Truth in real estate: Always stranger than fiction

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Published Date 7/30/2024

Real estate is serious business most days. But sometimes the wacky side of it just needs to be shared. Property Onion’s Damon Simon reminds us that there are few things more refreshing during your long day than sitting with a great batch of interesting and odd real estate facts and stories. So here are a few that are off-beat tales.

The world’s largest treehouse has more than 80 rooms, 10 floors and took the builder 19+ years to build. A landscaper/ordained minister bought some land outside Crossville, TN in the early 90s after God told him to build him a treehouse. He built it with salvaged wood scraps and recycled metal over several trees. It was a tourist destination until the fire marshal deemed it a public safety hazard. The property was listed in 2018, originally listed for $1.5 million. The subsequent owner, however, saw his mega-treehouse burn to the ground in less than 15 minutes in 2019.

Remember the TV series Breaking Bad? Fans continue to drive by and throw pizzas onto the roof of Albuquerque, NM building featured as Walter White’s house. “We’ve had pizzas on our roof. We’ve had pizzas on our driveway; pizzas until we’re sick of looking at pizzas,” Fran Padilla told NPR. She is definitely taking it sitting down, however, adding, “I’ll sit outside with a shotgun in a rocking chair.”

How about a secret passage or two? Based out of Gilbert, Arizona, Creative Home Engineering was started in 2003 by Steve Humble, a mechanical engineer who left the medical device industry to start the company. He specializes in building secret rooms and hidden passageways. He designed one that requires a chess board played in a certain combination to unlock. The company has now installed more than 1,000 secret passageways around the world.

It has now been proven that the scent of freshly baked cookies doesn’t sell houses. “The old myth that making a house on the market smell like freshly baked chocolate chip cookies will sell your house fast is wrong, “ says Simon. A study conducted by Eric Spangenberg at Washington State University revealed that complex scents like potpourri and cookies can backfire for open houses.

How about a Bavarian town (named Nördlingen) where a house was built over 15-million-year-old meteor? An asteroid hit the town over a thousand years ago but, far from being pressured to leave, the locals started building a town on the remaining crater. You can still see the circular layout of the town to this day.

Buying a house sight unseen is nothing new. In the 1900s, Sears started featuring a kit for building a house in its catalogs. The mail-order kit would feature the blueprint and all the pieces you’d need to build a simple house. Simon reports that according to NPR, between 70,000 and 75,000 people ordered houses from Sears this way by 1940 and that the vast majority of them are still standing today.

It appears Tokyo, Japan is not a place where the grass grows under your feet. So forget about buying a pre-owned house there. “Construction is such a bustling industry all over the country that nearly half the homes in Japan are torn down 30 years after being built,” according to Simon. “In fact, old homes that are typically revered in the west are loathed by Japanese.”

Some movie locations are used over and over again. You just don’t put it together when watching movies. Tony Stark’s mansion in Iron Man is the same cliff from Planet of the Apes where the Statue of Liberty is sticking out from the sand.

And lastly, homeowners in Scotland paint their front doors red when they finish making house payments as a sign to others they’re mortgage-free. "Anyone local who owns a home knows about this custom — so, next time you’re in Edinburgh, keep an eye out for homeowners who reached this important milestone,” says Simon.

Realtor, TBWS

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