Desperate owner slashes price of Georgia home to $1

t can be hard to sell a home. That’s why after trying to sell a home in Hawkinsville, Georgia, for nearly four years, its owners decided to drop the price to just $1.

The two-bedroom, one-bath home is owned by Butler County — in the state of Ohio — which originally listed the house at 235 Dooley St. for $8,000 in 2015.

Though it would seem like a good deal — the ramshackle house is valued at $15,320 — the property is currently in tear-down condition and lured no buyers.

So in a desperate attempt to get the dilapidated home off the books, the county commissioners decided on the reduced asking price of one greenback.

“I just have a wild idea, what if we put a quarter-page ad in the newspaper and it just said something like property for sale, $1,” commissioner Cindy Carpenter told the Journal-News, a Butler County-based publication.

“Do you have any ideas on how to get rid of that property, since it’s not selling at auction?” A strange series of events led a county in Ohio to come to own a house in Georgia.

A woman moved to Ohio’s Butler County — less than 40 miles north of Cincinnati — to be with her daughters, but was admitted to a county-run care facility three years later.

She was denied Medicaid because she still owned the home in Hawkinsville, a town of about 5,000 people that is located in the middle of the state, about 50 miles south Macon.

When the medical bills hit around $50,000, Butler County’s care facility director Chuck Demidovich made a deal to purchase the home for $18,000 so the woman could claim her Medicaid benefits.

Ohio law states that nursing homes should take people’s property when they are admitted to a nursing home. The unique sale covered $40,000 of the bill.

Since no one bought the home, Butler County had to keep paying its $200 yearly tax bill. It tried to get rid of the property via auction in 2015 — and lured one $1,000 offer that ultimately fell through.

Then, after going through the foreclosure process, it still didn’t sell at the sheriff’s sale. The county even tried to gift the house to the city, but the Hawkinsville city council turned it down.

County officials hope the “only a buck” price tag will finally attract a buyer.

Ref: Property Report