Danny McCubbin: How I lost money on $1.50 Italian house

Romantic fantasies of Italy’s €1 (AUD$1.50) home program would capture the imaginations of most — but Aussie expat Danny McCubbin is living the daydream.

Many old properties in small Italian villages have been left abandoned as young people leave seeking work and, when older relatives pass away, the homes just lie there, with the next generation who have made lives elsewhere continuing to pay taxes on them.

Through this a program was born: selling these properties for €1 to people who would renovate them and bring new life to charming towns beginning to decay.

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Mr McCubbin, a chef who worked with Jamie Oliver in London for 17 years after leaving Queensland, snapped up his €1 home just before the pandemic took over at the start of 2020.

But his plans to do it up and launch a community kitchen there were promptly derailed by Covid-19, which stalled his capacity to move to Sicily from London and begin renovating.

“A lot of these €1 houses are butted against other houses that are in ruin as well, so my particular house had the houses either side leaking into it for over a year,” he said.

“It crumbled, and that was one of the main factors that would have meant it would have cost so much to renovate in the end, the fact that it sat there for a year while this was happening.”

The house might have been €1 — but there were about $4400 worth of fees, which Mr McCubbin, 57, ended up losing as he sold the property back into the scheme for his same coin-sized purchase price, because his soaring renovation costs could be better spent.

“For me that wasn’t dramatic because I very clearly wanted to move to Italy to become an Italian resident after Brexit, and to get my residency I needed a place of residence,” he said.

“I wasn’t living there at the time but it was my permanent registered address, so I invested €3000 in being a resident here. Some people pay lawyers much more to get their residency, so in hindsight, yes, it cost me some money, but it was worth it.”

The community kitchen — The Good Kitchen — was launched through crowd-funding in the town square on a handy rental rate in another abandoned space while Mr McCubbin was trying to find a builder to work on the €1 house, and it made much more sense to stay there.

He bought another one-bedroom terrace down the road from the €1 house (since bought by a young couple turning it into an artist studio) — with breathtaking views of the mountainous landscape — for €8000 ($11,700AUD) and spent €5000 ($7300AUD) renovating it to live in.

These are known as “premium houses”, some of which can be moved into straight away or require only a little work, and are becoming more popular as a safer bet for foreigners.

“There has been a bit of a surge in real estate in the town … obviously in London people are priced out of the housing market, it’s hard to get into, and they’re looking then to see about having these premium houses, not only as a second home but eventually maybe to live here as well,” Mr McCubbin said.

He believes more than 120 €1 homes have been sold in his struggling central Sicilian town of Mussomeli, where locals were receptive and knew it was good for the economy and business in a place with 50 per cent unemployment.

“Everyone has been very welcoming, they’ve kind of been fascinated as to what an Aussie is doing in the middle of Sicily,” Mr McCubbin said.

“And I’ve just found it reminds me very much of life in Australia. I grew up outside of Brisbane and my parents were farmers so I have a connection to the land, and when I first moved here people genuinely are interested to talk to you and say ‘hello’, and it reminds me so much of Australia, that sort of good old-fashioned kindness and friendliness.”

Mr McCubbin’s The Good Kitchen project is completely volunteer-based and delivers 100 meals a week to elderly people in the town and families affected by the war in Ukraine.

The aim is for it to become a social enterprise with paid staff, and Mr McCubbin would like to branch out to farmland to grow and harvest their own vegetables and herbs, too.

He continues to do some consulting work remotely from the town but does not have to work full-time thanks to prior planning and low cost of living expenses, enjoying a “tranquil, centred” life at the centre of a community showing green shoots of its own.

Dateline episode ‘Italy’s One Euro Homes’, featuring Mr McCubbin’s story, airs tonight at 9.30pm on SBS and on SBS On Demand.

Dateline is part of SBS’s current affairs line-up preceded by Insight at 8:30pm and followed by The Feed at 10:30pm.

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scott.carbines@news.com.au

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