In this era of exponential global population grow, there is far too many people find it difficult to find a good home they can afford for themselves and their family.
If you own or are getting an empty home for free, would you like to share it with those who need it for free? Community Sharing is such a gift for the body, mind and spiritual enrichment. Tell us your story, and share with us your concern and even fear. Hugs!
Empty Homes is a campaigning charity dedicated to the problem of the country’s empty homes and ways to get them back into use for those in need of housing. We have always welcomed volunteers who are willing to give up some of their own time to help us.
Activities
The sorts of activities that volunteers can get involved in do vary from time to time as they depend on what is going on and what we are working on. Currently we are looking for volunteers with technical expertise in research methodologies, or general administrative skills. Our main concern is to match the particular skills and interests of volunteers with the tasks that need doing at the time.
Practicalities
Volunteers will normally be based in our offices in Farringdon London EC1 as part of our small team.
For volunteers who join us, we provide an allowance for daily travel costs and lunch.
We normally expect volunteers to be with us for two days a week for at least three months, but we are happy to discuss other possibilities.
Many volunteers have found that their time with us has helped them in their search for paid employment. Whilst we are careful to ensure volunteers do not carry out the normal work of the Empty Homes Agency, we encourage volunteers to get the most from the experience.
We hold informal interviews for volunteers as we want to make sure that we take people on who are suited to the tasks that we need help with and demonstrate a real commitment to our work. It also gives people the chance to meet us and ask any questions before committing to volunteering.
If you are interested
If you would like to know more, then please email your cv to tobytaper@gmail.com setting out in your email why you want to volunteer for us and any particular areas of interest or experience that you think might be relevant. We will then get in contact with you to discuss possibilities.
A home is more warm and welcoming for potential buyers with the right furnishings and artwork.
HAVE you ever stepped into an empty house for sale and wondered where will your furniture fit or does this room look small?
If so, you wouldn’t be alone. Most people I talk to cannot accurately see the way an empty house could be used, as there are no visual cues to give dimension or a sense of space.
There are many reasons why someone would be selling an empty house. The property may be a new display home, or previously tenanted, or the owners may have already found a new home and moved on. Whatever the reason, empty properties are expensive to maintain, with bills (insurance costs, mortgage payments and maintenance upkeep) pouring in as usual.
The owners understandably want to sell swiftly, but unfortunately empty homes don’t sell as fast as furnished ones. But why not?
There’s no emotional tie
AN empty property offers no emotional connection with buyers. How can a buyer fall in love with bare walls when all they can see are the faults? An empty house doesn’t conjure up any imagination or feelings to turn the house into a home. As I mentioned in a previous column, only 10 per cent of buyers can visualise a house’s potential.
An empty room is difficult for property buyers to visualise the space.Neutral furnishings show how a room could be lived in.
There’s no point of reference
EMPTY rooms actually look smaller than furnished ones (even as property stylists, we have to measure spaces after all these years to ensure our furniture will fit). Carefully selected furniture gives buyers a measurement of scale to compare items to their pieces. “Our dining table is bigger than this one, but I can see it will fit this room,” is the sort of thing buyers think. It also gives an idea of layout for the home taking into consideration any views, walkways, lifestyle factors such as TV viewing and entertaining.
Buyers will focus on negatives
BUYERS tend to focus on the negatives in an empty home, as there isn’t much else to look at. They will see faults in light switches, cornice work, paintwork, door handles, broken tiles and so on. These small things leave big negative impressions and buyers may calculate the cost to fix these things — usually doubling or even tripling the cost. Buyers don’t get excited about the negative aspects of a home unless they are looking for a bargain — which will be reflected in their offer. You don’t want your home to be considered a fixer-upper.
It’s cold and lifeless inside
EMPTY homes are cold and lifeless and they lack appeal. The lights are not on, there is no welcoming doormat and the curtains are usually pulled shut. What is meant to make a home homely is just not there.
You may blow your chances
TESTING the vacant home for sale first is akin to testing the market at an extra high price — and the chances of a negative outcome are high. You only have one chance to make a positive first impression. Most of those initially interested buyers can’t be bothered coming back again because they have seen the property, judged it and moved on.
Marketing is limited
THERE is only so much marketing you can do with an empty space. Marketing factors for a property include a realistic price, the location and the presentation. Even professional photos or video cannot wow a buyer with shots of corners of rooms and bare walls. Location cannot change so that leaves the price as the only marketing strategy to influence a buyer’s decision. We all know price adjustments usually trend down, not up.
There is only so much marketing that can be done with an empty space.The room photographs beautifully once furniture and artworks are in place.
Online opportunities could be lost
MOST people begin their property buying experience online these days. In minutes, they’ve found a few interesting listings from a series of photos and attractive descriptions. But what if your home is vacant? Your empty listing looks nearly the same as everyone else’s empty living room, kitchen and bedroom unless it has a standout feature — but even this might not be captured in the image. If you cannot entice someone to click on your listing they will skip to something else — opportunity lost.
You’ll attract less traffic
THERE will be less traffic online and at open homes. Empty properties are also vulnerable to breakins. But what could they steal? Surprisingly, power point covers, new kitchen appliances and sometimes doors and plants.
It could give a wrong impression
THERE is a perception of desperation. Buyers may jump to the conclusion that the owner needs to sell and negotiate the price down.
On the contrary, a styled home won’t leave buyers doubtful about the use of a space, it will allow them to visualise the rooms with their own furniture and lifestyle and ultimately increase your selling price and decrease your time on the market.
You may like to consider property styling — which is more an investment than a cost. Statistics show property styling draws more traffic to the property and creates that all-important emotional connection with the buyer.
Statistics show the cost of professional styling is 1-3 per cent of the asking price, and results in a 5 to 10 per cent higher sales price.
Tiziana Fabi—AFP/Getty ImagesA man walks in the center of the village of Gangi, 120 kms from Palermo, on August 14, 2014
But there's a catch (naturally)
In a move straight out of your European daydreams, the Sicilian mountain village of Gangi is giving away for free or at a steep discount many of the houses that line its ancient stone streets.
But there’s a catch, the New York Times reports. Anyone who takes the 13th century village up on its offer of a house has only a few years to restore it, and the buildings are often long abandoned and in advanced states of decay, requiring extremely costly renovations in order to become habitable.
Starting in the 1890s, Gangi experienced mass emigration, with much of its population leaving for the U.S. or Argentina. In the 1950s, the village had 16,000 residents, the town’s Mayor Giuseppe Ferrarello told the Times. Today the population is less than half that.
The result was a glut of empty homes, many of them traditional structures that hosted farm animals on the bottom floors and the family on the top.Their history and charm has lured interest from as close as Palermo and as far as Abu Dhabi.
There’s now a lengthy waiting list, allowing the village to choose applicants that will add something to the town. One Florence-based company, for example, acquired two free houses, and bought seven more. It plans on joining them together to make a hotel with historical character.
It’s all for the love of the town and its future. “We want our children to stay here and not leave,” Ferrarello said.
The historic center of Gangi, a Sicilian town where abandoned houses are being given away. Its population, once about 16,000, is down to about 7,000.CreditGianni Cipriano for The New York Times
GANGI, Sicily — Looking for a home? One Sicilian town is making an offer that is hard to refuse: It is giving away houses.
There is a catch, naturally. The properties in Gangi, a picturesque central town that straddles the Madonie Mountains, are generally dilapidated, some abandoned generations ago.
The structures give new meaning to the term “fixer-upper,” and anyone who acquires one of the properties has just four years to restore it and make it livable.
But the offer has already lured dozens of holiday home hunters from around the world, and Gangi’s novel approach to revival has brought fresh opportunities to local builders and tradesmen while energizing tourism.
“For our Sicilian mentality, Gangi was considered to be too far from the sea” to be attractive for tourism, said Giuseppe Ferrarello, the mayor of the town, which lies on a windy, stomach-rattling road between Palermo and Catania.
The housing initiative, he said, instead “set in motion a mechanism that was previously unthinkable for a city in the center of Sicily,” where towns have shrunk in tandem with the region’s dwindling economic prospects.
Gangi, Italy
Carrega Ligure
CROATIA
UMBRIA
Rome
ITALY
SARDINIA
Tyrrhenian Sea
Gangi
Palermo
Salemi
Catania
SICILY
TUNISIA
200 KM
Mediterranean Sea
100 miles
Gangi had a population of about 16,000 in the 1950s, the mayor said. Today it is home to about 7,000.
Periodic waves of emigration from Gangi began at the end of the 19th century, driven less by economic hardship, which “was endemic to the Madonie Mountains,” than by agents for trans-Atlantic ocean liners selling the prospects of a better life in America, said Marcello Saija, the director of a network of emigration museums in Sicily.
In the 1890s, a town near Gangi had no fewer than three agents representing various shipping companies “pushing for emigration,” Mr. Saija said. “Not that the economic situation was florid, on the contrary. But what determined their departure was the lure of the American dream.”
Ellis Island records show that about 1,700 Gangi residents landed in New York between 1892 and 1924, he said. Starting in the 1930s and 1940s, Argentina became the preferred destination.
Many family homes left behind were the so-called pagglialore typical of this town. The squat, tower-like structures housed donkeys on the ground floor with the paglia, or straw. Chickens and goats were kept on the middle floor. The farmer’s family lived on top.
These structures are now among those that the city has made available, with the local government acting as real estate broker of sorts, facilitating the convergence of the town’s considerable supply of abandoned dwellings and the growing demand. Some have been given away, others sold for a nominal price. The owners decide.
The community has gone one crucial step further, radically streamlining the intricate and often convoluted bureaucracy that accompanies buying and renovating a home in Italy.
“The bureaucracy is what worries people most, but we don’t sell a house and leave people alone,” said Alessandro Cilibrasi, a local real estate agent who assists the municipality in the initiative.
A website for British investors, shelteroffshore.com, advises would-be buyers to get advice from English-speaking or non-Italian lawyers well versed in Sicilian legislation; if property has been handed down through generations, “the path of ownership is not clear,” and there may be outstanding taxes, or debts and loans.
Building and renovation costs can be high. “Sicily is not for everyone,” the website warns.
Yet so far, Gangi’s answer to depopulation has been more successful than recent plans of other places. More than 100 houses have been given away or sold for less than market prices.
A few years ago, the Sicilian town of Salemi announced to great fanfare that it would sell buildings destroyed in a 1968 earthquake for one euro each. But it never followed through, said the current mayor, Domenico Venuti, who wants to revive the project. “But we don’t want to make any official announcements until we have something to offer,” he added.
Photo
The new owner of a property is given four years to restore it, and the initiative is funneling work to local workers. The renovation costs can be high.CreditGianni Cipriano for The New York Times
Carrega Ligure, a town in the Piedmont region that saw its population shrink by two-thirds to 900 during the last century, also tried to cede abandoned buildings to repopulate itself, “and also raise some money through taxes,” said a former mayor, Guido Gozzano.
But those efforts were stymied by “enormous bureaucratic problems,” he said, noting that
once a municipal administration gained possession of a building, by law it could be sold only at competitive market values. The initiative quickly sank.
Gangi has sidestepped that by not buying any of the homes outright, acting only as a mediator between owners and buyers.
About half of the new owners in Gangi are Sicilians looking for weekend homes, like Michele Di Marco, a Palermo entrepreneur who was attracted by the town’s relaxed rhythms that hark back to a less frenetic time.
“I am a lover of these towns that personify what was best about Sicily in days gone by,” he said. Financial incentives offered by the regional and national governments helped to cover the costs, he said.
The remaining new homeowners are primarily Italian, though there are also buyers from several European countries, and one from Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
There is a sizable waiting list for the remaining 200 houses, which means City Hall can be choosier about its residents.
“We don’t want people just because they have money,” Mr. Ferrarello, the mayor said. “We want to know what you’re going to do with the houses.”
Priority is given to those who want to start an economic enterprise, he said, citing Wendhers S.R.L., a Florence-based firm that received two free houses and bought another seven to create a 22-suite hotel in the historic center.
Mr. Ferrarello likes to boast that it is enough to exploit the natural and cultural beauties that the town has to offer to attract people to Gangi. “Umbria has nothing on Sicily,” he said.
But mostly, the housing initiative is about thinking ahead.
“We did this for our children, because we love our territory,” he said. “And we want our children to stay here and not leave.”
