From yesterday's Metro:
A detached 17th-century home is available for as little as £25,000 – and is expected to go fast.
The property is just 8m (26ft) from the edge of cliffs in Easton Bavents, Suffolk. It was 1.6km (one mile) from the sea when first built, but coastal erosion has placed it under threat.
Waveney district council will give the home’s new owners help and planning permission to demolish it and rebuild elsewhere.
Insolvency practitioners McTear, Williams & Wood said: ‘Plots of land near Southwold with planning permission are clearly highly sought-after, so we hope to be able to sell the cliff-top home – even in the knowledge it will have to be demolished.’
So basically what is being sold/bought here is the right to build a similar new home elsewhere in the vicinity, whatever the final selling price is tells us exactly what this council-bestowed monopoly right is worth. Why the council should bestow this right on whoever owns the land at the time it tumbles into the sea rather than to anybody else is unclear.
The whole thing is similar to the plot of Superman: The Movie:
… criminal genius Lex Luthor has developed a cunning plan to make a fortune in real estate by buying large amounts of barren desert land and then diverting a nuclear missile test flight to the San Andreas Fault.
The missile will sink California and leave Luthor's desert as the new West Coast of the United States, greatly increasing its value.
