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Comment by riedel | Hacker News Reader

Why should immovable property differ from moveable property. How many things are sold for 1 EUR, just because everything else would be too difficult. Often those things have value that is only specific to the buyer and have negative value for the seller. The process for declaring something actually worthless and paying for waste removal is so much, but also gifting something to someone is often so much more difficult than selling for the lowest possible price that all stupid booking systems accept and that dictate what we may do.

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If geography is a factor in the value of an asset, being able to move that asset allows you the ability to effect change in the value of it. I.e., my car might sell for x in one city, but only 0.7x in another.

As an immovable asset's value cannot be changed in the same ways as a movable one's, perhaps there are different ways to tax it that are still fair, or encourage positive social effects.

In this specific case the 1 EUR home is a blight in the community that makes the whole place less attractive, so it makes sense you'd have to "pay" someone to take it and fix it because it creates negative value for the rest of the place.

That is likely to lead to moral hazard issues though so i doubt it would work in the real world.

All I am saying is that while this makes sense, there is probably some stupid IT system or regulation wording, rather some moral constraints that resets things to 1 EUR.

As they say here in the UK: Location, location, location. Or there’s Mark Twain: Buy land, they're not making it anymore.

This is exactly the point - there is a strong expectation of positive values, so just saying 1 EUR makes it easy.

IMHO this is a defect of the system as some houses has the value -50.000 EUR and should be sold on the market for that - I should get 50.000 EUR to take over the house.

In particular, as we develop building- and decomissionning codes, these impose a liability of people to decommission.

While radically liberal market forces told us that we can buy land and have full control, that was never really the case, and we are waking up to the issues of irresponsible and harmful pollution.

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