This 41-Room Castle Is For Sale at $100,000

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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This 41-Room Castle Is For Sale at $100,000

© JacquesPALUT / Getty Images

There must be something very wrong with the mansion for sale at 615 Columbia St., Elmira, New York. Built in 1876, it spans 8,284-square-feet and is for sale for $99,990. That is a ridiculously low $12 per square foot. It sits on a lot that covers 0.47 acre. The price is based on the fact that the house is a mess and will require a large investment to be livable for most people.

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Realtor.com describes the house this way:

The mansard-roofed mansion is filled with original woodwork, multiple fireplaces, stained glass, and a curved staircase. A restoration effort will need to be completed by the new owner. It does have new electric service, and some of the rooms have been gutted in preparation for a massive glow-up.

Some of the work to rebuild the house already has been done. It has new electric wiring and a new rubber roof. It has two relatively new boilers. However, a number of rooms have been gutted. The house at 615 Columbia Street is “not currently habitable.” The value of the house actually has dropped recently. It was sold in September 2005 for $157,500.

Even with a price of $99,900, the house is relatively expensive by neighborhood standards. The most expensive house in the neighborhood has an estimated value of $70,800. The least expensive has an estimated value of $43,500. No house in the area is larger than 3,000 square feet. Most are much smaller.

Elmira is located near the southern border of Pennsylvania, West of Binghamton, and 615 Columbia Street is at the center of the city.

Elmira has 27,054 residents, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Its population is dropping, down over 7% in the past decade. Seventy-three percent of the population is white. Another 15% of residents are Black.

Elmira is extremely poor by national standards. Its median household income is $36,909, about $30,000 below the national number. The poverty rate is a remarkably high 26.2%, which is well over twice that national figure.

Click here to see the worst city to live in in each state.

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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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