Towns for sale

you say you're in the market for a town a special  place to call your own Christina Ruffini has just   what you're looking for [Music] if you're in  the market for a white picket fence several of   them actually Maine's Tuthill Village might be  the perfect place to call home or rather homes   how many buildings are in this town I guess  there's 25 buildings or something like that   how do you not know how many people concerns well  because it's just home a lot of thought going into   it seems like every inch of this place everything  everything for Nathan Tuttle home is this 40 acre   compound that he acquired from his father Kenneth  an antiques dealer and The Accidental founder of   this Federal style foothold there was no plan  it was preservation is what it was he couldn't   stand to see anything that was early beautiful  be destroyed that included a ramshackle 1800s   home that a neighbor was about to burn down  dollar for the house but you have to move it   and he said sure what the hell and once he'd moved  one house onto his property he was offered another   and another and a village started to grow  we get a lot of pictures taken here and   you know they just kind of wander around  and look we understand it after raising   his own family managing tenants and massive  amounts of maintenance for more than a decade oh wow Nathan is ready to retire you're the real  estate agent for this place I am for all these   places I am yes is he your most difficult client  he is 100 my most difficult client do my best   tuttle's real estate agent Anna Boucher who also  happens to be his wife is listing the property   which includes a church a massive garage and  all the structures you see here for 5.5 million   dollars somebody can make this into whatever they  need it to be but the only thing more difficult   than owning a town [Music] might be trying to sell  one a fictional but strikingly similar real estate   predicament was even at the center of the sitcom  schitt's creek you bought a small town in 1991   Johnny yes I bought that as a joke for my son but  town-sized transactions can be serious business my   name is Brent and we are here at the abandoned  mining town of Seraro Gordo Brent Underwood   and his Partners paid 1.4 million for a 380 acre  ghost town about four hours north of Los Angeles   4.3 million will get you this Rocky  Mountain Retreat three hours south of Denver   or you can dip your toes into the market or  the lake at this 1.4 million dollar compound   in Upstate New York but with great acreage  comes great responsibility we paid about   3 million bucks for about 88 acres of this  wonderful landscape before us take the tiny   Outpost of nipton California which spent almost  a decade being sold resold and foreclosed on   that is until last year when the circus came to  town literally why does a circus company want   to buy a town well we're an hour from Vegas and  it's such a beautiful place I'm from Australia   and it's full of gum trees and I just love  the gum trees this is a shopping cart Ross   Mollison is the impresario extraordinaire  and yes that's his actual job title [Music]   of the live entertainment company's Spiegleworld the vision is to use nipton as a staff Retreat  and incubator to Workshop new shows most of the   great creation happens out of the workshop they're  here 24 7 and creating the whole time and having   a lot of fun doing it eventually mullison wants to  build a small eco-friendly desert destination that   is after they finish the less glamorous parts of  ownership like cleanup and infrastructure repair   anybody who buys a town will probably tell you  that it's 20 million bucks of investment that   comes on top of the purchase so it's not the  sticker price the sticker price is just the   start you're putting Petrol in that baby forever  until recently nipton's most frequent visitors   were the clattering carriages of the Union Pacific  Rail founded in 1905 as a mining camp it grew to   include a school and General Store and in the  1930s Golden Era movie stars used to haunt its   Hotel rumor is Clara Bow still does just like  the song in Hotel California I checked in and   I can't leave Jim Esslinger is one of nipton's  two dozen or so living residents about once a   month we go into Vegas for groceries that's  the closest grocery store is Vegas yeah that   doesn't worry you at all living out here so far  like what if you have a heart attack then I die I believe that the Mojave Desert has a spirit  of its own and it decides who gets to stay and   who goes down the road right a town is not an  easy acquisition and certainly not for the faint   of heart but just as Jim and the Mojave seem to  have embraced nipton's new unconventional owners back in Maine Nathan Tuttle has faith  that the perfect buyer will find their   way home or in his case homes we don't  find the right person the right person   will find us you think so absolutely  yeah yeah it's just the way it works

Channel: CBS Sunday Morning

Views: 486,754

Keywords: CBS Sunday Morning, CBS News, news, deserted towns, towns for sale

Id: PMV4cjyukaQ

Length: 6min 1sec (361 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 30 2023