A municipality in western Sweden has had to temporarily suspend land sales after being inundated with requests for its 10 euro cent per square metre offer, the mayor said on Monday.
“We launched this campaign in mid-April. It was a bit of a crazy idea, but also a joke to be honest. It was a marketing operation,” laughs Johan Mansson, mayor of the municipality of Götene, which has some 5,000 inhabitants.
Scattered across the municipality, thirty plots of land – which had not found buyers for several decades and had fallen into oblivion – were put up for sale at a modest price: one Swedish crown per square metre, or less than ten euro cents.
The idea? To build more housing in a low-density area and grow the region, says the mayor. The plots range in size from 7 to 1,200 square metres.
By purchasing a plot of land, the buyer commits to building a house on it within the next two years. This involves several additional costs: the building permit (30,000 crowns), connection fees for water management (170,000), electricity (40,000) and internet connection (30,000).
A few weeks after the campaign began, Götene managed to sell three plots. “A great achievement for a small municipality for us,” recalls Johan Mansson. “But we could never have imagined what awaited us.”
A report by a local TV channel in late June triggered a snowball effect. Several Swedish media outlets picked up the story, a video was posted on TikTok, and millions of people discovered Götene and its cheap land.
A few days later, it became “a global hit,” the mayor explained, as two English-language media outlets picked up the story.
The municipality has since been inundated with emails and phone calls from potential buyers. So much so that Götene had to temporarily suspend the sale, to have time to study all the offers.
“We have interested people from Europe, Asia – mainly India and Pakistan – but also from the United States, Australia and even South America,” lists Mr. Mansson.
With this campaign, “we have managed to put Götene on the world map.”
Business will resume on August 7, with an auction of the land.
