That’s what elderly Italians are doing. Strangers buy the house and let the oldster stay in it until she dies. Ages are disclosed so I suppose it must be a rather ghoulish buying decision: “Let’s see, an 89- year old widow – how long can she last? But here’s a 74 year old guy with colorectal cancer – what stage is it, do you suppose?”
Before you investors get too excited about this, remember the example from Paris, where this practice has been going on for decades. A woman sold her apartment to some guy just after WWII and proceeded to become the longest-living woman in France. I believe the long-deceased buyer’s grandchildren finally got possession around 2001.
Update: here’s the actual story - my memory was more or less accurate.
France’s Jeanne Calment, world’s oldest woman, dead at 121
ARLES, France (AP) – She took up fencing at 85, and still rode a bicycle at 100. She liked her port wine, her olive oil, her chocolate and her cigarettes, and she released a rap CD at 121.
No wonder Jeanne Calment, at 122 the world’s oldest person until her death Monday, said she was ”never bored.”
She lived through France’s Third and Fourth Republics, and into its Fifth. She was 14 when the Eiffel Tower was completed in 1889.
Born Feb. 21, 1875, Mrs. Calment eventually became the greatest attraction in the southern city of Arles since Vincent Van Gogh, who spent a year there in 1888. She met him that year when he came to her uncle’s shop to buy paints, and later remembered him as ”dirty, badly dressed and disagreeable.”
For Mrs. Calment, the keys to long life were olive oil and port wine. She gave up cigarettes in 1995, and her doctor said her abstinence was due to pride rather than health – she was too blind to light up herself, and hated asking others to do it for her.
Mrs. Calment had no direct descendants, having survived her husband, her daughter and grandson.
In her later years, she lived mostly off the income from her apartment, which she sold cheaply more than 30 years ago to a lawyer, Andre-Francois Raffray.
He had agreed to make monthly payments on the apartment in exchange for taking possession when she died, but never got to do so. He died more than a year ago at 77; his family was required to keep making the payments.
Just the same, his widow, Huguette, said Monday she was saddened by Mrs. Calment’s death.
”She was a personality,” she told France Info radio. ”My husband had very good relations with Mrs. Calment.”
The Guinness Book of World Records had listed Mrs. Calment as the oldest living person whose birth date could be authenticated by reliable records.
