I am from Tunisia and as some of you may already know my country is 3rd world, full of corruption and one of the tax heaven countries! A lot of African countries were colonized by French and English in the past and Tunisia is one of them. During the French protectorate of Tunisia (1881-1956) a lot of french people (and some other European) moved to live here or have invested in Tunisia.
During the Tunisian independence which occurred from (1952 to 1956) a lot of French and European left Tunisia to go back to their origin countries and left their houses behind them, these houses nowadays are haunted houses (damp walls, full of grass ect…) some of these houses are in capital (Tunis) or in touristic cities (Sousse, Hammamet ect).
This brought a great idea to my mind, since I know that many of these houses are totally forgotten, their owners are french/european who didn’t check or ask about their properties for decades or a century even!
I contacted a guy I know who works in real estate management in Tunisia that is called “national land ownership office” (cpf tunisie) and told him to search for the ownership papers of these houses and change it to me (as it is easy to do this in a country full of corrupted administrations and we have no censorship/supervision) so I become the new owner and have control of them so like that I can sell these houses cheap to other people. I was thinking it would be better to sell them to non Tunisians, since my country also encourage foreign investors and this is why I am posting here. The guy went totally against me at first but after convincing him that some of these houses are really forgotten old houses and just a waste of money, I informed him about a house that happen to be in Sousse and he was looking for it in the office database to find out that this house is haunted since 1929 which means for almost a century! Its owner is a french guy who died in 1974 and his only son also is dead now! this means that nobody tried to retrieve this house all this time and this is a great example! it is true that it is just an old house that was probably worth nothing back in the time but now it does as prices have gone up like crazy, I mean even if the buyer is not interested to renovate the house as it is too old, he can destroy it and build a new one and that is still considered a great investment as the lands are so expensive nowadays.
I convinced this guy especially that he realized that the last European who sold his house in Tunisia was in 1980 and this guy was an italian who kept visiting his house every year until he decided to finally sell it in 1980, there is nobody after him who visited their houses or even asked about it. The guy said he would be interested to help me if I can get foreign people who are interested to buy the houses, we will also allocate a lawyer specialized in real estate during the process, they will get their commission I will get mine, and the buyer will benefit of a great real estate deal!