There’s a Whole Town For Sale In Oregon That The Chinese Want To Buy

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By Thomas Phippen

When you put a whole town up for sale for $3.85 million, you get interest from a lot of different places — including Chinese investment companies.

Tiller, a small town in southwestern Oregon, used to be the home of loggers, but now it’s a ghost town.

“When the federal money started dwindling away for timber, basically the mill shut down,” Garrett Zoller, the listing agent for the property, told The Oregonian. “And when the mill shut down, a lot of the loggers started having to go away.”

The current owners are selling the 250 acres that make up Tiller, which boasts 28 taxable plots, water rights for agriculture and domestic use, and a lot of trees, Reuters reports. As for buildings, there’s an historical post office built in 1902, six houses and an apartment building, an old school house, and what used to be a gas station and general store.

About 250 people living nearby, and there’s a small church in the town limits where about 50 people attend church each Sunday. The town itself only has a few inhabitants — the family that currently owns the town, a school teacher, and the pastor of the community church. The property of current residents isn’t for sale.

The town sits next to thousands of acres of National Forest and Bureau of Land Management preserves. A video of the town shows it sitting next to the beautiful South Umpqua River and Elk Creek river.

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“The most important thing is the arrangement of the properties as a whole, with 28 different tax lots, a school — it makes it very marketable,” Garrett Zoller said. “It’s an opportunity to do the development, and do it with a lot more elasticity and less bureaucracy.”

In addition to the interested Chinese investors, other potential buyers are interested in building a retirement home on the property, or in using the land for hemp production.

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