4 abandoned mansions for sale across the US — and why they're so unsellable (2024)

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This seven-bedroom 'zombie mansion' near Portland, Oregon, is listed for $1.3 million.

In Tigard, Oregon, about 10 miles outside Portland sits a 9,052-square-foot, seven-bedroom house that's never been lived in.

According to the Zillow listing, construction started in 2006 but was never finished.

It's been abandoned since 2008, after the builder had complications with his building loan during the recession, the Oregonian reported in December 2023.

The bones are there, but the house lacks electricity, water, and heating, the Oregonian said. The windows are boarded up, and the walls are filled with graffiti as squatters have made themselves at home in the empty mansion, according to The Oregonian.

For the state of disrepair, the list price of $1.3 million may just be too much.

Lising agent Eric Squire told The Oregonian that the asking price is "gutsy."

Squire added that the property is worthwhile not for the building itself, which will probably be torn down by any eventual buyer, but for the land. The 1.5-acre lot can be split into seven buildable lots.

"There is truly value here," he said. "The bones are good, and when it's built out, it will be a $3 to $6 million property."

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Michael Jordan's Chicago mansion, empty since 2012, is listed for $14.9 million.

Jordan, the basketball legend, has been trying to sell his 56,000-square-foot compound outside Chicago for more than 10 years.

The nine-bedroom home was first listed for $29 million in 2012 and is now almost half off.

Part of the reason Jordan's seven-acre property hasn't yet sold is because of how he customized it. It starts with the "23" — his jersey number for most of his career — emblazoned on the front gates. The house is littered with other custom features like a basketball court with his logo in the middle of the floor.

"It's clearly his home," Bruce Bowers of Bowers Realty Group told BI in 2019. "It's a tough sell. There's a lot of work that would have to be done to make it your own."

Jordan has even tried offering the buyer a complete set of his famous Air Jordan sneakers, but that didn't work.

Today Jordan owns real estate in his home state of North Carolina, as well as in Florida.

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Kanye West’s concrete mansion on the Pacific Ocean is unfinished but still listed for $39 million.

West's all-concrete house, designed by famous Japanese architect Tadao Ando, is perched on the Pacific Ocean in celebrity hot spot Malibu.

Kanye spent about $57 million on the 4,000-square-foot property in 2021. He started gutting the home soon after, but never finished his renovations.

In December 2023, he listed the home for $53 million but has since dropped the price to $39 million.

This might be the problem: The house comes without plumbing or electricity — and it's missing doors and windows, too, the Wall Street Journal reported in December 2023.

"It will take several million dollars for the house to be finished," real-estate agent Jason Oppenheim, of "Selling Sunset" fame who is representing West , told the Journal.

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A private island in Montana with a half-built mansion is on sale for $72 million.

Cromwell Island — located in Flathead Lake, just south of Kalispell, Montana — is about 350 acres and has almost three miles of shoreline.

On the island is a 45,000-square-foot mansion that was started in the late 1990s and never finished.

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On Cromwell Island sits an unfinished 45,000-square-foot mansion.

According to the listing, the previous owner, Robert M. Lee, the founder of gear company Hunting World, bought the property in the 1980s and started building a home for himself and his wife but died in 2016 before its completion.

Lee's widow, Anne Brockinton Lee, told the Wall Street Journal that they bought a house in Lake Tahoe in 1999 and moved there full-time. Once Mr. Lee passed, she thought finishing the Cromwell Island home would be too much of a pain for one person.