When celebrity home investments go wrong
Photo: Zillow
Bruce Springsteen's old home, where he wrote Born to Run, is now for sale in the US. But celebrity haunts are not always a good investment - as its former owner found out six years ago.
The two-bedroom home, in Long Branch, Jersey Shore, was home to The Boss from 1974 to 1975, during which time he not only penned the iconic title track, but also wrote the whole Born to Run album, including Thunder Road and Jungleland. That crucial role in musical history ought to be enough to put the property on the musical map.
Indeed, the Elvis Presley birthplace in Tulepo is now a museum dedicated to the star, with a $17 entry fee for adults. Michael Jackson's infamous Neverland ranch has been put up for sale this year for $100 million. John Lennon's home is part of a National Trust tour in Liverpool that also includes the childhood home of Sir Paul McCartney.
But for every resounding musical landmark is an embarrassing wrong note in the property market. Miles Davis' childhood home in East St. Louis, for example, has suffered vandalism over the years, while officials have not agreed to turn the property into an official historic site. A crowd-funding campaign started in 2014 to purchase Kurt Cobain's former home and turn it into a museum and continues today without reaching its target.
It's something that Jerry Ferrara found out the hard way in 2009, when he purchased the property for $280,000, along with his sister, Kim McDermott, and a friend, Ryan DeCarolis. Their plan? Not the Wrecking Ball, but to convert it into a Springsteen tribute home.
"We’d been to a couple of auctions where people paid a ridiculous amount of money for a signed guitar," he told NJ.com. "To me, the house is better than that stuff. It’s the place where he wrote Born to Run."
Indeed, the property attracts some visitors, but Jersey Shore proved far from Lucky Town: Ferrara now admits that wwe probably paid more than it was worth when we bought it".
A variety of obstacles prevented their Land of Hope and Dreams coming true, as DeCarolis got hitched and needed a bigger home and Ferrara found himself busy with construction work. Unlike a signed guitar, though, a property continues to cost money, from taxes to maintenance (the building now sports a new roof and wooden floors).
McDermott added that they don't want the plot to end up as some kind of Badlands: "I hope it doesn’t just become some house on West End Court. We would hope someone would keep ‘the Bruce factor’ in it. In a dream world, Bruce would show up and say ‘I think I should own this still.’ But I don’t think that’s going to happen."