- Allan Berger is selling a wall in Georgetown in Washington, DC, for $50,000.
- He told The Washington Post that he was selling it amid issues with the owner of the attached house.
A Washington, DC, resident is selling a wall for $50,000.
In July, Robert Morris, a realtor at Keller Williams Capital Properties, posted a listing for a property in the Georgetown neighborhood of DC.
At first glance, the photos of the listing appear to show a row house at the end of a block. But upon further inspection, it's clear that they actually point to a red-brick wall attached to the house.
The listing has an asking price of $50,000. The median sale price for homes in Georgetown is $1.6 million, according to Redfin.
"Own a piece of Georgetown," the listing says. "This wall located at 30 and M NW. The opportunities are limitless."
But Morris told Ellie Silverman of The Washington Post that the wall wasn't in great shape. "It's like crumbling," he said.
The listing has become the butt of jokes on DC social-media pages such as Washingtonian Problems, but the wall's current owner, Allan Berger, is selling it because of a disagreement with Daniela Walls, his neighbor, according to The Post.
The listing comes after years of tension between the two property owners
Berger told The Post that he inherited the wall from his father and that his father had bought it as a joke so he could say he owned property in Georgetown.
Walls told the outlet that she knew Berger owned part of the wall when she purchased her home in 2019. She said that she owned the interior 12 inches of the wall and that Berger owned the exterior 12 inches at its widest point on the south side of her house. However, she told The Post that when water started leaking into her house in 2020, she discovered the beams in the part of the wall that Berger owned were wet and therefore threatening the structure of her home. This was confirmed in a 2022 engineers report conducted by Walls' insurance company, according to The Post.
Walls offered to buy the wall from Berger through her attorney, Eric Rome, for its tax-assessed value of $600, which prompted Berger to list it through Keller Williams, The Post reported.
"That's when I came up with $50,000, without any research, without any great thought," he said. "For better or for worse."
Keller Williams did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Morris or Berger, and Walls did not immediately respond to a request for comment through Rome.
The Post also reported that before Walls offered to buy the wall from Berger, the DC Department of Buildings, also known as the DOB, fined Berger twice in connection to "improper upkeep" of his property — including chipping paint and rotting materials — for a total of $1,661 in November. Berger denied the claims and is scheduled to go before an Office of Administrative Hearings administrative law judge in September, according to the outlet.
The DOB also sent Berger an order to submit a structural-engineering report on his property within 30 days on Thursday, The Post reported. The DOB did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Berger told the outlet that Berger "blindsided" him by approaching the DOB.
But Walls told the outlet that Berger's claims were "childish" and that she didn't want her house to fall down as a result of the structural damage.
"Everybody is working to resolve this, not because they have a vendetta against Allen," she told The Post. "It's because they want to solve a problem."
So far, no one is willing to pay $50,000 for the wall
Walls told the outlet that she wouldn't pay $50,000 for the wall because she would have to spend tens of thousands on repairs and upkeep as a result of the deterioration of Berger's property.
"Nobody is going to give you a mortgage for a wall," she told The Post.
Morris told the outlet that he initially had 12 interested buyers in the property but that 11 backed out after learning that they would have to get approval on murals or advertisements on the wall from the Old Georgetown Board.
The remaining potential buyer lost interest in the property after seeing it in person, according to The Post.
The listing was still active as of Tuesday.