We, also, were drawng a blank, until we called a friend of ours who's a realtor. First, however, the background.
In 1978 Manuel Corchuelo, a Colombian immigrant, purchased a 700-square-foot house located at 224 Cincinnati Ave. in the Las Vegas neighborhood behind the Stratosphere known, colloquially, as "Naked City" (for the dancers and strippers who used to live back there in the '50s and sunbathe naked to avoid tan lines) for $30,000. In the intervening years, Naked City degenerated into a dubious ghetto riddled with crime, drugs, and prostitution. Corchuelo's property is a tract home that sits on 1.9 acres of land but when Manuel hit the headlines towards the end of 2005, he was asking $1.2 million for it.
The reason for the inflated price was that all around new hotels and condominiums were rising and Corchuelo was obsessed with monitoring the real estate market and making sure his property was appraised at what he thought was the correct amount. When Steve Wynn paid $250,000 a square foot for the land that his eponymous casino was built on, Manuel figured he should get the same number for his land, although the house next door had sold about six months prior for $520,000 and he's a block removed from the Strip.
The $1.2 million price tag that Corchuelo insisted on back in '05 piqued the interest of national media and, when the Associated Press ran a story, it went all over the world, which is no doubt when you became aware of it. Initially, we too had difficulty finding any new information past 2005, but an inspired call to our realtor friend led us on the trail to tracking down one of the last agents with whom the property was listed, a realtor named Georgia James who formerly dubbed herself the "Mayor of Naked City" for all the deals she's put together down there over the years.
According to Ms. James, Corchuelo is an elderly and somewhat grouchy gentleman who has no family and few friends and, with his stubbornness with regard to settling for anything less than what he believes his property is worth, she predicts sadly that he'll likely die there without ever selling. A neighboring 2.5-acre plot with 85 units on it sold recently for $1.5 million, but the last anyone heard Corchuelo was now asking somewhere in the region of $2 million (he's been offered $500,000+ in the past, but turned it down). James doesn't believe that her former client (he's been through several agents the years) currently has any utilities, although she thinks that someone supplied him with a cell phone. As you can see from the picture below, taken back in 2005, the tiny property is extremely rundown and hardly fit for habitation and, with the bottom having fallen out of the condo market and projects stalled and abandoned all over town, Señor Corchuelo's chances of a sale seem more remote than ever.
