$300K+ Houston home for sale for $150 ... plus a 200-word essay

For a $150 application fee, anyone can submit a short essay about why you should own this home in the Heights. In June, the owners will select a winner. For a $150 application fee, anyone can submit a short essay about why you should own this home in the Heights. In June, the owners will select a winner. Image 1 of / 146 Caption Close $300K+ Houston home for sale for $150 ... plus a 200-word essay 1 / 146 Back to Gallery

A two-bed, one-bath house in the Heights just hit the market for $150.

The real estate is valued at more than $300,000, but interested buyers need only submit a 200-word essay—that's half a page—for a chance to buy the home for the price of an OK desk chair.

"We just wanted to try it out," said Michael Wachs, 33, who is selling the home with his wife Stephanie. "There's something appealing in kind of an anarchic way about a person or family being able to get into the heights for $150 in 2015."

But the offer isn't charity; Wachs plans on making back they money he would have earned by selling the house. Submitting an essay to own the house costs $150. And in Houston, the nation's fastest growing city with a 6 million person metro area and a booming housing market, Wachs anticipates thousands of applications. That'll be a lot of pages to read, but he promises he and Stephanie will read them all.

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What they're looking for: they don't know.

"I guess they could write about their situation," Wachs said. "They might be lower income or higher income, but we don't technically know. We're not really looking out for one thing in particular, it's just which essay speaks to us."

The contest winner gets a 1,056-square foot wooden house built in the 1920s on a 5,300-square foot lot in the north Heights, blocks from Loop 610, where similarly sized homes go for two-to-five-hundred thousand dollars. It has a lawn, new appliances and recent renovations. Wachs said he and his wife, who inhabited the house since late 2013, want to move closer to their young daughter's school.

The essay contest idea came from a March 2015 online listing for a bed and breakfast in Maine being sold the same way. Wachs, a realtor, said it seemed "interesting enough to try," so they did it, even though it subverts the regular channels of his profession.

He also hoped it would prevent the home from being torn down like others he'd seen in the booming neighborhood.

All essays are due by June 13, and the sellers reserve the right to cancel the process and refund all application fees if they don't find a buyer. But if they do, Wachs hopes this sale will change somebody's life.

"There's just so much more freedom to do what you want when you're not saddled with a large mortgage," he said. "This is really the only feasible way that could be done."

Anyone 18 or older can apply to own the home here.