Detroit real estate agent Ian Mason has sold homes for $1.

When I asked him to check the listings for other properties at that price, he found four more.

He then took me to a white, clapboard-sided house that his company, Bearing Group Real Estate Brokerage, has listed.

“If you want this house, you can have it,” he said. “I’ll just give it to you.”

“I’m not allowed to accept anything of value from a source,” I told him.

“Who said I was giving you anything of value?” he replied.

Earlier in the day, I’d previewed the North American International Auto Show, where the car of the year was a Hyundai. A Hyundai Genesis, to be precise, with an MSRP of $37,250. Here, even a Kia or a Pontiac listed for $16,000.

By contrast, the median price of a home sold in Detroit last month was $7,500, according to Realcomp, a Farmington Hills, Mich., multiple-listing service, down 50 percent from last year.

Mason counted 1,228 homes listed for under $10,000, 209 of which were under $1,000.

“Many of them are in pretty decent shape,” he said, “and some can be lived in.”

At the auto show, I had sat inside a 2009 Maybach with a list price of more than $526,000. I had no idea that for the price of this car, I could own entire blocks of the city outside.

In the neighborhood where Mason offered me a $0 house (not including closing costs, escrow, taxes, etc.), almost every dwelling was in shambles. Boarded windows. Abandoned cars. Collapsed porches. Ubiquitous graffiti.

The home across the street was charred, likely by arsonists.

We drove through snow nobody would ever plow.

“What’s this place like in the summer?” I asked.

“You wouldn’t be driving through here,” Mason said. “There’s a small chance you’d field a bullet.”

Police stopped patrolling these neighborhoods years ago.

“So if I buy a $1 house, I’m going to need to hire some security?”

“Not necessarily,” Mason said. “Some of these neighborhoods are so desolate, crime isn’t much of a concern.”

“Really?”

“I could take you to 30 square blocks of urban prairie.”

The Motor City had more residents in the 1930s than it does today. About a million people have left since the 1950s, leaving less than a million today.

Enormous buildings sit vacant downtown, their hulking shadows darkening city streets at night. Unemployment is tallied in double digits. And this is how it is before Chrysler, General Motors, Ford and associated companies possibly file for bankruptcy this year.

“Detroit is a microcosm for what’s happening,” said local real estate investor Bret Russell.

Real estate prices are collapsing nationwide — and in Detroit’s affluent suburbs, too. Russell has purchased 50 homes in the past year and built a small company to fix them up and rent them out.

The former Navy pilot said he hopes to buy and hold 1,000 properties and manage 1,000 more for other investors.

He targets neighborhoods where homeowners have low loan balances and aren’t likely to be foreclosed. He wants to buy entire blocks so he can control them and bring up their values.

Mason helps Russell find homes for usually between $1,500 and $17,000.

“I’ve got an MBA and an engineering degree,” Russell said. “I use Ian because he doesn’t have a college degree. He’s got common sense. . . . All of the MBAs are the ones who created this financial mess.”

We went inside a duplex that Russell had just purchased for $7,000, wary of potential intruders.

The kitchen was strewn with garbage. Squatters had soiled the living- room carpet. A basement floor, flooded possibly because someone stole the pipes, had frozen into ice. But I could see that with about $8,000 worth of repairs, it might generate about $500 a month in rent from each side.

Landlords, like Russell of SE Metro Properties, are the new subprime lenders. People who’ve lost their credit to foreclosure or bankruptcy come to him.

“We’re not selling (Cadillac) Escalades. We’re selling them a place to live,” he said. “They’ll come up with $1,000 (a month) for that.”

He finances his acquisitions through private investors, offering a 5 to 7 percent return from the rental income. If the properties ever appreciate, the total return could be whopping. For now, though, it’s not easy building a rental-house empire with just a few thousand dollars at a time.

“I’ve got $2 million,” Russell said, “and I’m having a hard time spending it.”

Russell may be too big a player for the cottage industry that vacant houses have spawned.

On the lower end of the business, people strip empty abodes of just about everything and sell the parts to mom-and-pop entrepreneurs who are buying up and repairing houses that have been stripped as well.

“They take the hinges, the knobs, the sinks, the faucets, the vanities, the toilets; some of them go for the tiles,” Mason said. “They even steal the brick off the sides of some of these houses.”

Street dealers traffic in furnaces, water heaters and appliances.

One person’s dilapidated hovel is another’s economic-development opportunity. Mason predicts a bright future:

“The cost of living has gotten so low here that I think that we’ll eventually see a manufacturing resurgence.”

Al Lewis: 201-938-5266 or al.lewis@dowjones.com