Calling all foreign buyers and “computer whizzes”: Hamptons seller to accept Bitcoin

Philipp Preuss' Southampton home
Philipp Preuss' Southampton home

Cash-strapped buyers eyeing a particular four-bedroom home in Southampton need not fear: the seller will also accept Bitcoin for the $799,000 asking price.

That may be a tricky price to nail down however, as the digital currency’s value has been all over the place in the past 12 months. Philipp Preuss, who is selling the home, told the Wall Street Journal that with this transaction, the Bitcoin price will be determined by the average exchange rate on the day the sale closes.

He would also accept a combination of Bitcoin and cash, he told the Journal.

“There might be international buyers, or a younger computer whiz who came into a little bit of coin overnight,” Preuss told the Journal. By opening up the sale to accept the digital currency, he said he is “expanding my buyer base.”

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Preuss said he had to give his broker, Amadeus Ehrhardt of Brown Harris Stevens, a crash course in the currency.

“Aside from what I hear on the news about it here and there, I didn’t know much about Bitcoin,” Ehrhardt told the Journal. “But people are always interested to see what’s new and people like options.”

Preuss joins a Trump Soho condominium seller in his willingness to accept Bitcoin, though that home owner announced that he would accept only the digital currency. The rental market is tentatively opening up to Bitcoin as well, with online apartment search marketplace RentHop now accepting advertising payment from landlords and brokers in Bitcoin, as previously reported. [WSJ]Julie Strickland