Consider it the ultimate in baseball memorabilia: the home where New York Yankees legend Mickey Mantle grew up. Now, thanks to some enterprising investors, fans can actually own a share of the property for $7.
According to ESPN, the house—located in Commerce, Oklahoma, and where Mantle is said to have learned how to hit—is being offered in piecemeal fashion by Rally, a company specializing in fractional ownership of high-value investments like rare comics, cards, and cars. The property is believed to be worth $329,000, meaning roughly 47,000 shares will be offered.
To realize a higher value, Rally intends to explore a number of possible improvements, from converting the property to a museum to Airbnb rentals to hosting a Little League field. (While shareholders will have a say in potential strategies, the ultimate decision to sell rests with Rally.)
If augmenting the home results in greater resale value, then shareholders will benefit. As in conventional stock trading, if the value diminishes, then they’re out of luck. Any sale profit would also be reduced by the cost of maintenance and construction.
“A lot of it is untouched, that is a lot of the mystique about it,” Rally co-founder Rob Petrozzo told CBS Sports. “That’s what makes it special. When you go inside the home, it hasn’t really been lived in in around 20, 25 years. So much of the furniture, the entire kitchen, the doors, a lot of the windows, the barn, it’s been untouched since the equivalent of about 80 years when Mantle lived there. I think that’s the biggest thing you notice when you walk inside. It really is a time capsule, but it’s one that has withstood the test of time.”
Selling shares in outsized sports collectibles grew in popularity over the pandemic, when Rally offered fractional possession of things like a signed Mantle bat and a basketball used in a pick-up game by Barack Obama and NBA legends including LeBron James and Kobe Bryant. Shares of each ultimately lost value.
Mantle’s house is similarly unpredictable. Without its history as a boyhood residence for Mantle, its market value might be as little as $10,000. But his name carries considerable weight. A 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle card is, after all, just a piece of cardboard—but it sold for $12.6 million in 2022.
This article was originally published on www.mentalfloss.com as Mantle Piece: You Can Own Shares of Mickey Mantle’s Boyhood Home for $7.
