Kiwi wins his prairie patch for a song

Some dream of a house in Tuscany or villa in France but retired Auckland saw doctor Kevin Wall is happy with his $600 slice of a North Dakota ghost town.

He hasn't seen pictures of his new prairie section, in the wheat belt near the Canadian-United States border, let alone visited.

"I guess I might be a bit mentally retarded but I like to take a bit of a gamble," the 49-year-old Browns Bay resident said.

Mr Wall, along with around 150 investors from the US, Canada and Australia, snapped up pieces of the abandoned town of Omemee after spotting it on internet auction site Ebay.

After checking it wasn't a scam, and the land wasn't part of a nuclear testing site, he decided to buy land where the buffalo once roamed and the Sioux and Cheyenne fought the white man.

The section comes with no power, sewage or water supply and is just 10m by 18m.

"They said you were allowed to build. I'd like to build," he said.

A Dakota newspaper reporter who spoke with Mr Wall told him "it wasn't a bad little place" despite the fact it snows in winter, has no sealed road and residents began leaving in 1910.

Omemee will be added to his property portfolio which already includes a 5ha slice of Texas and land at Modoc County in Northern California where he'd like to build a log cabin.

Sections at Omemee, valued by the county tax assessor at US$30 ($44), sold on Ebay for between NZ$100 and NZ $1000.

Omemee (believed to mean pigeon or dove) was originally a post office town, reaching a population peak of around 650 in 1906 with two banks, four hotels, lumber yards and seven grain elevators. Its population was listed as zero in 1990.

Mr Wall said he had visited the US a few times and was looking forward to his next visit to check out Omemee.

"Things like this make life exciting," he said, adding his wife had "a lot of confidence" in his ability to pick up a property bargain.