On May 24, 1626, Peter Minuit pulled off the most famous deal in the real estate market. Not much and not a little, but he bought Manhattan - the present center of New York. Was this purchase really profitable?

A little background. Dutch farmers began to actively settle these neighborhoods in 1621, when the Dutch West India Company received official permission from the General States of the Netherlands to settle the Hudson River basin. As part of this, the settlement of New Amsterdam was established in Manhattan.

The chairman of the village council bore the high-profile title of governor and had far-reaching plans for farming on the island, which required some assurances of safety, so the Dutch began to look for a suitable roof among the locals.

Since the Indians only hunted on the island, the choice was made by poking in the direction of the nearest tepee, which turned out to be the tepee of the Canarsis tribe from Brooklyn (sometimes there is information about a deal with the tribe "Manhattan" - this is from the lack of imagination of the authors).

Apparently, the Indians couldn't figure out for a long time what they wanted to buy, but they took the axes with bling for the total sum of 60 guilders ($24.00 - at the then exchange rate or $700.00 - at the current one), and the Dutch solemnly declared #Manhattennisour.

The Indians, who were probably just passing through the island to hunt, actually made a good deal (700 bucks is a lot of money), and the Dutch, with their "profitable investment", quickly lost out, because less than forty years later they were kicked out of there for free by the British and renamed New Amsterdam to New York.

Today, only the land in Manhattan is valued at about $50 billion (which is about $1,000 per square meter). If you add all the real estate, you get a sum of about $4 trillion. And if you divide this amount by the island's area of 59 km2, it turns out that each square meter of Manhattan is worth about $70,000.00.

And the Indians had nothing to do with it.