Walter White’s New Mexico house from Breaking Bad is up for sale – and it’ll cost about $4m, assuming you can handle the fan attention.
It’s over a decade since TV crime drama Breaking Bad ended its run, but its characters, plot and locations remain fresh in the minds of its avid watchers. For proof, look no further than a recent news story that caught our eye this morning: a Albuquerque, New Mexico house – once used as protagonist Walter White’s residence in the series – is going up for sale. Its asking price is $4m – over 10 times the asking price of similar houses in the same area.
The story comes to us via Consequence and New Mexico’s KOB4, who interviewed the house’s current owner, Joanna Quintana. Originally purchased in 1973, the house was originally owned by Quintana’s parents, and life there was fairly ordinary – that is, until one fateful day in 2006, when someone from Breaking Bad’s production knocked on the door.
“My mother never ever answers the door, and she did,” Quintana recalled. “They introduced themselves and handed her a card and said, ‘We would like to use your house for a pilot.’”
Within two weeks, filming on Breaking Bad’s pilot began, and Quintana’s life has never been quite the same since. The crime saga, about an ordinary high school chemistry teacher who turns to pharmaceutical distribution in order to pay for his soaring medical bills, became a cult hit with audiences over its five season run, which first aired in 2008. As the show’s fame grew, so too did the number of visitors to the house.
“We average 300 cars a day,” Quintana said. “Come Balloon Fiesta, hundreds of thousands come for balloons. Balloons go up, they come down. Where do they come? Here.”
Read more: El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie review | A fitting epilogue?
Fans regularly show up at the house to take selfies, and often, try to re-create a famous moment in which Walter (Bryan Cranston) threw a pizza onto the roof. On one occasion, a fan appeared on the doorstep in his swimming costume, and offered to pay $1,000 to take a dip in the family’s swimming pool.
The interest was so intense that the family was eventually forced to build a six-foot-tall fence around the property.
After more than a decade of visits, selfies and pizzas on the roof, however, Quintana has decided to put the 1,900 square-foot residence up for sale. “I hope they make it what the fans want,” she said. “They want a BnB, they want a museum, they want access to it. Go for it.”
The Walter White house on Piermont Drive is currently listed for sale at $3,995,000. Whoever buys it will have to get used to the sound of 12″ deep crust Neapolitans landing with a splat on the garage.
