Italian here.
This is mostly a marketing initiative.
If you buy those houses, you need to completely renew them using local companies and with a lot of regulation. You will probably spend 100k doing that.
If you buy another house, in the same village, maybe you will pay 5k but you have more freedom in the renewal process and you will end spending less.
I looked into some of these a few years back, when the initiative was new. I remember one house in particular that I found very interesting, an old monastery, iirc somewhere near Parma?
I couldn't afford the renovations needed, but it came with several acres of land and generally seemed like a pretty decent deal!
Then there were a bunch of huts in some abandoned Sicilian village that seemed less attractive, if probably cheaper to renovate then the 5 story 14th century monastery.
If that's true Anubis should just remove the proof-of-work part, so legitimate human visitors don't have to stare at a loading screen for several seconds while their device wastes electricity.