Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: cohousing premium?

[Diana Carroll (dianaecarroll]

My experience is very similar to Sharon's, except the fast resale. For us
it has seemed to go one of two ways: either it sells near instantly to
someone who already wanted to live here (or in cohousing in general)...or
it takes forever to sell. I take this to mean that there's a very small
supply and also a very small demand...and either they match up at the right
time or they don't.

I think it's true that we've never successfully sold through a realtor. Or
if I'm misremembering, it is only a very small portion of sales. Almost all
sales are through our interest list, word of mouth, or our website.
(Actually a significant number of sales have been member to member, or
member to member family.)

(Why do I know all this? I'm a Trustee and we handle our portion of the
sales paperwork so we know about every sale that happens.)

Diana
Mosaic Commons

On Fri, Nov 27, 2020 at 12:44 PM Sharon Villines via Cohousing-L <
cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org> wrote:

> > On Nov 27, 2020, at 11:23 AM, Diana Carroll <dianaecarroll [at] gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > No premium. I've worked with zillions of appraisers now and they don't
> care
> > at all. It's all about the square footage and number of bedrooms, and
> maybe
> > a really small premium for having more amenities, but for all the
> > intangible benefits of cohousing? Nada.
>
> I’ve done walkthroughs with appraisers in DC who wouldn’t even look at the
> common spaces. “There is no comparable to compare them with so I can’t
> appraise their value.”
>
> I don’t think we have ever sold a unit using a real estate broker but some
> have tried. One agent was not showing people the common house at all. They
> entered the property from the side and never even looked at the piazza.
> When I asked him about it, believing that I would show the common spaces
> first, he said, “ if people don’t like the apartment, they don’t care about
> anything else.”
>
> When I compared neighborhood prices 10 years ago, our 3 bedroom units were
> selling at similar prices as 3 bedroom houses with yards in the
> neighborhood. There weren’t many apartment buildings or condos then and I
> haven’t done a recent comparison.
>
> Increasingly we are getting calls from people who want to  live in
> cohousing, and that was not true in the early 2000s. We had to explain it
> to people. The Resale and Rental pod still explains but people listen and
> ask questions as if it isn’t a foreign concept.
>
> I wonder, rather than selling for more, units sell faster. As a unique
> item in most morkets, people have very limited choices. I think there are
> only 2 four bedroom units in cohousing in the DC area and only one of them
> has turned over in 20 years. There is a line waiting out there, or in here,
> for that size unit in cohousing. It is not uncommon (I’m repeating myself
> here) to have an open house, receive 3 offers, and in the end it is not
> just the one that works out, but the choice of the seller. The person they
> think will be best for cohousing.
>
> Sharon
> ----
> Sharon Villines
> Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington DC
> http://www.takomavillage.org
>
>
>
>
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