Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: How do you deal with resale

[Pablo Halpern (phalpern]

Hi Netters,

My group, New View Neighborhood Development (In Acton, MA.  More about
us in another posting) has also been struggling with the problem of
keeping a cooperative membership while not appearing descriminatory
and without impinging on a member's ability to sell their unit.
Although the issue is far from settled, this is what we have come up
with so far:

Once the initial membership has moved in, New View will create a new
class of member (called "associate member," for now) which will have
some privilages and responsabilities but not as many as a full,
resident member.  At the very least, associate members would be
invited to some common dinners and other events and have some use of
common facilities but they would not live on the site and would
probably have limitted consensus-voting rights.  The important thing
is that the associate members would constitute an expanded
communitty of people interested in cohousing with whom we would be in
close touch.  It is our hope that people will be able to sell their
units more quickly and without realtor's fees by using the associate
members as a pool of potential buyers.

Without further refinement this idea has several problems.  For
example, no matter how long someone has been an associate member, they
can be outbid for a house by a much newer member.  The initial members
do not need to contend with this because we are not individually
bidding on houses.  We could create a process, either mandatory or
voluntary, that sellers would follow in order to get a fair, though
not necessarily best price for their units, but when it comes to
selling houses, it is difficult to ask people to give up on getting
the maximum return on their investment, especially after all of the
time and money we put in building this thing.  At its worst, though,
the concept as it stands is no worse than simply opening it up to the
market.  At least we would know that the new member has been approved
by the community and is truly interested in cooperative living.


-- 
- Pablo

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Pablo Halpern             (508) 435-5274          phalpern [at] world.std.com

I am self-employed, so my opinions *do* reflect those of my employer.
However, they may not reflect the opinions of my client.
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