Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: Home sales: Buyer and community protection

[Rob Sandelin (robsan]

Bruce A. Duda asks in relation to a previous posting where I described 
how Sharingwood is dealing with resale of units...:

>Is there protection for the buyer?  It sounds like s/he could
>louse his/her interest money if s/he came in inadequately informed.  Why
>not require the information be part of the purchase agreement?

That is a good idea, but we would have to check it out with our 
attorney and then run it by FNMA which is much more costly (The FNMA 
review was $1200 last time we did it, although that was for the whole 
condo declarations) than just creating and sending the package 
(Covenants and bylaws) to the buyer.

And yes, as in all housing situations, the buyer could lose their 
earnest money if they were not savvy.  Sales of existing homes are the 
sole business of the owner.  Of course the community has a vested 
interest that the buyer be interested in being a part of the group, but 
we have no way to really ensure this, nor enforce it, since we have no 
way to really control who the home owner sells their home to.  So far 
we have found that people self select pretty well.  I think the key for 
this to be effective is to give each prospective member a honest and 
clear picture of what we are doing.  We do that with a tour and a 
handout.  However, if someone came in who was not interested in the 
community aspect of what we are doing, there is no way we could stop 
them from buying an existing home.  I think this is the Achilles heel 
of our community.