Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: ...Cohousing in existing neighborhood (Boston area)

[Stuart Staniford-Chen (stanifor]

<Maren Cooke writes about their co-op house and how they'd like to buy the 

house next door and start being a cohousing community.>

Firstly, I'd just like to wish Teal the very best of luck in acquiring the  
house next door.  This is exactly how N St got started - a large co-op  
house where one of the members bought the house next door.

I'm not planning on moving to Boston any time soon, so I can't help out  
that way.  I have two suggestions that may or may not be useful depending  
on circumstances.

1) Do you (collectively) have enough equity in the existing co-op house to  
borrow part of the purchase price of the new house against that?

2) Is there any possibility of the owners renting the house to you with  
you purchasing an option to buy in a year or two when you have things more  
together?

A final suggestion for the future - we have found it much better to make a  
deal *before* a house actually goes on the market.  That way the real  
estate folks don't get a piece of the pie - which makes the remainder  
bigger for the seller and buyer to share.

Stuart.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Stuart Staniford-Chen           |       Dept of Computer Science
stanifor [at] cs.ucdavis.edu            |       UC Davis, Davis, CA 95616
(916) 752-2149  - work          |               and
(916) 756-8697  - home          |       N St. Cohousing Community
Cohousing pages are http://everest.cs.ucdavis.edu/~stanifor/cohousing.html