Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Value vs. Cost

[Paul Conahan (pconahan]

I wanted to thank everyone for the responses I have received regarding
the issue of charging market value or actual cost for our cohousing
units.  Our group is now better informed and we can wrestle with this
issue some more (oh no, MORE meetings!)     ;)

For clarification, I just wanted to state WHY we even got started on
this issue.  Our initial thinking was that by charging market value for
certain units (i.e., similar to David Mandel's 'relative' market value),
not only could we charge more for certain units, but more importantly,
we could therefore charge LESS than our cost for other units.  By
definition, the last units remaining are usually the toughest to sell (I
know I know, we're not selling real estate, we're selling community; but
the reality is that people buying at the end are really buying the real
estate).  Since we had decided that we were going to build our community
all in one shot (versus phasing, with it's associated carrying costs and
dilution of marketing effort), we didn't want the tail-end of our
marketing effort to take forever, and perhaps force us to wait another
year to begin construction (due to the cold weather and a slew of
regulations, the window for construction in Michigan is fairly small). 
Ergo, the DEBATE began (and continues).

Paul Conahan
Ann Arbor Cohousing Community

-- 
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~pconahan/