Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: European contacts

[Denise Meier and/or Michael Jacob (dmmj]

On Tue, 20 Jan 1998, Paul Milne wrote:

> Cohousing 2000, where we are trying to come up with a viable financial
> model that incorporates affordability, so that we can start looking at
> sites! There is one we have seen that would be perfect, but we don't
> really have the wherewithal yet to approach the seller.


I don't know how the real estate market works in England, but here in
California you can often "tie up" a property with a small, often
partially or fully refundable deposit (say $2000 - $5000), which gives
you an option to purchase the property within a certain amount of time.
In our case, we had a refundable $5000 on a property for nearly a year
while we pursued the rezoning necessary to build our project. If
this property looks "perfect", see if you can get an option on it,
before someone else buys it. Once a site has been identified, your group
will coalesce and others will be attracted by the concrete possibility of 
it!

Denise Meier
Sebastopol, California, USA