Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: lot pricing

[Lynn Nadeau (welcome]

We valued our buy-ins at from $28-38,000 if I recall correctly. This 
bought a home site, as well as a share of the commons, common house, 
infrastructure, and such. 

We decided to vary the lot price because the objective real estate value 
of the lots differed. Some were larger, and-or more elevated, and-or had 
street impacts, or more or less frontage on commons vs shared property 
lines with other home sites. We had a challenging task because at the 
point we set lot prices, the 8 or so families had already long held 
"their" lot choices. We had to deal with all the different viewpoints 
about what made a lot attractive or unattractive (You have the thicket 
next to you! Yeah, but it's a fire hazard...) , as well as some folks 
being very laid back and generous in attitude, and others who were afraid 
of not getting a fair deal. We hired an outside faciliatator, paid cash 
to him out of our wallets at the meeting, and got the job done.

Now we are down to our last several lots, and are adding in the factor 
that we want to encourage young working families, and so need to keep 
buy-ins as low as we possibly can, balanced against the money we "need" 
to realize from those lot sales for our common  house budget. Those 
last-lot buy-ins are probably all to be $20-30K. 

I imagine your range of buy-in prices will be affected by similar 
factors. Re-sale value, in effect. So, how much range depends on how much 
range there is, measured in market values. Plus whether you want some 
lots to subsidize others, for income diversity. 

Lynn Nadeau, RoseWind Cohousing