Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: sharing founding documents?

[Rob Sandelin (floriferous]

The standard Caveat. Legal documents you want to copy need to be from the
same state your project is in. State laws vary, each state has its own set
of real estate laws. If you give a real estate attorney a set of documents
from another state as a template, they will happily charge you their hourly
rate for going through and fixing them. This might end much more expensive
than simply using a boiler plate condo document from your locality and
making a few  changes to it. Be sure to ask your attorney which will be
easier and faster. The standard legal approach for attorneys is to use
standard documents and make as few changes to them as possible. Why? Because
the standard documents have all been reviewed by lenders, and so the closer
you are to those, the more likely lenders are to give you money. Cohousing
people have gotten smarter about this, but in the early days, cohousers
would insist on customized legal documents, the attorneys would implement
them, and the banks would reject them,then the attorneys would go back and
redo the documents to the lenders liking, in some cases tripling  or more
the attorneys billable hours.

I would also be cautious about house rules and agreements from other groups.
Your group is unique, and just because some group in Seattle has a pet
policy, kid agreement, fence policy does not mean your group needs or should
have one. I think a better approach is to define your actual needs and
desires when they come up, then research what other groups have put into
place, and take those ideas which fit you and your needs.

Its Ok, in fact very good and necessary, to try things out, examine them,
then change them. This is the on-going work of all communities. Cohousing
cooperative life is an experiment.  There are none which have it perfectly
right, and there is no one right way. Community functioning is a process
which is always changing and evolving. This dismays some people, and they
seem to equate changes with failure. Changes to things are iterative to make
things better. It is, in my opinion, foolish to keep processes in place
which don't work well.


Rob Sandelin
Sky Valley Environments  <http://www.nonprofitpages.com/nica/SVE.htm>
Field skills training for student naturalists
Floriferous [at] msn.com



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