Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: what info do new/prospective owners need?

[Deborah Mensch (deborahmensch]

At Pleasant Hill Cohousing in Pleasant Hill, California, where I have now
been both a buyer (after initial move-in) and a seller, one diligent
community member has taken on assembling all the financial and legal
documents in one online archive, and keeping them current, to make them easy
for sellers to access. This includes the CC&Rs, Bylaws, various financial
and accounting statements, the latest budget and reserve study, and probably
some other documents I'm forgetting.

The real estate agent handling the paperwork on our for-sale-by-owner
transactions also strongly recommended that the buyer read the past 12
months of minutes from community business meetings. I did this, and it was
immensely helpful in getting up to speed in the community. Your mileage may
vary according to how detailed and well-explained your minutes are, but
having them available for due-diligence by buyers will likely be
appreciated. By the time I sold, I had been archiving meeting minutes in my
email account for a couple of years, so it was fairly easy to forward on the
last year of minutes.

You may have propective buyers who will want to see some of this information
before making an offer. This was not the case for us, though we did
advertise full funding of reserves on our marketing materials, answering
what might be the most common question. The documents should definitely be
provided once you are in contract and well before the buyers are due to
remove their inspection contingency, so that reading the documents can be
part of their general inspection of the property. I'm not a real estate
agent, but this is how both our sales agreements were done (by the same
agent). When I bought into cohousing in Colorado, there was an explicit
documents deadline in the sales contract by which the sellers were to
provide the financial and legal documents for our inspection, and another
deadline by which we needed to approve them. I haven't seen this in
California, but it may also be a common practice.

Pleasant Hill Cohousing (PHCH) maintains a Decision Log (again, mostly the
efforts of one person) in which it's possible to look up community
decisions. As far as I know, the policies (full text) are not all assembled
in one place for easy reference, though I think this is a laudable goal for
any cohousing community -- not just for resale, but for when questions come
up among long-time members -- Don't we have a way to handle that question
already? Doesn't our pet policy already specify X? And so on. For my part as
a buyer, after reading a year of minutes, which fortunately were interesting
and informative, I pretty much knew what policies I had questions about. But
certainly the community will appreciate if prospective buyers are well
acquainted with key community policies that require everyone's buy-in to
work well, such as participation and pet policies.

This process of communicating specific policies can also be handled by
making sure that prospective buyers attend some social events and business
meetings at the community, and have knowledgeable community-member hosts who
will be sure to fill them in on key expectations in the community. Sometimes
the community members who are sticking around are more motivated to do this
well than are the sellers, who despite their best intentions are moving on,
and often have much of their energy aimed elsewhere by the time they are
offering their home for sale. And remaining community members may be
interested in providing information to the sellers on how they think a given
prospective buyer would fit into the community. (Being aware of our own
potential biases is important here to avoid discriminatory behavior, but
"fit" is more than just demographics, as I think anyone who's lived in
cohousing for a while can attest.)

As I spend more time in my new community, I'll know more about how things
are handled here; as it is, at the moment I know far more about PHCH and
hope they don't mind my speaking about how things have been there, where I
think resales during my time there have been handled very well (and better
and better and time goes by and the community gains experience).

Good luck,
Deborah Mensch
now of Wild Sage Cohousing in Boulder, Colorado, USA

On 10/9/07, Ken Lewis <kenlewisjr [at] yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> The first house in my community (less than two years old) is getting ready
> to be sold. We have two questions:
>
>     1) What information do new buyers need?
>     2) When in the process of marketing, selling, buying should the
> requisite info be conveyed to the new owner?
>
> For the first one, our CC&Rs document mentions three types of information
> that all owners are bound by: a) CC&Rs, b) By Laws, c) Community Agreements.
> For the latter, I'm taking that to mean any of the community policies that
> we have developed and agreed upon (e.g., pets policy, participation
> policy, etc.). Does that sound right? If so, I imagine we need to bind those
> together to be able to convey them to folks in a more official manner. What
> have other communities done?
>
> Thanks very much in advance for your feedback.
>
> Ken
> Nevada City Cohousing in California
>
>
>
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