Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Developer financed cohousing

[Joelyn Malone (JKMalone]

Mina wrote:

"We don't have members with "deep pockets", so the group has decided to look for developer financing. We are open to working with someone who doesn't know a lot about cohousing, but if we do so we'd like to be able to introduce  
them to the idea of cohousing with several examples of developer-financed cohousing that was successful from the developer's point of view..."

In my experience, development is a very "local" thing, with examples from far-off locations not 
carrying much weight. Where is your group located? .... Also: even if you don't have "deep 
pockets", your members will be asked to make a financial commitment that will assure the developer you 
really are in this for the long haul and won't disappear on him if he takes the risk on your group. And you 
will pay a significant premium on the prices of your units, to compensate him/her for the very high risk 
he/she will be taking to build something unproven (e.g., not in demand) that he/she will likely feel doesn't 
have a guaranteed alternative use, if its use has cohousing fails.  Think carefully about how it can be 
constructed in such a way that the really high-risk "cohousing design" features don't have to be 
built until success (100% pre-sales) is guaranteed.
And no, I can't think of a single example of where cohousing has been built 
without member taking a significant chunck of the financial risk. Maybe there 
are others out there - if so, it would be good to know about them!

Joelyn
Cohousing Advocates