Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Rewarding Early Adoption

[Diana E Carroll (dianaecarroll]

I don't have much wisdom to offer here except to say that we also
follow Chris ScottHanson's advice regarding credits for early
buyers, though through a somewhat different scheme.

These have caused us innumerable challenges now that the time has
come for members to actually purchase the homes, such as:
- we had originally planned to have the actually PRICE of the homes
reflected as different for different members, rather than offering
credits but this didn't work out -- it would have affected taxes
and condo fees permanantly, etc.
- so we did it as a credit applied to down payments, but our members'
mortgage lenders want to see where every dollar of "deposit"
comes from and we've had to do some fast talking to get them
to accept this "credit" as valid (there are lots of strict
rules governing seller credits that have only gotten stricter
in today's tight mortgage environment)
- when money got tight and sales were slow, our construction
lender balked somewhat at letting these "credits" through
- our construction lender also set a limit on how much equity
members could apply to their down payment (20% of the cost of
their homes) -- excess equity AND credits needed to be deferred
to the end of the project and couldn't be applied to members'
home purchase.

So, I can't tell you the RIGHT way to do it, but I can warn
you but the actual details of implementing these incentive
schemes are quite challenging.

- Diana (Mosaic Commons)


---
Sawyer Hill Ecovillage    ++++ http://www.sawyerhill.org
Cohousing in Berlin, MA   ++++ 1,2,3 and 4 BR homes still available