Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Development Phase- early participants paying less

[Muriel Kranowski (murielk]

At 10:42 AM 9/21/2011, Sharon Villines wrote:
> 2. I think people who join early should get bigger discounts than 5% or 
> whatever.

It seems logical that the founding members, who take on all the financial 
risk and put in unbelievable amounts of time and suffer huge stress and 
angst over all of it, should get a significant discount, or to put it 
another way, later buyers should pay a significant surcharge.  We discussed 
this in the early stages and were going to do it.  But it turned out that 
our greatest motivating factor after a couple of years was the desire to 
sell all of the units and not have to keep living in an unfinished 
community in a perpetual construction zone.

So, in the end, the later purchasers paid more only because it was then 
costing more to build.  We didn't charge more for the lots, because we so 
much wanted the last ones to be sold and built out. It seemed 
counter-productive to that effort to make the little houses on tiny lots 
even more expensive than is typical around here.

Potential buyers didn't seem to appreciate that they were also getting 
1/33rd of all the amenities, the common house, the acres of woods and open 
space, and of course the community, which came along with the small house 
or duplex unit - they focussed on the purchase price of their house-and-lot.

We built-and-sold for almost 4 years from the first move-ins to the last, 
but I would guess that similar pressure to sell all the units would hold 
for a project where everyone moves in at the same time, or in two 
stages.  What have other communities experienced with charging more to 
later purchasers?

    Muriel
    Shadowlake Village Cohousing, Blacksburg, VA