Cohousing-L Mailing List: Have you used your Right of first refusal? (was Re: co-housing unacceptable to Fannie Mae?!?)

[Lyle Scheer (wonko]

So,

        Flip side question to the list... who here has experience of actually
needing to invoke your right of first refusal.  How many times?  What
were the circumstances (if you are able to disclose)?

        It occurs to me that a straw poll of organizations represented by
readers of this list will help me question the actual usefulness of this
clause.

        Reversing it, not having such a clause, but working on having your
marketing team (if any such exists) have an active waiting list to
supply buyers to anyone including banks or estates of residents who have
become deceased seems like it might serve the equivalent purpose without
scaring banks.

        So if you did invoke this right, did you have the chance before
invocation to supply potential buyers to whomever you were exercising
this right upon?

        All part of figuring out if this sort of thing is more trouble than it
is worth, or worth the trouble.

BTW, just a vocal voice of thanks to Diana Carroll who gave me some
excellent suggestions about methods of finding a loan that I am pursuing
currently with two other lenders.  The first is a broker whose main
investor also balked, but is researching with 13 other investors that
she works with.  The second is the local branch of one of those big
banks, who is at least initially telling me that they might not have a
problem with our right of first refusal, but hasn't actually contacted
his underwriting department yet.  It will be interesting to see where it
goes, and I'm happy to report back my somewhat unscientific but larger
data set.

It is unfortunate and I'm sure unlikely to be put into a position of
needing to get a loan under a very tight timeline.  However, I'm sure
it's happened before and will happen again.  Having the ability to tap
the collective consciousness here has been extremely useful.

Many thanks to all responders.

- Lyle