Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: management services vs self-management at the building stage

[Elizabeth Magill (pastorlizm]

Personally I do not think there is a single stage of our project that "doing it 
ourselves" did not cost us A GREAT DEAL of money, A MASSIVE AND PAINFUL loss of 
time, and a fair amount of heartache.

We lost a great property because we didn't have a professional that knew local 
politics. (and in fact we allowed to be called into play a law that didn't have 
to be called into play and thus could have avoided the whole thing that lost us 
the property.)

We lost money by saving money not having a professional supervise the 
construction. We lost money by saving money not talking to lawyers about the 
ending of the construction and sales.

We were often faced with hard questions that we didn't know the answer and 
needed to answer as quickly as possible and so gave the wrong answer, or a 
guess, or an answer that had consequences we didn't predict.

Professionals know the stuff that we don't even know that we don't know.

-Liz
(The Rev.) Elizabeth M. Magill
www.worcesterfellowship.org
www.mosaic-commons.org
508-450-0431