Cohousing-L Mailing List: Your post in choosing - l

[Jim Bronson (jimbronsonashland]

Thanks for your thoughtful reflection, Mac.  River Song is at 24 out of 28
sold.  Hoping our bank is sufficiently impressed with that and the equity
investments of about $850 in addition to our 20% of our unit cost.  The are
offering us 65% loan to construction cost, which seems skimpy to me in view
of the 75% we could have gotten 1.5 years ago.  Just for the fun of it,
what was your construction loan to cost?

Wishing you very well on your Phase 2 project.

Jim Bronson
River Song Design Team


Message: 3
Date: Thu, 5 Aug 2021 12:25:13 -0600
From: Mac Thomson <macthomson [at] me.com>
To: Coho-L-postings <cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org>
Subject: Re: [C-L]_ members responses to the question about cohousing
        communities that have not made it
Message-ID: <7097A759-19F4-49E2-BD23-EB102D514C03 [at] me.com>
Content-Type: text/plain;       charset=utf-8

Back in 1999 when we developed Phase 1 of Heartwood Cohousing, we had
planned to partner with Jim Leach so that banks would recognize Jim as a
successful developer with a strong balance sheet and therefore offer us a
construction loan. As it turned out, we were 100% pre-sold before obtaining
our construction loan. That was good enough for the bank so we no longer
needed to partner with Jim. Jim very graciously agreed to be our
development consultant, but not our partner. That meant we paid him an
hourly rate for his help, but didn?t end up sharing the risk or splitting
the profits with him. The net result was that the community ended up with
an extra $100K.

Two takeaways here:
Banks get very excited about a project being 100% pre-sold. Get there if
you can. But of course that means that the pre-buyers need to have entered
a legal agreement to buy a home and put enough money into the project to
demonstrate they?re not going to walk away.
Jim is a great guy. Cohousing wouldn?t be as successful as it is today
without Jim, Katie, Chuck, and many others who have given so selflessly.

-- 
Mac Thomson

Heartwood Cohousing
Phase 2 Project Manager
http://www.heartwoodcohousing.com