Our original plan had us building the group first, and then, with that established, find and purchase the house together (as a co-op).

However, circumstances changed, and so we have pivoted to purchase the house first, and then build the group up incrementally in the house!

We were finding it challenging to find people. We attributed this to two things:

In this context, an opportunity arrived. We’d previously found a house that seemed ideal in central Carmarthen. The sellers contacted us directly, and, due to wanting to accelerate their own timeline, offered to reduce the price of the house. I had also inherited a large sum of money (an enormous privilege, and one I want to use to benefit the community). The combination of these two things meant we could buy the house immediately, using only loans from family. This felt like an opportunity that would not come along any time soon (as similar houses in Carmarthen were being listed for substantially more than we could afford!)

This means that we can easily meet people in the area, host meet-ups, show potential members the room they could have, and perhaps most importantly, provide a fairly concrete timeline for when someone could move in.

The big one is for now, we will be living in a house that is too big for us! Staying on top of the maintenance is going to be hard. And we’re having to do things like understanding the surveyors report on our own.

The other big disadvantage is when the community is set-up: there will need to be some further legal wrangling to redress the fact we’re the owners. For example, if we want the traditional co-op structure, the co-op will need to buy the house off of us, and have to pay the land transaction tax again. However, having spoken to other co-ops, we’re confident there will be a way to resolve these issues down the road.

We are currently in the process of purchasing the house. This is proving to be a slow process and we’re currently staying with family connections in the area as the lease on our rental ran out. We hope by the end of October we’ll have completed, or hopefully sooner!

We continue to be open to hearing from people who’d be interested in joining. We’ve been very busy packing our lives away into storage, but this is now completed. We’re hoping to meet people in the Carmarthen area in person from September and building a group who have shared values.

As before, please do drop us an email if you’re interested!

Forthcoming posts will hopefully cover in more detail: