We have been getting a lot of inquiries for investment opportunities over the past few months. We originally shied away from getting investors involved in the original project due to the affordable nature and lower than normal or expected return. Moving forward, we will most likely will need to involve other investors in order to proliferate the brand to the fullest extent possible.
The bottom line is the brand could build many more homes in the future than we as Postgreen will be able to afford to fund.
We have ideas for getting investors involved, but since we like to use our blog here to gain input and feedback from our gracious readers, we are soliciting feedback. Earlier today I setup a new investor page that contains a simple survey that should take about one minute to fill out. If you have a chance and feel like helping us out with some market reasearch head on over and fill it out for us. We’ll post the results in a week or two once we have sufficient feedback.
Also, feel free to comment here on the survey as I think it could be a good addition to posts in the future to gather opinions in a more scientific way than we can get in comments alone.
http://www.100khouse.com/invest/
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Having investors gives you another class of stakeholder to worry about. As you know, the returns here are not likely to be large enough to keep investors happy.
If you can find a very small pool of very like minded people you might be ok. People who are able to and want to invest to help create something, and who measure their investment return in something other than dollars.
I’m pretty confident we can offer good rates or returns for investors (10% – 12% APR is standard).
The real question is whether we can make the profit we need to with investors involved? I think the answer is Yes. Even if we are making a lower return on the investor funded homes, these are homes that we would not be able to build without their involvement. Investors could help us double, triple or quadruple the total income in a year compared to what we could fund on our own…
Chad.
Go without investors for as long as you can. With investors, suddenly your company belongs to others too,and you will no longer be as nimble as you like. If you didn’t like working for a company, you won’t be happy when Mr. Investor gets upset with you when his return is not where he wants it, or he wants to pull his money out.
I do not disagree with you G. We have been steering away from seeking capital or angel investors that would want equity in the company and strict performance goals.
We would rather pursue project specific investors. If someone didn’t work out well, then we would only have to deal with them once and hopefully the people that were happy would spread the word to more like-minded people…
Chad,
I greatly respect what you’re doing. You ARE the man.
The 100K house is currently budgeted at 109K, about 9% over budget (or -9% return). Where is the +10% return going to come from?
Also over how many months will it take to get a 10% return? If it takes 24 months, that would really only be a 5% return per year.
Chad,
Do you plan to be as transparent with the business side of the venture as the design side? If so, I have some questions that I haven’t seen addressed yet..
1. How much is the vacant lot?
2. What does Zillow give as the expected sale price of the 100k house?
3. Is it common for the seller of a vacant lot to wait this long? Going forward, will you just cash them out ASAP for a discount?
4. Are you worried about competitors soon snapping up the lots before you can get your hands on them?
5. How much would the design fee be for the next one?
(If only small changes are made, the fee should be small)
6. Do you see your team doing a turnkey design-build for a homeowner with a lot? For a developer for re-sale?