If you are a Commercial Investor

The VillageTown cosmopolitan town center provides an investment opportunity for investors in commercial property. Unlike the residential units, where the buyers are rewarded for presales (meaning they collectively retain the net profits through a community-owned corporation), the commercial units will be leased by business, thereby creating a business opportunity for investors. The privilege to gain a stake holding in the initial projects may be a way the VillageTown Stewards & Co secure the stage one financing required to initiate first projects.

To explain: In order to secure the objectives of the VillageTown, it is essential that the future residents pre-identify and participate in the design and formation of their village. We use the term open-source real estate as a way of describing their involvement (they pay for the hardware [the building] but are involved in the operating system [how it is designed and governed]). This is important for many reasons, one of which is kick-starting the local economy. The businesses who depend on a critical mass a local customers need assurance that those customers (the other people who live in the villages) will be there day one.

Thus, instead of using a developer, a VillageTown uses an organizing company that functions like a developer except that the net profits are retained after the project and the ownership of that company (which becomes the VillageTown Operating Company) then passes to the citizens. They are rewarded for pre-buying through a Legacy Fund that may amount to hundreds of millions of dollars derived from subdividing and the economies of scale in construction of their homes. This Legacy Fund is off-limits for investors. Also off-limits is the walk-to Industrial Park which will be owned by the operating company. That company's community-elected governors may decide to subsidize rent to make its blue collar jobs more competitive with low-wage countries. It is important that a VillageTown maintain a skill-base to make things.

However, the town center with its four story office buildings is not off-limits and with the Legacy Fund's policies focusing on creating jobs and investing in wealth creation, it can be expected that the white-collar office buildings will be good investments. Rather than take this part on, the VillageTown Stewards would prefer that the Organizing Company sell the development rights to these buildings to raise the capital necessary to fund the first stages of the development.

The Organizing Company is a professionally-staffed corporation charged with developing, selling and building the VillageTown. It is expected that bulk funding will come by aligning 4,000 mortgages and construction loans packaged and sold as securitised bonds to institutional investors. This enables the VillageTown to establish its own bank. However, prior to those mortgage applications being processed, the Organizing Company's business plan sets out substantial milestones that require start-up funding. After the first projects, such start-up funding comes through a reinvestment premium charged on each project. For the first projects however, it is expected to come by capitalizing the revenue stream of the Town Center office buildings.

To learn more, contact the Stewards.