The dreaded ‘Idea’ — Part 4: Housing ‘product’ to bridge renting and buying
February 19, 2011 – 9:35 am
Rent or buy? That’s it? Are you kidding? We are talking about where we live our lives and we only have two choices? Seems like the streets or life on the road would be better at times.
Then why not have a Real Estate product that puts a portion of current rent towards a slowing growing chunk of (pseudo-)equity in owning a (potential) future home from the same property owner. In other words, you wouldn’t be pissing away all of your rent money knowing you’re getting nothing except more and more rent coming due.
Say your rent is $500 a month. $10 of that $500 would go (into a fund) toward owning a home from the same property owner — if you ever decide to buy later. Best of both worlds. Participating property owners would have a great edge by offering such incentives while renters wouldn’t constantly lose money keeping someone else’s roof propped up. Renters would get a tiny slice of what they are hopefully trying to do anyway: gradually striving towards a real stake in owning a home.
Potential markets may spring up to roll over this pseudo-equity from one property ownership company to a different property ownership company. And time would tell if such a product could fall victim to its own version of messes pivoting the current housing crisis like default credit swaps and mortgage backed securities.
Sure this is kind of a radical housing product, but it may take something a little different to pull us out of this crisis and restore faith and credibility to how and where we live.
Please chime in on why this wouldn’t have a chance in hell, or what you believe needs to happen before a scheme like this could take hold.
By the way, the awe inspiring stuff below deals with building new and innovative structures. I credit this for spawing the question, “This is awesome, but what do we do with the houses here today? And how are we to better finance all of this?”:
Dan Phillips: Creative houses from reclaimed stuff — Dan uses building and construction waste to build unique dwellings.
John Gerzema: Liquid Living And Modular Homes — Definitely not mobile homes. These energy-efficient, low-cost homes comprised of green materials fold up into shipping containers to go anywhere for quick and easy assembly.
Lookotels — “LOOKOTELS is a new concept in the design and construction of hotels for a cost effective price, thanks to reduced construction times and raw material costs.”
Corn Waste Transformed Into Versatile Building Material — “a proprietary corn-based composite board that can be used as a construction material instead of plywood or fiberboard.” Creating building material from corn stover (the corn husks and stalks remaining after harvest) seems more profitable than letting it rot in the fields like it often does.
The Multi-part postings “The dreaded ‘Idea’” addresses minor world needs that I’d like to see happen but don’t believe any single one is important enough (for me) to go to anybody with.
Part 1 spouts freely about Twitter and iPhone/iPod Apps & iOS along with a short treatise-like rant on ideas in general.
Part 2 explores needs in the web media landscape.
Part 3 tackles eReading and Music.
