Co-Own Company LLC

09/22/2023

We are still here!

A main component of our company is to provide owned urban housing to young middle-class buyers.

In other words, giving Millennials the same opportunity to own in-town real estate that their parents and grandparents had.

And we still will. In fact, when the current interest rate spike ends, the shortage of housing in our urban centers for first-time buyers will have reached unparalleled levels. And the demand will be higher than ever. (Even immigration is working to fill up every available urban housing unit – a few are being built right now).

So our company will be more ripe than ever to build our co-owned housing, sell homes, earn a profit, and do it again and again.

As frustrating as it is, however, we must wait until mortgage rates start heading lower so that construction lenders will get back in the lending business. Housing requires a lot of capital, and banks have mostly stopped lending (don’t even get me started on my opinion of that).

We wish that we could start our projects today because I firmly believe that rates will be in the 5%s by the time our houses/townhouses are completed.

You may recall that mortgage rates tend to follow the 10-Year Treasury, which keeps rising at the moment, to record levels for the past 17 years.

However, most experts, including the Mortgage Bankers Association, project that the 10 Year Treasury will drop by 2025 and that 30-year mortgage rates will drop with it (mba predicts (in August 2023) that mortgage rates will be in the 4%s in 2025).

We have a $33T national debt, so do the math on refinancing that long-term at 4%+, and you can quickly figure out why the Fed and all other parties need to eventually lower rates. We cannot afford to pay $1.3T yearly in interest alone on our debt.

At even 5% mortgage rates, our co-owned units will be very successful (ie less than renting in most cities), and in great demand in multiple cities, and we will be ready to meet that demand.

We are working now to finalize co-op documents, advertising materials, and share loan materials.

So we are still here (in our office in Denver), we are working every day, we will be successful, and we will honor our initial investors with a great company, and our upside is larger than ever.

Please contact me at 303 802 6700 anytime. I am always glad to talk about the good days ahead.

03/17/2023

In our last update, we communicated that we would reach back out in early March with an update. Currently, we are still waiting for our lender to complete their work and fund our first building. While this is not happening as quickly as we had hoped, we still expect movement on this soon.

Once the funds have been secured, you will have a choice between receiving your investment back with full interest or converting your investment to an ownership share of our co-live project.

Long-term, we still plan to build and sell co-owned units. Once mortgage rates are under 5%, this will once again become feasible. In the near term, we are focusing on rental projects that allow renters to build equity towards one-day buying a co-owned unit.

Thank you for your continued support and we will get back to you when we hear more!

01/18/2023

Happy New Year to all of you, our Co-Own Company supporters!

We have been working very hard behind the scenes to make sure that our inaugural projects are successful. As you are probably aware, mortgage rates have doubled over the past year, and this has caused us to think and act anew regarding our initial plans.

As a result of the increased rates, the estimated monthly cost of a co-owned unit on Holly Street has gone from under $2,000 per person to about $3,000 a month, making our co-ownership model for that site untenable at this moment.

Instead, we will build a Co-Live project nearby that will allow residents to live in community and gain credit ($100 a month) towards the purchase of future co-owned units. Once interest rates decrease, we will be able to offer these units (and those on Holly Street) for co-ownership.

We apologize that we have been quiet in these last few months. It has been impossible to give an accurate update as the state of the economy and the local market has changed our plans and intended use many times.

However, we can, with confidence, give our investors the following update for their investments: we intend to have two options available to you in the month of March. You will have a choice between receiving your investment back with full interest or converting your investment to an ownership share of our co-live project. We plan on sending out another update in early March.

To be clear, we still fully intend to build co-owned units. We expect interest rates/mortgage rates to fall in 2023, which will allow us to offer co-own units in 2024, however, for now, we have to adjust our plans.

Thank you for your continued support and we look forward to speaking to you again!

05/04/2022

We have some exciting news! On April 8th, we officially entered a ground lease on the Holly Street property! Raising the funds to tie up the land was no easy task, but we were able to raise the necessary $2.6M in order to get it done.

Since then, we’ve been working on submitting permits with the City of Denver. This can be a time-consuming task, but we have the benefit of working with approved plans for a by-right development. This means that lengthy and contentious rezoning and approval processes are not needed, allowing us to start sooner rather than later. We anticipate permits to be completed in the coming months, with the project finishing construction and ready for owners to move in during 2023. Once we get further along in the process, timelines should become more solidified, and we can begin communicating more concrete dates.

The housing market in the US, and in Denver especially, continues to be highly favorable for missing middle housing. According to a recent New York Times article (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/01/upshot/pandemic-housing-market-wealth.html), “economists generally don’t expect [housing] prices to fall. There’s just too much demand for too little housing in America today.”

In a recent Denverite article (https://denverite.com/2022/04/13/denvers-average-house-price-may-hit-1-million-by-memorial-day-says-a-colorado-realtors-group/), the Colorado Association of Realtors projects that “by Memorial Day, the average single-family home price might reach $1 million”, and “for a freestanding home, the average price rose from $810,0914 in February to a staggering $918,850”.

We hope to provide an alternative way for people to get into the housing market and provide a viable alternative to homebuyers that doesn’t have income restrictions or relies on government programs.
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02/07/2022

We are happy to report that we have another building site tied up in Denver! This second project will be another 24 unit town home development, similar to our first Denver site on Holly Street. Please visit our website at https://co-ownco.com for more details on the Emerson Street project.

As we continue to hear more and more news reports (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/11/your-money/single-mothers-home-buyer-pandemic.html, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/22/opinion/cohousing-mothers-pandemic-community.html?searchResultPosition=1) about housing costs rising at a rate faster than wages, we recognize that our product is the obvious solution to this crisis. In a world where rents are too high and people continue to live in isolation, co-living and co-ownership will be the future of housing.

We are excited to announce that we have a new interior designer on our team, Katie Diederich. Katie’s mission is to provide a modern, eco-friendly, and high-tech interior space with exposed ‘industrial’ elements. We want to ensure that we design a space where shared living is comfortable, innovative, and easy to live in.

Own It Changing the future of homeownership with new-build, net-zero, co-owned housing. Own It Changing the future of homeownership with new-build, net-zero, co-owned housing. Millennials are being boxed out of the housing market. We’re here to get you back in the game. The Co-Own Company was form...

06/03/2021

https://www.5280.com/2021/06/would-you-ever-own-a-home-with-friends-or-strangers/

The Co-Own Company introduces a model of shared homeownership aimed at helping first-time buyers in Denver get into the real estate game.

05/09/2021

Our Wefunder campaign closed out strong last week thanks to our 210 wonderful investors!

While we didn't hit the total amount that we had originally hoped for, we did exceed our minimum goal of $200,000. This allowed us to move forward with our projects. There were challenges at every step of the way, but as we gained momentum we found new and innovative ways to make the dream of sustainable new-build co-owned housing a reality.

Thanks to you, we were able to begin preliminary work and identify 4 infill sites in Denver and Boulder, Colorado. We hope to share more details in the coming weeks and months as these individual projects move into the construction phase.

Crowd funding is not for the faint of heart, but we're sticking with it! We've learned valuable lessons which will make our next campaign even better! Additional investment from wonderful people such as yourselves, will allow us to grow our brand faster and expand to other cities.

Help us be the solution that addresses the national housing crisis and help us do it sooner rather than later.

Stay tuned for more updates in the near future!

02/14/2021

Check out this new article from the Brookings Institute.

"We are now at a tipping point where our households and our housing inventory have become a round peg struggling to fit in a square hole.

Multigenerational and mixed family households have
become more common, as Americans are increasingly “doubling up” to reduce housing costs.

In predominantly catering to the traditional nuclear family,
the real estate industry is continuing to serve the interests of white
households over Black and brown households, for whom the suburban single-family home is often more a symbol of profound exclusion than something attainable . . . Over 6 million Black and brown millennials would be considered mortgage-ready if there was any attainable product for sale in prime locations."

Introduction  Separate and unequal  Modernizing family  Risky (housing) business  The office, reimagined  Retail revolution  The types and distribution of household st…

02/04/2021

A 2,700 square foot, four-bedroom townhouse just outside of downtown Denver for $150,000 may sound too good to be true, but Co-Own Company is taking a new approach to make homeownership possible for young adults.

02/04/2021

As our local media blitz continues, Denver's Channel 7 (ABC) interviewed Sarah Wells, our Director of Sales at the Co-Own Company.

"The Co-Own Company was really created out of a need to create housing for people to get an earlier entry point into homeownership," Wells said. "We've seen a lot more people participating in buying properties together as their first home to live in."

"What we find in the United States is that the easiest way to build wealth is by owning property," Wells said. "It really is about increasing opportunities for people to get on the ladder of building equity, so that they can actually live in the cities that they love and work in.”

Read and watch the story here: https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/digital-originals/co-own-company-reimagines-homeownership-for-young-adults-in-denver

Or watch on Facebook here: https://fb.watch/3r5B8kp1ln/

01/17/2021

An article was recently published in Denver's 303 Magazine talking about the Co-Own Company.

“When people think about cooperative housing, sometimes they think about standard co-ops like you hear about in New York and California,” said Sarah Wells, Co-Own Co.’s director of sales. “What we think about more commonly in Colorado is shared housing. What we’re doing is really combining those two concepts.”

“Across the United States, there are lots of co-living models that have popped up where one can rent,” she continued, “but for us, the backbone of our project is to have an ownership stake. There hasn’t been anything like this in the United States that we know about.”

Read more here: 

Starting in early 2022, those looking to buy a home in Denver will have a brand-new option to help them do so — at a fraction of the usual cost. The Co-Own Company, which develops, sells and manage…

01/15/2021

We're excited to announce that we've met our minimum goal of raising $200,000! More work lies ahead, but meeting our minimum goal allows us to start work on our King Street project (https://co-ownco.com/denver/king-street-home/) in northwestern Denver. More work lies ahead on our journey to create nationwide, scalable, for-profit shared ownership housing in the United States.

Thank you to all of our wonderful investors for helping make all of this possible! We are looking forward to seeing more of you join us on our final goal of reaching $1,000,000 raised on Wefunder (https://wefunder.com/co-ownco).