Running a trial of what the club offers members, is not something that can be done quickly, in that a member has to work with us through work books, meet up with a consultant a number of times and do a lot of identified additional research themselves including mortgages etc. However if you want to do this we have a suggestion as to how this is done.
We are unable to run free trials for reporters, or free services for anyone. To do so would mean we were asking our members out of their membership costs to fund others. There are considerable costs in providing the services we provide for members and groups of members and all of this has to be recovered from membership costs. We have no other income, don't sell anything or take any introductory commissions from anyone. Members therefore know that we are concentrating on helping them not trying to get them to do something in order to generate a commission for us.
We also have tight confidentiality rules as a part of our terms and conditions of membership, so neither us or any of our consultants can divulge anything about a project or members. In part this is so that projects in hand don't get messed up by others being able to work out the opportunities we have discovered or arranged for members and trying to outbid us, or interfere in some other way. In part its also about keeping a lot of our knowledge to ourselves. While we are happy to share concepts and have an educational role, we don't offer work books and kits we have available to members to anyone else.
We will never ask a member to allow us to disclose information on them, as they might feel obliged to help us out, especially if they have got a particularly good deal and feel they owe us a lot. Others approached at an earlier stage might feel that if they did not co-operate, they may not get as good a service and feel they had to help us out with the request. You will understand therefore that as an organization that always puts our members interests first, we cannot put them into such a position.
From your perspective this may seem to rule out any help, but it does not and we have two different routes that would allow you to get to speak to members who had agreed to talk to you.
Our first suggestion is that you identify a member of your own staff or a relation of one of your staff who would like to design and build their own home and you ask them to take out a normal membership as anyone else would. Once this has been done, that you contact us and tell us that you are shadowing this member. If you cannot find a person, then why not talk to some other local businesses, some of the better ones are happy to pay the joining fees of people they would not like to lose, or to offer them a loan covering club costs and part of the deposit, that is repaid when the home is built and they can remortgage to a higher value to recover it, or before if they should leave, allowing a future key person to become home owner.
This will allow us to do several things, check with the new member that they are happy for us to talk to you about them and projects they get to see, for us to explain to the member what we are concerned about keeping confidential and what we are not, giving them a contact they can check with if it is unclear and giving you a contact so that you can ask any questions relating to how they are proceeding or any aspect of it. This contact may not be the local consultant supporting them but another who will be able to explain more to you, without the concerns about breaking confidentiality rules. In a lot of cases we will be able to let you shadow some aspects, that at that time we do not want publicized, on the understanding that, that aspect will not be reported for a time. This means that we should be able to share some information with you, that we don't want to become public knowledge yet, as it may be too commercially sensitive at the time.
We can also check with other members who may be involved in a site containing a number of other self builds before involving the shadowed member, so those that want to avoid this can veto the involvement. Given this you may be able to have at least partial contact with other members also developing on the same site.
If this is all too complicated, then there is another route we have mentioned on the special offers page, this is the suggestion that you run a voucher offering to give any reader who goes through this route to build their own home a bottle of Champagne on starting to build. This does not cost you anything as we fund the bottle of Champagne. It does however give you the chance to met the member, who has got to the point of having a plot and building is planned. The other option to running a voucher is sponsoring a presentation and the voucher being within the information given out at the presentation we do for you. This should give you a number of members to follow up on later. The reason why this approach works so well is that in sending in the form to claim the Champagne, it is the member who has contacted you, not us disclosing information on a member.
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Self Build Homes Club is an international club
and trading title of Self
Build Homes Club llc. Local services
to serve members are commissioned for the club by New
Atlantis International Services Corporation.
All major commissioned companies involved, have New Atlantis trust status.