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Q.
Why does it costs so much to become a member of this club
A.
In most areas of life you get what you pay for, clearly a small subscription club would be unable to even consider taking on the type of help and support we can. Members of course should get back many times what their membership costs in savings, risk reduction, cleaver buying and faster projects.
The activities we are involved in, finding, negotiating, organizing, trouble shooting and the like requires levels of skill that are not easy to acquire, and a great deal of traveling and cost, often including some speculative costs to proactively create sites rather than reacting to what comes up. In addition a great deal of time is taken up in looking at joint ventures and other ways that expand the supply of opportunities to self builders and in helping individual members define and discover exactly what it is they are going to undertake. A great deal of other work is done as well, from contacting suppliers to allow you to get the most from the trade card, to researching topics to create work books and devising vast numbers of standard letters contracts and forms, designing and improving site management systems and more. We also have to limit the people who help us to working for members and not those outside or for themselves without our agreement.
In helping people to identify and define their project, researching and searching for options to meet these, finding other with similar needs to work in groups on some occasions and in searching out potential sites to create new opportunities, taking to planning people, and others to help smooth the path and working out what can be achieved as well as negotiating with individuals and large corporations, is well beyond the ability of many people so is not a service that you will find offered elsewhere. For example, one consultant that we use is a company director with very wide experience, including being at one time a director of a merchant bank working internationally. employing an individual of this level to help you on your own project is just not be a financially sensible option, even if you are building a multi million pound palace, however given that he can also be helping many other members and has the support and help coming from many members the benefits of this is available to you through the club.
You will find property finders who undertake relocation and some of these will also look for property, however to do this they have to charge a fee a number of times what it costs to achieve the same thing through the club. Typically it would cost you 4 or 5 times as much and you chance of success would be far smaller, as they just would not have the network that we have through the club members. You would also be likely to end up paying far more for your plot as most have the fees geared to the cost of the purchase, so the more you spend the more they make, so there is an incentive to get you to spend more. The reason they have to charge so much more than us is that they do not have the help of the local network of members to help them, and are working for a client at a time ratter than being able to combine research and some solutions.
The other alternative is to use a package deal with a builder where the builder does it all for you, including finding you a plot, however again this can add considerably to the cost as quite naturally he will not be expecting you to seek competitive quotes from other builders, so perhaps you will in this case end up paying in effect 15 times as much for the service and although the builder may have local contacts he is unlikely to be involved in promoting self build and in proactively searching out new sites as we are.
I hope you have seen now that be can help you to make your dream into a reality far more economically than you can by using others.
Some have suggested we could lower our cost if we employed staff rather than having contracts to meet the needs, however we do not believe that we could produce as good a service within the same budget.
Employing people is expensive and generally the higher the skills they have and better they are at trouble shooting and finding solutions, the more they are worth and therefore cost. If we were to employ a large team of people, in addition to their salaries there would be the cost of overheads, office, equipment, cars, electricity, rates, taxes, as well as the cost of paying for holiday time, sick leave, maternity leave and far more. You need to have supervisors, and not all staff are reliable, some call in sick when the sun shines and they fancy a day off for example. Where staff are out of sight of their supervision, there is far greater temptation not to put in 100% unless there is bonus system that rewards them for doing their job. If you have tasks that are weather related, less is often achieved, and it is difficult to enforce confidentiality clauses on staff and to know that they are not also working for someone else.
The only way we could use staff and overcome many of the down sides would be to employ more to carry the passengers you pick up along the way, with considerable increase in numbers and costs.
Using consultants who are on performance related contracts, we have non of the above problems, they have to do what they have undertaken or loose the contract. Those who are extremely good and know they are, see this as an attractive deal, while they don't have the security and benefit package of an employee, they know that by achieving results they are being rewarded well. In addition the job satisfaction is far higher and they are able to have far more influence over their own lives, than you can allow employees.
In some operations it makes sense to have staff, while in our unique situation and the level of service we demand for members, the route we have chosen we believe produced the best results at a lower cost to members than other methods would.
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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.