just signed closing documents on one of the more unique and purposeful negotiations of my life thus far. I sold the property that I bought from La Laurrien (next door to Osiris Indriya and Chiyona Dang) to a green developer contingent on their agreement to implement many deep green, healthy building, and community development techniques - and hire Lifestream Solutions as consultants on the project. So we actually signed two contracts - one for the sale and one for the consultancy. Its been a pretty incredible process. I purchased this property against my familys strong advice. I was very clear there was a mission about this one and despite the risks I committed to it. La even agreed to sell it to me for less than a competing offer because she hoped the lands legacy would be honored in my stewardship. Despite my good intentions and innovative visions I ended up with a costly property I couldnt rent and not enough experience to leverage for the funding to build the envisioned development. It was looking like I would be forced to sell as my family was pressuring me to consider to get out from under the weight of it. Then, at one point last year I was struggling to figure out how to raise enough cash quickly to buy the neighboring vacant lot in order to keep all the parcels together for the future community development vision. And so I was incredibly bummed when the neighbor sold his vacant lot to a developer without honoring the first right of refusal he had offered me. But then, in proper twist of fate fashion, that developer offered to buy my property - and since I didnt have it on the market, I was in a strong position to negotiate. I explained to the developers that I had a vision for a healthy sustainable community development... and I was open to someone else building that vision if it held true to those values. Being that Isola is an established and recognized leader in green building they were interested to explore what we had achieved with our innovative building techniques on our backyard cottage construction. After months of negotiations and due diligence on all our part, now we are complete and close that chapter and exhale before we open the next exciting chapter for all of us! Incredibly, the buyers realtor was the competing realtor when I purchased the property and knew I had done so for less than his offer - intentionally for the benefit of community and spoke to his fascination with Las decision at the time (he had never seen that happen) and personal understanding of what this means to all of us - so these property transactions have been remarkably in the family since the beginning. Feels like something really beneficial is unfolding for us, them, the neighborhood, the city of Seattle, the green building movement... etc. This is how we like to do business - looking for that win-win-win-win-win... :-) and holding faith that it can be found.
Posted on: Wed, 04 Jun 2014 22:01:31 +0000
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