How You Can Create Intergenerational Wealth With A green Home build Family Compound?
A family compound is when multiple homes or living spaces occupy the same piece of property. Family compounds are an ideal solution for many scenarios: A homeowner has a large piece of land and wants to help their kids by giving them a place to build their starter house. This paradigm also allows you to share solar power by building a centered battery and panel array system. Homes on the land can share the solar array by allocating a fixed number of panels on the roof to each residence and then either having 2 separate inverters, one for each meter, or micro inverters, and sharing the micro inverters between residences.
Ironically If the homes are grid tied they are already connected and the excess from one PV array is shared in the entire community. Special inverters like Enphase IQ8 Series Microinverters will produce power both when the grid is up (feeding excess power back into the grid), and when the grid is down, powering essential appliances. There are other very important parts to the system, including a switch that isolates each house from the grid when the grid is down.
Compound solar projects utilize large capacity solar panel arrays bought at shared cost that generate electricity for more than one property. This mode of generating solar empowers more people to access the financial and environmental benefits of renewable energy. Most notable no electric bills. Although it is smart to buy land and build homes on it. It's not that always that simple. Every piece of land has it's specific land use that's regulated in the USA by local government. You have to comply with their rules, or do it illegally and potentially have everything demolished and you lose everything. Then you have to consider sewage, water, energy, etc. So giving due diligence to that is essential to success which is why many people build in other countries that allow them to create their dream homes.
Generally to build a compound you're looking at Rural zoning that allows for secondary or accessory dwelling units. If you plan the build correctly, you might be able to do duplexes, semi-detached, Row homes etc, which more zoning types will allow. Most Rural zones according to experts at Narman Construction Inc in Boston, Massachusetts allow for a primary and a secondary dwelling unit. So, to do a compound, you'd have to design the units as connected to be a quad-plex or something similar to the animated image below.
Condos and multi-family buildings can pay for their solar system two different ways: Direct ownership; Third-party ownership (if available in your state).Direct ownership means the building owner/s will purchase the system for their property and will own all of its electrical output. Direct ownership of a system makes sense if you have cash up front, access to financing, or wish to keep incentives like the federal tax credit or Solar Renewable Energy Credits (SRECs).
Under third-party ownership, a separate entity, such as a cooperative or a group of community investors, owns and operates the solar system on behalf of the organization. The organization then pays the third-party for the monthly electricity produced by the solar system. Many condos and multi-family buildings prefer third-party ownership. This is because third-party ownership is simpler and does not require the building to manage the federal tax credit or other incentives. Additionally, the third-party owner would cover any maintenance that the system needs. Third-party ownership is only available in certain states.
Some families may want to consider building spaces with a separate unit that can be run as a short-term rental business. In some cases the best way for retired parents to subsidize their income, and/or for family members to have flexibility in how much money they spend on a house (such as allowing family members to stay in the rental unit when in town).utilizing the AirBnB rental income calculator to assess a fair price cheaper than hotels etc. But there's also lots of potential upside, and with a separate unit families could fall back to renting out long-term during times of economic hardship. Any profit from the rental unit (after paying or subsidizing mortgage, etc. in a pre-agreed manner) would to go towards house maintenance and improvements, which would be simple and fair.
Things to be aware of are the fact that no written agreement or structure can protect against the situation where a co-owner wants out and the others either have to cover their share of the finances, or sell out completely. You can't eliminate this possibility. And someone who wants out can just walk away, whether the agreement allows that or not. If one of the co-owners wants or needs their share of the equity for some reason, or just doesn't want to be a co-owner any longer. The remaining co-owners can pony up the cash to buy them out and solve it that way (either lump sum or a payment agreement), and hopefully there is enough cash among the other co-owners to make that happen. But if not, there is such a thing as a partition sale, where a court can force the other co-owners to sell so that the person who wants out gets their share. This is not an unusual occurrence with property that has multiple owners. A partition sale can be very difficult to prevent if push comes to shove, even if the person who wants out owns just a small share.
That is why the best case scenario is to focus on land acquisition and let parties build their properties in a way that allows them to expand over time. Tiny homes or multifamily homes each have their own specific types of potential problems necessary to discuss beforehand. The term "compound" in real estate has come to mean a group of buildings on a large, single residential property, the perimeter of which is usually fenced, walled or otherwise secured and hidden from public view. There would generally be one main building and several accessory "out buildings."
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