Marketing

As a group, cohousers tend to be a creative, resourceful lot, and their marketing efforts reflect this. Friendly flyers hung in coffee shops, member-staffed booths at Farmers' Markets, slide shows at local bookstores, ads in the Sierra Club newsletter and preschool newsletters – along with the indispensable word-of-mouth promotion – can draw prospective members to a new cohousing community by the score.

Cohousing may not yet be a household word, but you may have noticed it in the news more often this past year. Both multigenerational cohousing and the newer elder/senior cohousing are increasingly grabbing the attention of print and broadcast reporters as well as magazine writers.

Cohousing isn’t for everyone, so how do you determine if it’s a good place for you? Here are a dozen questions to help you explore aspects of that decision. The questions are intended to make your determination easier and, just as important, the underlying issues they probe might prevent an ill-fated mismatch of your expectations with the realities of life in cohousing.

While news reports turn to economists and other pundits to anticipate where the real estate market is headed, Cohousing magazine asked a couple of our own experts, Wonderland’s Jim Leach and Cohousing Partners’ Katie McCamant, to jump into the fray. They were asked. “How will the cooling housing market impact cohousing communities?”

It should be obvious that if you want to sell units, then you must market your community. Yet I'm constantly amazed that most members of cohousing communities in development sidestep marketing to focus on other issues such as policies and procedures, budgets and color selection. While these other priorities are important too, everyone will suffer the consequences if you don't complete the "sell out" of your project.

Six years ago while living at Doyle Street Cohousing in Emeryville, CA, I casually mentioned to a visiting tour group that I planned to offer my unit for sale within eight or nine months because I would be moving to Swan's Market Cohousing in Oakland upon its completion. The next day, a woman who'd flown up from Los Angeles to attend the tour called me up and offered to buy my unit for about $20,000 more than I was thinking about listing it for. She's happily living there still.

In marketing and outreach, you're letting the world know who you are and what you do. You're inviting others to come play in this big game called creating community. Play it like a game – and make it fun!

Whether you're just beginning to form a cohousing community, in the process of designing or building one, or are close to completion and want to attract a few new members, this "Top Five" list summarizes the most cost-effective ways to market your community.

Want to attract new members to your community? Send a postcard!

Next to websites, a well-conceived and implemented direct-mail postcard campaign is one of the best tools for finding your future cohousing neighbors.