The Business Plan — affordable homes where you choose your neighbours

The plan in five lines

1. Acquire cheap property — a caravan park, a hostel or hotel, a half-empty town, one street, or land for new blocks.
2. Sell homes and rooms on affordable payment plans (~30% of income) to people who join with their friends through the choose-neighbours app.
3. Hold some homes free so friends can always join and anyone can always move — the feature no other housing model has.
4. Recycle every repayment into buying or building the next homes — the fund perpetuates itself.
5. Repeat where demand appears; publish everything so the model spreads.

Why this sells itself

Two of the fastest-growing problems in the developed world are the product here:

• Housing: about 1 in 7 Australian households can afford a typical home today — down from nearly half three years ago. The buyer pool for genuinely affordable ownership is nearly everyone under forty.
• Isolation: more people live alone than ever, and weak social connection harms health on a par with smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Nobody sells the cure: living near your friends.

Every existing option asks people to choose between affordable or near-their-people or owned. This is all three, and the waiting list builds itself through the app: people sign up with their friends, so every buyer recruits their own neighbours.

Every buyer brings the next buyers. That is the marketing budget.

What we sell

Title structure: homes carry the owner's name with Choose Neighbours on the papers, so a swap is a name change, not a taxed sale — moving stays nearly free, which the whole model depends on.

How the money works

• The perpetuating fund: profit returns to investors; principal recycles into the next homes. Unpaid homes are resold. Growth pauses automatically when no newcomers arrive.
• Owner-built value: homes built in blocks with common mains for water, power, internet and sewerage — owners extend services into their blocks with their own time, metering them, adding capital value with labour instead of cash. Built for low-income people with time, by one of them.
• The failure clause, up front: if the plan fails, the property is sold and money returned — or investors keep the homes. The downside is ordinary real estate; the upside is a repeating model.

Where — pick a scale

We support this anywhere there is interest — Australia first for the founder's labour, anywhere for the model.

What's already committed

• $50,000+ of founder savings and part of future income.
• The founder's labour — building on commission, app development and community organising for free.
• The working app — chooseneighbors.com: profiles, groups, listings, messaging. Live now.
• Thirty years of design — the Belonging community plan, the AI community plan (an AI helper that runs matching, activities and admin — and never rules), and the journal it all came from.

Phases

1. Now — the register. Grow app signups of people who want in with their friends. The waiting list is the proof of demand investors can check.
2. First site. One building, park, or street (founder capital + first investors). Convert, sell rooms and homes on payment plans, hold the float, run the app's community features for real.
3. Prove and publish. Occupancy, repayments, resident-reported community outcomes — published openly. The honest numbers are the pitch for phase three.
4. Repeat and grow. The fund buys the next site; full villages seed new ones; other towns copy the published model.

Risks, honestly

• Slow uptake: mitigated by buying assets that are ordinary rentable/sellable property if the community layer stalls — and by the failure clause.
• Title and tax structure varies by country: the name-change swap needs local legal setup; where it can't work, swaps run as standard sales at the price difference.
• Moving friction: too much shuffling annoys people — moving is always a choice, and anyone can opt out and hold their home normally.
• Key-person risk: the founder is central today; everything is published open so the model outlives any one person.

The ask

Investors and partners: capital or property for the first site, on terms built around the failure clause — your money ends in real assets either way. Councils and landowners: an approved area where affordable homes can be built anytime. Everyone else: join the register with your friends — you are the demand.