Buying a house that comes with an equity swim club membership?

[Anonymous]

Apologies if I am not phrasing this correctly, but has anyone ever put in an offer on a house or successfully bought a house that included an equity pool membership as part of the purchase?

Do you feel like it affected your offer or offer price? Did it have any noticeable impact on the number of competing offers?

Asking because after what feels like a million years of waiting, we are off the waitlist for a swim club with a very long waitlist. However, it seems likely that a move is in our future. If we accept the membership, we can get back most of our money if we were to sell it. We’re allowed to put it back into the membership pool or could convey it with a house sale.

Getting off the waitlist is so rare that I only know one family who has plus one other family who got a membership when it transferred with the house they bought, so I don’t have many people who can tell me about their experience.

We are a swimming family so the summer membership fees are “worth it”, so I’m mostly curious if we’ll feel like we’ve come out even with the equity should we have to sell.

[Anonymous]

If this is for AFC and you’re able to sell it separate from the house, we will pay multiples of the original buy-in price for it.

[Anonymous]

yeah per PP you should decouple it from the house. People buy a house then look into swim memberships depending on age of kids. Other people want a swim membership without wanting to buy a house.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If this is for AFC and you’re able to sell it separate from the house, we will pay multiples of the original buy-in price for it.

Not AFC but thank you for that perspective- helpful to understand the marketplace.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:yeah per PP you should decouple it from the house. People buy a house then look into swim memberships depending on age of kids. Other people want a swim membership without wanting to buy a house.

Thanks. We can’t sell it ourselves at this club- we can sell it back to the club or sell it as part of a house sale. In the only case I’m aware of where one conveyed with a house, a true dump went fast presumably because of the attached membership. But this was immediately post-Covid when people were crazy for both social activities and bigger houses. Our house isn’t a total heap but it will likely sit for a while because it’s large and older for the neighborhood it’s in and has new systems but not fully updated cosmetics.

[Anonymous]

If this is Rock Creek, you can take your equity membership with you. So if you don’t plan to move too far away, this could be appealing.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If this is Rock Creek, you can take your equity membership with you. So if you don’t plan to move too far away, this could be appealing.

I’ve thought about this and the option to sell later, but I think we might end up out of a reasonable commute distance and adjacent to a club that’s way easier to join. Just trying to figure out if our so-so house, which might sit in this market, might not sit if we had pool-hungry buyers.

[Anonymous]

AFC used to require you to sell it back at current equity price, or so I thought. So don't count in it to boost your home price.

[Anonymous]

People around here will buy it, especially if the home buyer has a kid.

Get the membership if you will use it. Who knows, you might not move. Don’t plan around a hypothetical - life has a tendency to disrupt your plans

[Anonymous]

So if you accept the membership you have it until you move. When you sell your house you can convey the membership, but if the home buyer doesn’t want to take over the membership you can turn it back in to the club for resale, is that correct? I don’t see where you lose by accepting it now.

Our club doesn’t have a waitlist. We can convey/transfer our membership with the sale of our house but we don’t get anything back if the new buyer doesn’t want it.

[Anonymous]

I could imagine this helping to sell for a few clubs in NVSL- but that relies on buyers already knowing about the swim culture here and valuing that above a nicer house.

The house I grew up in was NVSL had homeowners fees that included pool membership. There was a time when it actually made it harder to sell (higher required fees than a nearby neighborhood) so they divorced the memberships from the houses.

I tell that story because no one can really answer your question without more details. Having grown up here, if we were trying to move close to Overlee or Donaldson Run, we would have absolutely paid more for a house with a membership. But if we were moving from out of state- no way.

[Anonymous]

We are in Vienna and it would be a boost for young families since waiting lists are so long.

[Anonymous]

Another one in Vienna - we know houses that sold as an “add on” to the house for an additional amount and everyone paid it. It’s for VW, and they could either sell their pool membership with the house, or sell it back to the club after they moved I think. They decided to sell their house with the caveat of having a pool membership that they were also willing to sell. That way it wasn’t included in the sale price of the house, and if somebody wasn’t interested in the pool, they could just sell the house, but if someone did want the pool, they could throw in a few thousand dollars for the membership.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:yeah per PP you should decouple it from the house. People buy a house then look into swim memberships depending on age of kids. Other people want a swim membership without wanting to buy a house.

This is no longer true. Maybe you bought when waitlists weren't so long, but we restricted our search to homes where we could get membership, and I know others have as well. It is hard to feel locked out of a core element of one's community.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:yeah per PP you should decouple it from the house. People buy a house then look into swim memberships depending on age of kids. Other people want a swim membership without wanting to buy a house.

This is no longer true. Maybe you bought when waitlists weren't so long, but we restricted our search to homes where we could get membership, and I know others have as well. It is hard to feel locked out of a core element of one's community.

This. We live 2 minutes away (walking) from our neighborhood swim club and the waitlist is 12 years for us. At that point it’s ridiculous, we won’t have any need for it in 12 years but we get to drive by it every time we leave our house and cry inside : )