Why We're Buying a Home in Our Own Development
Esther and I are purchasing a four-bedroom home in our pilot development at full market rate. We’ll pay all annual fees — €2,220/year, same as every other homeowner. We’ll raise our family in the community.
People hear this and think it’s a marketing story. A nice anecdote for the pitch deck. It’s not. It’s a structural decision that changes everything about how the NeighbourWood Model works, and how it’s perceived by every stakeholder we interact with.
The Problem with Property Development
Property development has a trust problem, and it’s earned.
Typically a developer buys land, builds homes as quickly and profitably as planning allows, sells them, and moves on to the next site. They never live on the estate. They never deal with the snagging list two years later. They never experience the management company fees they set up. They never walk past the green space that often turned out to be less than promised.
The incentive structure is simple: build, sell, leave. Quality is a cost centre, not a value proposition. Long-term outcomes are someone else’s problem.
We’re asking someone to buy a home connected to a Woodland Bank through a permanent legal covenant, with annual fees attached in perpetuity. We need to break that pattern fundamentally. Not with words. With action.
What This Really Means
When we say we’re buying a home in our own pilot, here’s what’s on the line for us for full transparency.
The visa. Esther and I are US citizens, having lived in Galicia, Spain for the past nearly two years. We submitted the Start-up Entrepreneur Programme (STEP) visa application in November 2025. Our family has relocated permanently to Ireland. It’s a complete life restructuring — schools, healthcare, community, everything.
The down payment. We’re putting down 20% on a full-price home. To anyone that has ever bought a home, you know that’s usually the single largest purchase in anyone’s life. It’s significant personal capital committed before we’ve sold a single home to anyone else.
The relocation costs. Moving an entire household across the ocean isn’t simple or easy. Shipping, flights, temporary accommodation while the pilot is built, legal costs for immigration — these add up quickly.
The fees. We’ll pay the same €2,220/year as every other homeowner. Estate management, woodland stewardship, energy infrastructure. No exemptions. No discounts. The same covenant on our title.
This is what it looks like when founders have skin in the game. Our family, and our family’s home.
Why It Matters to Buyers
If you’re considering a NeighbourWood home, the our commitment to living on-site tells you something that no brochure can.
The covenant will be tested on us first. The permanent legal mechanism that links your home to the Woodland Bank and obliges you to pay the three-tier fees will be on our title too. We’ll go through the same conveyancing process. Our solicitor will review the same documents yours will. If there are issues, we’ll encounter them first.
The fees are ones we’ll pay ourselves. We designed a fee structure that we’re committing and willing to pay. €2,220/year, every year, forever. If we thought the fees were excessive or the value proposition was thin, we wouldn’t be signing up. We’ve tested it against our own household budget.
The specification delivers. We’ll be living in a BER A1 home with the same heat pump, solar array, battery, and water treatment system as yours. If the energy savings don’t materialise, we’ll know — because we’ll be living with the same impacts.
The community will be real. We’re not building a development and visiting for photo opportunities. We’ll be raising our children there. Walking in the Woodland Bank. Attending the same OMC meetings. Inviting our neighbours for tea or coffee. You’ll see us.
Why It Matters to Investors
For investors, founder commitment is the strongest risk signal available. Talk is cheap. Equity is expensive. But committing your family’s home to the business you’re asking others to help fund? That’s a different category entirely.
Here’s what it signals:
Alignment. If the model doesn’t work, we lose our home. Where our family will sleep. There is no stronger alignment between founder and investor interests.
Confidence. You don’t commit your family’s housing to a model you think might work. You commit when you’ve done the analysis, stress-tested the assumptions, and concluded that it works. That the net-positive economics, the covenant structure, and the energy specification all hold up under scrutiny.
Long-term commitment. Founders who commit to living in the development don’t walk away after the fundraise. The don’t lose interest in Year 3 and pivot to something else. The community, and the Woodland Bank it sustains, will be where we go home to every night.
Every bridge investor and seed investor we speak to hears this. And it changes the conversation. The question stops being “do you believe in this?” and becomes “why are you this confident?”
Why It Matters to Councils & Communities
Council planners, housing officers, and communities have seen a lot of developer pitches and the long-term results.
When we invite a council planner or community member to visit our pilot, we won’t be walking through a show house. We’ll be inviting them to our home where we live: our neighbours, our shared estate, our Woodland Bank.
“Visit our pilot where our founders live alongside early adopters” — that’s the invitation we intend to make. An open door to see the model in operation, from people who have everything on the line.
The Test We Set for Ourselves
Early in the process of designing the 10:1 Model, Esther and I asked ourselves a simple question: would we buy one of these homes?
Not theoretically. Not “if we were in the market.” Actually buy one. Pay full market price. Sign the covenant. Pay the fees. Live there.
If the answer was no — if there was any part of the model we wouldn’t accept as homeowners ourselves — then we needed to fix it before asking anyone else to buy in.
The energy specification could be lower. We could have built to BER A2 with an and saved on construction costs. But the energy savings wouldn’t have exceeded the fees. The net-positive economics would have been marginal at best. The model would have been harder to defend to buyers — and to ourselves.
We built the home we’d want to live in. Then, we committed to living in it.
The Right Decision
Committing to live in our pilot development isn’t something we decided would “look good.” It’s a decision that emerged from the logic of the model itself, and from our values.
The 10:1 Model asks homeowners to accept three things that are unusual in Irish property: a permanent covenant linking their home to a non-adjacent woodland, annual fees that run with the land forever, and a stewardship structure managed by an independent trust they don’t control.
If the people asking you to accept all three won’t accept them for their own family, that tells you something.
If they will — if they’ve bet their home on it — that tells you something different.
NeighbourWood Communities is building Ireland’s first net-zero woodland communities. Register your interest for updates, priority access, and an invitation to visit when construction begins.