The question here isn’t whether building a new castle from scratch would cost £15,000,000, or whether the real estate is properly valued; I assume it is. The question is whether you need to buy a castle to host yearly or monthly conferences—to which the answer is clearly not.
Investing £15,000,000 would yield roughly £1,000,000 a year on the stock market. If you are spending a million pounds on the venue for a conference, you are not doing it right. A convention hall runs in the tens of thousands of dollars, not the millions. This is a 10-100x markup.
£15,000,000 sounds like a lot to a researcher because it is.
In my experience from actually renting spaces to run tech conferences and events, a convention hall in a reasonably dense city runs in the tens of thousands for a single <5 day long event.
Consider just 3 breakout rooms, typically ~$90-$180/room/hour, 8 hours a day, 5 days takes you into the $20-$40k range, that gets you no food, no lodging for attendees, once you add that stuff in and the all-in cost for a fully-paid for typical 30-40 person event can easily land just inside $80-100k, with costs growing slightly sublinearly per person for a while before they balloon again once you rise above the size where there are multiple competing venues in your area.
If the convention center you are using isn’t a hotel now you have to move your attendees back and forth. For tech conferences you can charge a few hundred $ per person, and have them book with your hotel out of a bloc, incurring obligations from your org to a hotel about occupancy, and then you can generally come up with a way to make your event break even. Conferences are expensive for a reason.
Locating an event in the middle of nowhere? Maybe that room becomes maybe a fixed rate $350 space at a cheaper hotel, $1000/day for 3 becomes so $5k for a 5 day event, but now its harder to get folks to the venue.
At the end of the day, in either of these scenarios you are subsidizing the hotel and event space industry rather than focusing in on your events.
On the other hand, using the model of a typical CFAR event, using a venue that is already owned, you are dealing with some cleanup, a couple of members of the team providing operations support, catering costs, but the venue itself remains relatively customized to purpose. People can sleep on site, enabling folks to drift in and out of conversations, the event can run all night with people talking in smaller more intimate groups long past when a hotel would have kicked you out of the space. If your goal is to built a community and have folks come together, this is a much better model.
If you can keep this above 50% utilization, this even strikes me as way more than break-even or even if I’m delusionally out of touch and hotel prices have some how plummeted in the last 3 years while the cost of everything else has gone up, at least far closer than the 10-100x swing you are arguing for here.
Lightcone, by comparison, has been getting about 75% utilization out of the home it has been using as a conference space.
The question here isn’t whether building a new castle from scratch would cost £15,000,000, or whether the real estate is properly valued; I assume it is. The question is whether you need to buy a castle to host yearly or monthly conferences—to which the answer is clearly not.
Investing £15,000,000 would yield roughly £1,000,000 a year on the stock market. If you are spending a million pounds on the venue for a conference, you are not doing it right. A convention hall runs in the tens of thousands of dollars, not the millions. This is a 10-100x markup.
£15,000,000 sounds like a lot to a researcher because it is.
In my experience from actually renting spaces to run tech conferences and events, a convention hall in a reasonably dense city runs in the tens of thousands for a single <5 day long event.
Consider just 3 breakout rooms, typically ~$90-$180/room/hour, 8 hours a day, 5 days takes you into the $20-$40k range, that gets you no food, no lodging for attendees, once you add that stuff in and the all-in cost for a fully-paid for typical 30-40 person event can easily land just inside $80-100k, with costs growing slightly sublinearly per person for a while before they balloon again once you rise above the size where there are multiple competing venues in your area.
If the convention center you are using isn’t a hotel now you have to move your attendees back and forth. For tech conferences you can charge a few hundred $ per person, and have them book with your hotel out of a bloc, incurring obligations from your org to a hotel about occupancy, and then you can generally come up with a way to make your event break even. Conferences are expensive for a reason.
Locating an event in the middle of nowhere? Maybe that room becomes maybe a fixed rate $350 space at a cheaper hotel, $1000/day for 3 becomes so $5k for a 5 day event, but now its harder to get folks to the venue.
At the end of the day, in either of these scenarios you are subsidizing the hotel and event space industry rather than focusing in on your events.
On the other hand, using the model of a typical CFAR event, using a venue that is already owned, you are dealing with some cleanup, a couple of members of the team providing operations support, catering costs, but the venue itself remains relatively customized to purpose. People can sleep on site, enabling folks to drift in and out of conversations, the event can run all night with people talking in smaller more intimate groups long past when a hotel would have kicked you out of the space. If your goal is to built a community and have folks come together, this is a much better model.
If you can keep this above 50% utilization, this even strikes me as way more than break-even or even if I’m delusionally out of touch and hotel prices have some how plummeted in the last 3 years while the cost of everything else has gone up, at least far closer than the 10-100x swing you are arguing for here.
Lightcone, by comparison, has been getting about 75% utilization out of the home it has been using as a conference space.