Judging from similar estates in the area, the Abbey must’ve cost at least $10,000,000 [EDIT: from other comments it cost 15,000,000 pounds (~$21 million at time of purchase)]. A 30 person conference could easily be held in an office. Regardless, no way CEA hosts 100 of them near Oxford every year. I’m guessing the upkeep costs of the Abbey alone cost more than rent for a generous office.
Besides, if they did want to buy a venue, they could have found one for much cheaper.
This is a luxury purchase. It’s made to make visitors feel important and prestigious. It is rightly being criticized and mocked by those outside CEA. WTF were they thinking?
A 30 person office could not house the people attending, so you’d need to add costs of a hotel/AirBnB/renting nearby houses if going down that option. Even taking into account that commercial rest estate is usually more expensive than residential, I’d expect the attendee accommodation cost to be greater than the office rental simply because people need more living space than they do conference space.
Additionally in my experience retreats tend to go much better if everyone is on-site in one location: it encourages more spontaneous interaction outside of the scheduled time. There are also benefits to being outside a city center (too easy for people to get distracted and wander off otherwise).
Was Wytham a wise investment? I’m not sure, I’d love to see a calculation on it, and it probably comes down to things like the eventual utilization rate. But I think a fairer reference class would be “renting a conference center plus hotel” than “renting a 30-person office”.
I agree with Adam here about the fact that it’s better to host all attendees in one place during retreats.
However, I am not sure of the number of bedrooms that Wytham has. It could be that a lot of attendees have to rent bedrooms outside of Wytham anyways, which makes the deal worse.
I am really torn on this purchase, but just to add some info/one data point—OFTW ran its first conference in a while this year in Philadelphia and I was genuinely shocked at the costs. Hotel plus professional conference venue plus locking you in to caterers that charge a premium… It came out at $1000/head for 1.25 days (although this also included travel, which was average $500/head). And I really truly think we couldn’t have held that conference in a cleared out office space.
That said, it is possible that something equally functional was available for cheaper, and with better optics.
To add further, given construction prices in Oxford and London, CEA could have built a brand-new office/hotel/retreat center of the same size for less than half the price.
And given the top level answer, they looked at three properties. Most people look at way more than three properties when they are just renting an apartment, let alone buying a house or a 14th century estate. It seems CEA had the money, liked the place, and didn’t put much more thought into it on the optics or the economics. I’m really puzzled why people are so comfortable with the rationalizations CEA gives. CEA clearly cares little about due diligence and justifying its decision to the community, referring to that as just “looking good”.
To add further, given construction prices in Oxford and London, CEA could have built a brand-new office/hotel/retreat center of the same size for less than half the price.
The difficulty in building, aside from the fact that CEA is not a construction firm, is all in the planning permission, not the cost of materials and labour. I would be very surprised if CEA happened to have a comparative advantage at overcoming one of the main impediments to UK economic growth over the last 70 years.
For context, here’s Matt Yglesias on the state of UK housing policy:
The nature of the UK housing issue should be familiar to Americans, especially those who read Slow Boring. There is a lot of demand for living in Greater London (and also Oxford, which isn’t far away), and that demand is not met, which leads to high prices.
But the extent of the problem can be hard for an American to grasp.
For example, as best I can tell, the average size of a home in the United Kingdom is 1033 square feet versus 968 square feet in New York City, so it’s not that Greater London is experiencing a housing squeeze comparable to Greater New York City — the UK as a whole is experiencing a housing squeeze similar to that of NYC. London is worse, and not coincidentally, the UK doesn’t have an equivalent of Dallas or Phoenix or Atlanta — a big, cheap city that is growing fast.
Judging from similar estates in the area, the Abbey must’ve cost at least $10,000,000 [EDIT: from other comments it cost 15,000,000 pounds (~$21 million at time of purchase)]. A 30 person conference could easily be held in an office. Regardless, no way CEA hosts 100 of them near Oxford every year. I’m guessing the upkeep costs of the Abbey alone cost more than rent for a generous office.
Besides, if they did want to buy a venue, they could have found one for much cheaper.
This is a luxury purchase. It’s made to make visitors feel important and prestigious. It is rightly being criticized and mocked by those outside CEA. WTF were they thinking?
A 30 person office could not house the people attending, so you’d need to add costs of a hotel/AirBnB/renting nearby houses if going down that option. Even taking into account that commercial rest estate is usually more expensive than residential, I’d expect the attendee accommodation cost to be greater than the office rental simply because people need more living space than they do conference space.
Additionally in my experience retreats tend to go much better if everyone is on-site in one location: it encourages more spontaneous interaction outside of the scheduled time. There are also benefits to being outside a city center (too easy for people to get distracted and wander off otherwise).
Was Wytham a wise investment? I’m not sure, I’d love to see a calculation on it, and it probably comes down to things like the eventual utilization rate. But I think a fairer reference class would be “renting a conference center plus hotel” than “renting a 30-person office”.
I agree with Adam here about the fact that it’s better to host all attendees in one place during retreats.
However, I am not sure of the number of bedrooms that Wytham has. It could be that a lot of attendees have to rent bedrooms outside of Wytham anyways, which makes the deal worse.
I am really torn on this purchase, but just to add some info/one data point—OFTW ran its first conference in a while this year in Philadelphia and I was genuinely shocked at the costs. Hotel plus professional conference venue plus locking you in to caterers that charge a premium… It came out at $1000/head for 1.25 days (although this also included travel, which was average $500/head). And I really truly think we couldn’t have held that conference in a cleared out office space.
That said, it is possible that something equally functional was available for cheaper, and with better optics.
To add further, given construction prices in Oxford and London, CEA could have built a brand-new office/hotel/retreat center of the same size for less than half the price.
And given the top level answer, they looked at three properties. Most people look at way more than three properties when they are just renting an apartment, let alone buying a house or a 14th century estate. It seems CEA had the money, liked the place, and didn’t put much more thought into it on the optics or the economics. I’m really puzzled why people are so comfortable with the rationalizations CEA gives. CEA clearly cares little about due diligence and justifying its decision to the community, referring to that as just “looking good”.
The difficulty in building, aside from the fact that CEA is not a construction firm, is all in the planning permission, not the cost of materials and labour. I would be very surprised if CEA happened to have a comparative advantage at overcoming one of the main impediments to UK economic growth over the last 70 years.
For context, here’s Matt Yglesias on the state of UK housing policy: