I refuse to believe that renting out a conference hall would actually have cost more.
Investing £15,000,000 a year would yield roughly £1,000,000 a year on the stock market. If you are spending a million pounds on the venue alone for a 1,000 person conference, you are not doing it right. A convention hall typically runs in the tens of thousands of dollars, not the millions. This is a 100x markup.
The calculations there are completely correct under the assumption that the space is being used 365 days a year, which strikes me as wildly implausible. I was working on the assumption the is space used a few days each year. If this space is actually being occupied 100% of the time, I’d gladly retract my criticism.
The actual usage of the abbey is very likely to be somewhere between these two numbers. Definitely I would expect it to be used far more than for one major conference per year, but I wouldn’t expect 100% usage either.
I refuse to believe that renting out a conference hall would actually have cost more.
Investing £15,000,000 a year would yield roughly £1,000,000 a year on the stock market. If you are spending a million pounds on the venue alone for a 1,000 person conference, you are not doing it right. A convention hall typically runs in the tens of thousands of dollars, not the millions. This is a 100x markup.
This comment suggests that renting conference venues in Oxford can be pretty expensive:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xof7iFB3uh8Kc53bG/why-did-cea-buy-wytham-abbey?commentId=3yeffQWcRFvmeteqc
Your cost estimates seems to be in the wrong order of magnitude.
The calculations there are completely correct under the assumption that the space is being used 365 days a year, which strikes me as wildly implausible. I was working on the assumption the is space used a few days each year. If this space is actually being occupied 100% of the time, I’d gladly retract my criticism.
The actual usage of the abbey is very likely to be somewhere between these two numbers. Definitely I would expect it to be used far more than for one major conference per year, but I wouldn’t expect 100% usage either.