On the flip side, it seems the Abbey is likely to require less in the way of upfront renovations, which seem to me to be the significant at-risk part of the Inn, because the sorts of changes you’re likely to want to make it a good venue for running workshops probably make it an objectively worse ‘hotel’, which is what almost anyone else would be buying the space to get.
It seems the two are within a factor of 2 of each other for long term cost, most likely in your favor, while they may have you beat a bit in terms of non-recoverable conversion expense.
In the end it is surprisingly close, all things considered, given quite how different Oxford and Berkeley are.
I’ve very vaguely heard that the renovation costs might end up on the same order of magnitude as well, I think partially because CEA hired an external design firm to do things, whereas Lightcone is doing things in our usual in-house, highly-incremental and local way (we are working extremely closely with a small team of contractors that we hand-picked, and don’t have any kind of design-firm middleman). Though I also don’t think they started construction yet, so this might still change.
I think this will look better on paper for us because Lightcone doesn’t pay market rate for its employees, but will probably overall end up worse for us if you take into account counterfactual earning rate. I still think it’s the right call because it allows us to be more adaptive while we are doing it, and hopefully produce a better result.
On the flip side, it seems the Abbey is likely to require less in the way of upfront renovations, which seem to me to be the significant at-risk part of the Inn, because the sorts of changes you’re likely to want to make it a good venue for running workshops probably make it an objectively worse ‘hotel’, which is what almost anyone else would be buying the space to get.
It seems the two are within a factor of 2 of each other for long term cost, most likely in your favor, while they may have you beat a bit in terms of non-recoverable conversion expense.
In the end it is surprisingly close, all things considered, given quite how different Oxford and Berkeley are.
I’ve very vaguely heard that the renovation costs might end up on the same order of magnitude as well, I think partially because CEA hired an external design firm to do things, whereas Lightcone is doing things in our usual in-house, highly-incremental and local way (we are working extremely closely with a small team of contractors that we hand-picked, and don’t have any kind of design-firm middleman). Though I also don’t think they started construction yet, so this might still change.
I think this will look better on paper for us because Lightcone doesn’t pay market rate for its employees, but will probably overall end up worse for us if you take into account counterfactual earning rate. I still think it’s the right call because it allows us to be more adaptive while we are doing it, and hopefully produce a better result.