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Comment by jefftk | Hacker News Reader

If you're going to hold a lot of events I can definitely believe it's more efficient to buy space than rent it.

If you’re going to hold a lot of events in royal manors then sure maybe buying a royal manor is cheaper. However, most events don’t need to be held in royal manors, especially if they are about altruism or shit like that.

I did my undergrad in one of the many German universities where the main building was a 'schloss', an aristocrat's huge mansion, similar to OP's manor.

It was the worst building for teaching, as ballrooms are flat so you can't see the speaker past the third row, and acoustics are awful because these rooms are just not made to carry sound from one spot to the rest of the room.

I don't think that's a problem in this case? I've been to the building (I'm friends with the person who started the project and he showed it to me in April when I was visiting) and it doesn't have a ballroom. The rooms it does have do seem like a good size and configuration for the planned use (medium sized residential workshops).

I don't think it's the rent vs. buy that's attracting the attention here.

Do you know how expensive events actually are? An average wedding can easily run into tens of thousands of USD?

What he meant was that everyone can accept buying is better than renting. Most people can’t accept that this was the most efficient purchase possible.

I guess it's a nice place and people want to have events at nice places and if they held it for 200 years it would be a good investment?

Don't forget to factor in maintenance costs. If you own the place, you're on the hook for maintenance, which can be pretty high for old buildings. While the asset may appreciate in value over time, the cost of carry may negate that price appreciation.

Or you can decide not to do maintenance but then the value won't appreciate.

Lots of those costs will still be there. Catering, food, AV, Decorations, etc etc don’t just become free because you bought a palace. Also now you have to take care of a centuries old building, hire gardeners.

All that is besides the point which is that these people are clearly not motivated by the principles they espouse.

If you focus on the essentials, bypass the glitz, and are selective with sourcing, you can run a great wedding for a few thousand. The main costs are land-hire, marquee, catering, and equipment. The rest is free or low-cost. That's what we did, and people still remember it fondly nearly ten years on.

One thing your numbers probably don't consider is the cost of hosting the guests? For a wedding that is usually not considered the responsibility of the hosts, but it is still a cost associated of the event. In this case, one of the reasons why this building seems to be a good fit for the project is that most of it has been carved up into small bedrooms. (I think this happened in the early 20th century when it was used as student housing, if I remember what Owen told me correctly.)

We invited guests to camp over at the field that we hired; it was about £20 per tent which we passed half of to the guests. So that counted a few hundred towards our overall costs (included in my few thousand figure).

Obviously I wouldn't expect CEA to run a campsite, but it was a lot of fun for wedding.

I would have accepted it if they bought a big space that's close to public transport, so that events can be organized often and very efficiently, with high accessibility.

To be fair, it's only a 10 minute bus journey from Oxford's train station (albeit on the ST2 line which only runs once an hour).

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Oxford+Station,+Park+End+St,...

Travel time also matters less the longer you're spending there, and I understanding of the project is that it is for multi-day events.

25 minute walk from public transport. Accessible, but not well.

The comment claims it is about an experiment. How about running regular workshops for some years in rented space so that you can judge interest/success first?

Then you can buy a building which is appropriate with some space to grow.

Most SV companies, even the big ones (Google, FB, etc) lease most of their offices, if not all.

Google famously has spent billions of dollars on NYC real estate, including Chelsea Market and the Port Authority building.

I don't think this is all relevant, though, since the trade-offs for a large publicly traded tech company are very different than for a grant funded events project at a charity?

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