Quote:
Originally Posted by AnchorAlumna
This is why I wonder why the lodge concept has never been big. You have a smaller number of women living in to help pay the mortgage/rent, but still have the meeting and storage rooms. It can be a privilege to live there, rather a requirement. Students can have more of a choice.
I thought huge houses to have to fill, heat and cool would die out, but that has not been the case.
One of these days, enrollments will drop...and/or going Greek will NOT be a big deal, and we may regret building the mansions. Things always go in cycles. You have to be prepared for the bad times, too.
|
Lodges are problematic. You really need to cover the mortgage 100% from rent. Otherwise you're even more prone to problems when that business cycle circulates to the lower side.
You need A size chapter room, dining room, common areas, etc to support B range of chapter size. That determines everything.
You have to pay for it with X rooms at Y per month. You can warehouse people in there to keep rates low, but then you have trouble filling it when times are tough. Or, what's going on a lot more lately is, you can put in fewer rooms in a suite or even apartment style setup at a higher rate. That makes for a lot less to fill & easier to get people in there, which better weathers the tough times.
There's kind of a formula to it. There's no reason you can't have a big house that you can keep full without all those problems. It's just a matter of designing what's going to work best economically for the situation, location, and chapter. There's a couple really good companies out there that are good at figuring out that calculus. I don't think a lodge model is great answer in most cases, but I guess it could work under certain circumstances.
Threaded Mode
