Ok, this is one of the most common questions asked so I’ll go a bit into detail on the answer here.

The response on the Ocean.Builders website is
“We are trying to keep the price as close as possible to an average US family home for the minimal seastead with the option to add features such as Air Conditioning, more solar, upgraded kitchen, etc.”
“The first 20 will be sold at cost.”

If that sounds a bit ambiguous then you are right. The fact is that we cannot give an exact answer until we have the quotes from the contractors for the new design. We can estimate based on the prototype build but we do plan on upgrading the design based upon our lessons learned on the build process for the prototype. This should raise the cost. But we will also be buying in bulk. This should lower the cost. As we get closer to having the first 20 pre-sold (serious buyers indicating their willingness to buy one) we will give them a more precise number as we move forward with arranging the construction.

For now we are targeting a price of $150,000 for the minimum price of a barebones seastead. We are not yet sure how barebones that would be nor what may be included. Likely close to what the prototype has. A no frills seastead. Closer to $200,000 would likely give you a move-in ready seastead with a nice kitchen, water, solar electric, etc.

Again, we do not plan on making any money on the first 20 seasteads, but we also do not plan on losing money either so we may buffer the estimate by a couple of percent due to the lesson learned from the prototype that we need to keep going to the store to buy things for the seastead that we may have missed.

Timeshares

For many of the contacts we have had so far, they are interested in buying a portion of a seastead either as an investment or as something they can visit once in a while. This is understandable as many people who have enough money to buy a seastead need to live where they live to earn that money.

While we could certainly offer timeshares or shares of seasteads, we would rather focus our resources on building the best seasteads we can deliver. While car manufacturers may make most of their money on financing we would love to leave those profits to another entrepreneur who wants to get involved and make money in such a venture.

This would be a great opportunity for anyone with any experience in this area to get in on the ground floor. We would be willing to work closely with you to make it happen and offer a great service to future seasteaders. It would be an ideal way to test out some blockchain based solutions as well.

From what we have seen, there are four types of seasteads that will need to be built. An owner’s version, a timeshare version, a long term rental version and a short stay version. They would all have the same structure and shell but the setup may be different for each one. For example, a short stay version may not need to focus as much on the kitchen as the owner’s version. A non-owners version could come complete with furniture and be move-in ready for customers utilizing bulk purchases to bring down costs.

For the first 20 seasteads, Chad and Nadia will be open to helping with property management early on as this first step will be difficult and they are at the location 24/7 already.

If you are interested in setting up a business to coordinate investors into seasteading let us know at [email protected]. We could even coordinate a few people that are interested if you would like to get in contact with others to form a company.

Otherwise we will move forward to provide this option if nobody is interested as we wish to see this happen and are excited about getting a community of seasteaders in the sea.