In addition to Lighthaven for which we have a mortgage, Lightcone owns an adjacent property that is fully unencumbered that’s worth around $1.2M. Lighthaven has basically been breaking even, but we still have a funding shortfall of about $1M for our annual interest payment for the last year during which Lighthaven was ramping up utilization. It would be really great if we could somehow take out our real estate equity to cover that one-time funding shortfall.
If you want to have some equity in Berkeley real estate, and/or Lightcone’s credit-worthiness, you might want to give Lightcone a loan secured against our $1.2M property. We would pay normal market interest rates on this (~6% at the moment), and if we ever default, you would get the property.
We have some very mediocre offers from banks for a mortgage like this (interest rates of around 11% and only cashing out like $600k on the property). Banks really don’t like lending to nonprofits, who tend to have kind of unstable income streams. I think there is a quite decent chance that it would make more economic sense for someone who has more reason to think that we won’t be a giant pain to collect from to do this instead (given that from the perspective of the bank we are hard to distinguish from other nonprofits, but we are easy to distinguish from the perspective of most readers of this).
To be clear, by my lights most lenders are probably better served making some AI-related investments, which I expect will have higher risk-adjusted returns, but this could be a good bet as part of a portfolio, or for someone who doesn’t want to make AI-related bets for ethical reasons.
If you’re interested, or know anyone who might, feel free to DM me, or comment here, or send me an email at habryka@lesswrong.com.
In addition to Lighthaven for which we have a mortgage, Lightcone owns an adjacent property that is fully unencumbered that’s worth around $1.2M. Lighthaven has basically been breaking even, but we still have a funding shortfall of about $1M for our annual interest payment for the last year during which Lighthaven was ramping up utilization. It would be really great if we could somehow take out our real estate equity to cover that one-time funding shortfall.
If you want to have some equity in Berkeley real estate, and/or Lightcone’s credit-worthiness, you might want to give Lightcone a loan secured against our $1.2M property. We would pay normal market interest rates on this (~6% at the moment), and if we ever default, you would get the property.
We have some very mediocre offers from banks for a mortgage like this (interest rates of around 11% and only cashing out like $600k on the property). Banks really don’t like lending to nonprofits, who tend to have kind of unstable income streams. I think there is a quite decent chance that it would make more economic sense for someone who has more reason to think that we won’t be a giant pain to collect from to do this instead (given that from the perspective of the bank we are hard to distinguish from other nonprofits, but we are easy to distinguish from the perspective of most readers of this).
To be clear, by my lights most lenders are probably better served making some AI-related investments, which I expect will have higher risk-adjusted returns, but this could be a good bet as part of a portfolio, or for someone who doesn’t want to make AI-related bets for ethical reasons.
If you’re interested, or know anyone who might, feel free to DM me, or comment here, or send me an email at habryka@lesswrong.com.