Family walks away with
$68,750
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← Back to homeA Community Land Trust home can stay affordable for the next family — and the family after that — while its owner still builds real wealth. One formula does both. Scroll to see how.
Sold on the open market, the subsidy evaporates the first time the home changes hands. A resale formula is the mechanism that stops the bleeding.
A Community Land Trust separates the land from the house: the trust holds the land in perpetuity, the family owns the building, and a resale formula decides how the gains are split at sale. Set it right and the same dollar of subsidy keeps working — family after family, decade after decade.
What follows are three calculators. The first builds a family's equity the way Champlain Housing Trust — the largest CLT in the country — actually does it. The second pits the three common formulas against each other. The third hands you the single dial that decides everything.
Build the family's equity.
Champlain's formula returns four things to the seller: their down payment, every dollar of principal paid down, the value of approved improvements, and 25% of the home's appreciation. It opens on the report's worked example — drag anything.
What the selling family walks away with — and what the home costs the next family.
At the opening numbers, a family turned a $10,000 down payment into nearly $69,000 of real wealth — and the next family still bought the home for $193,750 instead of $250,000. City of Lakes CLT reports the same pattern: after ten years, the average homeowner builds $40,000–$60,000 in equity while the home stays affordable.
Not every CLT uses the same formula.
The report describes three common models. Two index the resale price to a rising benchmark; one shares a slice of actual appreciation. Set a scenario and watch what each charges the next family. Lower price means more affordability preserved.
Same home, same market — three different rulebooks for the resale price.
There's no single right answer — there's a trade-off. Index-based formulas are simple and predictable, but in a hot market they can drift above what the next family can pay if incomes rise faster than the original subsidy assumed. Sharing a fixed slice of actual appreciation ties the resale price to the home's real gain — which is why Champlain and City of Lakes both land on the 25% share.
Now the dial itself.
The whole model lives in one number: how much of the appreciation the seller keeps. Slide it from 0 to 100% and watch the two goals — building wealth and keeping the home affordable — pull against each other.
One slider decides whether a CLT home builds wealth, stays affordable, or strikes the balance.
Drag that lever to 100% and you've rebuilt an ordinary market sale — affordability gone the moment they close. Drag it to 0% and the home stays cheap forever, but the family built no wealth and had no reason to buy in. The job of a resale formula is the number in between. Champlain settled on 25%:
Nobody got rich. Everybody got ahead. The family built $68,750 in wealth, the next buyer paid $193,750 instead of $250,000, and the trust preserved $56,250 of affordability for the family after that. That is the whole idea.
The free lesson shows you why the resale formula works. Premium takes you inside the machine that makes a Community Land Trust run.