Village Homes RealtyAlmost five gruelling years after starting construction in February 2020, Michelle and I are ready to start stepping back from full time work in the WEV office.
This is being made possible due to our fantastic Admin team, Karen & Michelle, book keeper, June, and the appointment of a new, very experienced, Director and sales rep to Village Homes Realty, who has the experience, attention to detail, and passion for the Ecovillage that we’ve been looking for to enable us to finally take this step back from sales ourselves.
An important component of this change is that Village Homes Realty (VHR) will be taking over all of the developer (Sustainable Settlements & Perron Developments) sales in the Ecovillage, which have until now been managed and sold by Sustainable Settlements. The benefit of this is that VHR will become a one stop shop for all sales in the Ecovillage, be they new developer lots or re-sale lots/homes.
We have also recently committed to a builder to complete the Stage 4 & 5 Community Sheds, which only leaves the completion of the turf area and orchard trees in Stage 4, and the remaining irrigation and landscaping in both Stage 5 clusters.
Michelle and I plan to reduce our time in the office to 2 -3 days each from January, with a new focus on communications and marketing, so we can start building our home at 21 Mannitj Place, in Cluster 2B. We are going to start planning the development of our two ag lots — one into an organic mixed berry farm (blueberries, raspberries, etc) and the other has been set aside for something I’ve been wanting to experiment with for ages, a highly productive, syntropic strip-style agroforest with fenced grazing belts for Michelle’s beautiful milking goats. Goats need a mixed and varied diet, with lots of roughage, so I’m keen to get their assistance to build soil fertility whilst substantially improving their diet and quality of milk. We can’t wait to start milking our girls again next year (after a 5year break to get the Ecovillage off the ground!)
Michelle’s goat Saffi, as a baby
We’re very much looking forward to becoming more active participants in the community, instead of being stuck in the office all day, every day! We can’t wait to get our hands in the dirt again, planting trees and growing our food!
I’m also looking forward to having more time to evaluate and document our community’s overall energy, water and food production, CO2 emissions/reductions, household performance (comfort/thermal/energy), etc, so we can show the world how sustainably people can live in this day and age.
To all in our amazing Ecovillage community, thank you all so much for believing in a more sustainable and caring world. We know it’s been hard work for all of us to get to this point, and many of you have been waiting patiently for us to join you. We have been looking forward to this exciting stage of the journey for over 15yrs, so we can’t wait to get started and enjoy the fruits of our labour!
Warm regards,
Mike & Michelle
