User:Vincecate/FloatingVilla

Rental houses in Anguilla are called villas. This proposal is to make money renting out an early seastead prototype off the coast of Anguilla. After we get a few seasteads operational, it could be called a "seastead resort".

Taxes

In Anguilla there is no income tax or sales tax. However, there is a "hotel tax" or "visitor tax", officially covered in the "transient persons act". Basically there is a 10% tax on any room rented by the day or week.

Financials for Villa

Anguilla villas are mostly full from Christmas to US Tax day (Apr 15). So there is about 4 months that people are fleeing the cold weather up in the US and coming to Anguilla. If a house got $500/night (plus the tax that goes to the government) for 4 months this would be about $60,000 for the venture. For this back of the envelope type estimate lets assume that you make enough during the rest of the year that the $60,000 is profit. A loan at 10% for $600,000 could sort of be paid with this profit. So if you could build a seastead for less than this, or charge more per night than this, you could be profitable.

Financials for Mini-Villa

I think we could start with something small that could be built for under $60,000 and rented for $100/day. This would be targeted to students or young adventurous types. This would take less investment and have a higher return. I have some ideas on how to build something small and also here.

Licenses and regulations

Would need a "business license", but this is not usually hard to get, particularly for a local.

A foreigner working in Anguilla would need a "work permit". The support work is best done by locals.

If I build something and play with it, people in Anguilla probably won't care. However, a seastead would need a "boat license" if tourists were going to go on it. This takes certification by some place outside Anguilla. At NMMA, the first place I checked, this certification would cost about $2,500 plus travel costs. So this is probably affordable, though it may be more than this as this design will be very different than what they are used to certifying. The seastead would probably be classified as a "house boat". We might need to test it for a year or something for people to get comfortable with the design. It may not be reasonable to expect to have paying customers on what is really an experimental prototype. Or maybe engineering, CAD design, and simulation is advanced enough these days that this is reasonable.

I sent the NMMA people a link to my tension circle page to check if they could certify such a thing as a boat. Their answer was if it had propulsion and/or the US Coast Guard would issue me an MIC (Manufacturers Identification Code) designated for boat builders then they could. I could get an MIC code or have someone with one build the vessel. Putting an engine on the seastead just costs money, but might be good to have really. So maybe this can work.

Location

The location I like is a nice spot north of Anguilla. It is on the downwind side of the island and inside a reef while a few miles offshore. So it is sort of out in the ocean but sort of protected so the waves are not too bad. Here is a chart showing the dark blue area is about 20 meters deep. It is far enough that people won't notice it much. It is almost an "out of sight is out of mind" situation. If you are paying 10% to the government and not bothering anybody I don't think there would be any trouble. It is also not far from my dome and within line-of-sight from a building I have on the top of our hill. So about 3 miles offshore, 4 miles from a good harbor, and around 5 miles from my property. Another nice thing about this location is there is a water taxi based in the nearby harbor. The view is wonderful, the wind is nice, the reef amazing, the water clear, and not many people around. I think it is a location people would love to spend time at.

Tourist activity

Going the 4 miles to the harbor could take 10 to 20 minutes one way. It would be nice if there was entertainment near the seastead. Be good if people could have enough fun that they might stay in the area for the whole week. Some possibilities are:

• scuba diving
• snorkeling
• sailing
• kayaks
• kite surfing
• practice kite powered life raft evacuation to downwind island
• power boats (jet-skis not allowed in Anguilla)
• glass bottom boat (guy here in Anguilla could pick them up at seastead)
• fishing from seastead or boat
• operating an ROV - maybe catching lobster by remote control
• restaurant/bar/food delivery
• lobster traps
• internet (wireless providers and line-of-site to my place)
• phone (cell phone is easy, as is Internet phone)

Anguilla has a hotel named "Cuisinart" that has a hydroponic greenhouse. Tourists find the tour of the greenhouse very interesting. A similar thing could be done with the seasteads. Perhaps a combination of a micro-version of the Eden project and the floating greenhouses developed by Dutch firm Dura Vermeer? Anything we were experimenting with, testing, developing could be of interest to someone who picked this vacation spot.

Baby steps

This a relatively easy first step that should be profitable. Being close to land avoids the problems of communication and transportation. At this distance the regular cell towers work and there is wireless Internet. A good harbor being 4 miles away makes getting people and cargo there easy. The island has an airport so people can come from all over.

This lets us test out prototypes and make money from them. If we can make money off our R&D efforts, then the capital investment needed is much smaller.

Over time we can put seasteads outside the reef and further and further out. If there is a storm coming we could bring the seasteads back inside the reef (maybe leave an empty one out in the storm for testing). Eventually we would have a group of seasteads that we trusted enough to go out into the open ocean.

So this is an incremental plan that makes money along the way and eventually gets to our goal of seasteads out in the open ocean.