Freehold

Freehold is the ground-lease and resale-formula back office for a community land trust. The trust owns the land permanently and sells only the house to an income-qualified household under a 99-year ground lease. When that homeowner sells, a written resale formula decides exactly how much of the appreciation they keep and how much stays in the home to keep it affordable for the next family. Freehold is the place that arithmetic actually lives.

The product is the worksheet. Enter the original purchase price, the date of purchase, the appraised value at resale, and the trust's chosen formula — appraisal-based percentage, itemized, indexed to area median income, or fixed-rate — and Freehold walks the whole calculation in the open: base price, the owner's share of appreciation, credit for approved capital improvements, deductions for deferred maintenance and damage, transfer fees and the ground-lease fee arrears, down to the maximum resale price the trust will permit and the net proceeds the seller actually receives. Every rate sits beside its own extension, so a steward can defend any line of it to a board, a lender, or a family at a kitchen table.

Around the worksheet sits the rest of the stewardship job: a portfolio view of every home in trust with its lease anniversary, formula type and current maximum resale price; a resale queue moving each pending sale from notice of intent through appraisal, eligibility screening, buyer match and closing; a ground-lease ledger tracking monthly lease fees, arrears and credits per household; an income-qualified applicant waitlist scored against area median income bands and household size; and a homeowner-facing record showing each family what they have built and exactly what they would walk away with if they sold today.

Built for community land trusts, shared-equity homeownership programs, deed-restricted inclusionary housing stewards, and housing-authority staff who need the formula to be transparent rather than a black box. The design is 1970s municipal housing-authority modernism — Swiss International Style civic annual-report typography, an isometric line-drawn housing plate, ruled tabular figures, and a split-screen that puts the plain-English promise on one side and the accounting on the other.