
Background and Understanding
Location-location-location.
You intend to spend $1 million building a house. In our community it can be worth $10 million. In
that community it may be worth $1 million. Our community provides the best schools, the best public services, the best neighbors, and a community block committee dedicated to maintaining and raising housing values for all its members.
That community has terrible schools, no public services and neighbors with cars jacked up on cinder blocks in the front yard.
Community is a major contributor to asset value. It's a multiplier of asset value. Although with Intellectual Capital+ we have no bricks and mortar and we won’t have our neighbor’s sewage running through our streets, the comparison still fits. Intellectual Capital shares psychological attributes with real estate investments. Investors and investees learn to view these assets in terms of their potential as members of a nurturing, vibrant community.
De Soto, in his book The Mystery of Capital (2000), gives results from a global survey of asset values of squatter ...