I guess it'd pretty much have to be a corporation, for a dozen or some people to all own equal shares in a ranch/resort/retreat-center/whatever you wanna call it.
Trouble with that is, it covers the departing original investor's interest, but it doesn't cover the interests of the remaining ones. In that aspect it's maybe less like a company and more like. Eh, the way I used to rent this house with five bedrooms, or seven if you counted rooms you had to walk through to get to one or two rooms beyond. Sharing a house is probably harder than sharing a compound of cabins with one main house, but anyway. The original renters agreed to find replacements for themselves when they chose to leave. Those four people all loved each other and wanted to live together. We all bought groceries as a group and cooked for each other and it was super-cheap and worked out great, barring a few issues like, 'Dammit, I am tired of hearing that phrase you keep repeating, Doc,' and 'Look, all of us want you to move your teevee out of the living room and into your private room, 'cause the babble-box is dominating our conversation,' and 'Hey, do your share of the dishes instead of relying on other people to get sick of the mess sooner than you do,' and 'Okay, look, do you have to be naked all the time?' and 'Let's get a cat.' Not big problems. But over the two years or so I lived there, over sixteen different people lived in that house and it went from a house that was inhabited by university students and would-be students who were working to save up for that kinda thing to a house inhabited by speed-freaks. This is 'cause people who were leaving had no strong interest in finding a really good replacement for themselves, and those remaining could not stop leavers from going on the grounds that the new potential roomie they offered wasn't good enough, nor did they want to see their share of the rent go up, as it might do dramatically when people left as couples.
I'm sure with a major investment like a commune, this turn-over would happen over ten or fifteen years rather than one or two, but still, scary. Since eventually I ended up being the only person in that house whose name was on the lease, I should have said, "Okay, this is the house /I/ rent, you all just sublet from me, and /I/ get to choose the roommates, and right now I am choosing to kick out /you/ and /you/, and by proxy all your drug-fiend friends," or something of that ilk. As it was, I just left. With a shared ownership and a several thousand dollars invested rather than a shared rental, kicking them out or just leaving 'cause I didn't want to deal with it wouldn't be possible, though. Dunno, Dennis, you're the lawyer. Could it be set up in such a way that the investors are somehow protected from having to live with a new buyer that they don't want to live with?
