Dreamship Co-Ownership LLC Agreement
Details
- Author: Dreamship community, published via Supernuclear
- Category: Constitutions
- Published: Published on Supernuclear, post-2020
- Source: Supernuclear by Phil Levin and Gillian Morris
- Source URL: https://supernuclear.substack.com/p/dreamship-shares-their-co-ownership
- Access: public
Description
The publicly-shared LLC operating agreement template that four families used to co-own a home together as the Dreamship intentional community in Berkeley, California. One of the few cases where a working co-living constitution has been published as a downloadable, adaptable document.
Annotation
Most co-living and co-buying agreements stay private inside the families and lawyers that wrote them. Dreamship deliberately published theirs through Supernuclear so that other groups could copy, adapt, and learn from a working document rather than starting from scratch with a lawyer. For a researcher this matters: it is one of the few constitutional documents in the co-living space that exists in actual reusable form.
Full text
Dreamship is an intentional community in Berkeley, California, in which four families pooled resources to co-own a home together. They are part of the wider co-buying and co-living movement that Supernuclear (Phil Levin and Gillian Morris) has been documenting since the early 2020s.
The constitutional document Dreamship published is their actual Co-Ownership LLC Agreement, the template the four families used to formalize their joint ownership. The agreement is hosted as a downloadable document on Supernuclear and is intended to be used and adapted by other groups in similar situations.
The practical questions a co-ownership LLC agreement has to answer include: how is initial capital contributed and tracked, how are operating expenses split, how are decisions made (and at what voting threshold), who can join and leave, how is exit handled, what happens if a family wants out and the others do not, what happens in the event of death or divorce of an owner, how are property improvements decided and funded, how are taxes handled. The Dreamship template addresses each of these.
**Why this entry matters in the comparative library:**
Most entries in this Library catalog the constitution of a single community. This entry catalogs a template that has been used by one community and offered as the seed of constitutions for others. It is closer in spirit to the Federation of Egalitarian Communities' practice of publishing member-community bylaws as exemplars: the document is published with the explicit intent that someone else will adapt it.
The Radish FriendLLC Model entry in this Library is the more comprehensive published architecture for co-living. The Dreamship LLC Agreement is the more reusable template for the smaller, family-scale case (four families co-owning one home rather than 20 adults co-owning a compound).
For a researcher, Dreamship is the case where the constitutional document escapes the community that wrote it and enters circulation as a working artifact for the broader movement.
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## Living examples and entry points for community builders
If your group is trying to co-own an asset together, whether a boat, a property, a vehicle, or something else, and you want a legal structure that actually accounts for the social dynamics of shared ownership between people who know each other, the Dreamship model is worth studying.
**Dreamship** is a co-owned sailing vessel governed by a custom LLC operating agreement written specifically for a small group of co-owners. The agreement was built to answer the questions that generic LLC templates skip: what happens when one person wants to exit, how are usage conflicts resolved, what constitutes negligence and who bears the cost, how does the group make decisions about major repairs or modifications. The vessel itself has been used as a living laboratory for these governance questions.
The model has influenced how some small property co-ownership groups think about their own agreements. A handful of **tiny home co-ownership** arrangements in the US have borrowed elements of the Dreamship structure, particularly the exit mechanism and the usage scheduling logic. The **Sailing Collective**, which operates a fleet of vessels on a membership model, has developed parallel thinking about shared asset governance from a different starting point.
For adjacent models, the **FriendLLC/Radish model** (documented separately in this library) addresses shared residential property ownership with similar tools. Time-share co-ops exist as a more commercial version of the same underlying question, though they typically lack the community governance layer that makes Dreamship interesting.
Where the door is:
- Dreamship has made their operating agreement template publicly available. Reading it is useful even if your asset is not a boat, because the underlying governance questions are the same.
- The Sailing Collective's membership documentation is worth reading alongside it. They are solving a similar problem from a more commercial angle, and the contrast is instructive.
- Before you look at any legal structure, map out the exit scenario with your group in plain language: if one co-owner wants out in three years, what happens? Who can buy their share? At what price? Over what timeline? An agreement that cannot answer these questions clearly will create conflict later.
- Find a lawyer who has worked with small shared ownership arrangements before. This is a niche enough area that general business attorneys often produce agreements that work fine for business partners but create problems for friends or community members.
One caution that comes up consistently in shared asset ownership: the buy-out mechanism is the most important clause in the agreement, and it is the one most often written vaguely or skipped entirely. Unclear exit terms are the single most common source of conflict in co-ownership arrangements. Whatever else you spend time on, get the exit clause right.