It was 11 years ago that I first had the idea of crowdfunding to buy an island, to run as a business and micronation. In fact, I even purchased the domain name www.LetsBuyAnIsland.com back then. Alas, 11 years ago I had a few other things on my mind; the idea got shelved, but not forgotten.
Fast forward to 2017 and I found a friend of mine was selling an island in the Philippines called Nici Island. Sadly the 5 or of us that initially started talking didn’t have 350k at hand, so could not buy it. All was not lost though, and we decided to kick-start the project with the idea of 100 people investing $3000 (a total of 300k, maths fans), which believe it or not stretches quite far when it comes to purchasing island property.
The next year for Let’s Buy An Island was quite a whirlwind. We started a website, changed the buy-in to $3250, and the target to 120 ($390k), and we went out canvassing! And what do you know? There’s quite a lot of people out there who held the same ideas as is! By the end of the year we’d hit 76 of our 120 target.
We also decided, democratically and as a group, on how to move things forward. In June of 2018 we opened a Cayman-Islands-based company (for which everyone owns a share) to run our corporate side, as well as government from the members to run things on a day to day basis.
We also spent a lot of last year “island shopping”, which as you can imagine was pretty damned cool. It is also resulted in us voting on our 5 finalists, with the nominal winner (so far) being Coffee Island in Belize.
We might not exactly be where we want to be, but we continue to enlist members, and are very much on track to buy this year. As we said at 50 members we’d buy regardless, so whilst we might not exactly know where yet, we will be island owners this year.
If you’d to get involved check us out!
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