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Looking for people (probably from US/UK) to do donation swaps with. My local EA group currently allows tax-deductible donations to:
- GiveWell - Top Charities Fund
- Animal Charity Evaluators - Top Charities Fund
- Against Malaria Foundation
- Good Food Institute
- <One other org that I don't want to include here>
However, I would like to donate to the following:
- GiveWell - All Grants Fund (~$1230)
- GiveDirectly (~$820)
- The Humane League (~$580)
If anyone is willing to donate these sums and have me donate an equal sum to one of the funds mentioned above - please contact me.
Haven't seen this anywhere on the forum: Effective Ventures sold Wytham Abbey in February for £5.95 million (source). When they bought it, there were many debates over the price they paid (just under £15 million). Some people said it's an investment and so it's not like £15 million have been lost. Well, seems like we now have the verdict on those claims - the whole thing cost about £9 million.
Why the huge loss? Real estate prices in the UK haven't dropped, and the depreciation on something that old shouldn't be significant.
My understanding is that they were trying to sell in a hurry, and the number of buyers for properties like these is very small. Ironically, if they weren’t so desperate to rid themselves of the negative PR around having spent lots of money on a “castle”, they could have saved a great deal of money by waiting to sell it.
Edit: The last sentence is missing some qualifiers, but I think the broader point about PR skittishness and impatience leading to negative outcomes is correct, even if the monetary loss caused by this in particular is uncertain or even zero.
Wytham Abbey was listed on the market in May 2024 and sold in November 2025, so it took 18 months to sell. I do not know whether 18 months is slow or fast to sell a property like this. Would waiting another year have helped get a higher price? Maybe. But I guess waiting has costs too, like not being able to use the money right now and paying for property maintenance.
It's a niche property with very few potential buyers and they probably overpaid. The UK property market has cooled a little and isn't necessarily as attractive to the sort of oligarch or hospitality company most likely to buy it. It will also have a very high annual maintenance bill due to its age; it's possible they found more work which needed doing which hit the value and hanging onto it would have had a non-trivial cost regardless. It's also possible they clawed some money back from selling off some parts separately (there was an apartment in a Wytham Abbey outbuilding for sale last year, though I'm not sure EA ever owned that building).
It's not particularly unusual for buyers of niche high value property to make large losses when under a little pressure to sell, especially if they bought into the property's sentimental appeal rather than its costs. The people that very confidently dismissed the idea that Wytham would be a losing venture because don't you guys know what a capital investment is understood the market dynamics and operational costs less well than many of the critics.
I mean, if you want to buy up a pretty hotel with a bus service to Oxford, you can get more bedrooms for less money than Wytham was sold for, never mind what it was bought for https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/739022765321024#/?channel=COM_BUY
Presumably whoever approved the original donation to buy Wytham Abbey did understand these considerations and decided to go through with it anyway?
Presumably CEA did some sort of estimate of utilization and operational costs to justify the funding bar; the decision to shutter it fairly early based on cost benefit analysis suggests that those estimates proved optimistic. It would be interesting to see how much they missed by, and whether they factored alternatives like hosting at the local university into either of the assessments.
The venue selection process between 3 publicly listed and immediately available properties in the range £6-£15m sounds rather trivial as described considering the expense, particularly in a culture which encourages rigorous analysis of the relative effectiveness of much smaller donations.
There was an update about this here, FYI.
This feels like a mind blowingly large loss on a property in just a couple of years. I'm not sure I've ever heard of such a big loss. This should be chalked down as gross mismanagement and a blot on our copybook.
But also not the end of the world, be sad and move on.
If so do we have any way to determine what decisions led to this mismanagement so as to not make them again? I’m not talking about the decision to buy it but to the decision to (apparently) overpay for this asset or to undersell it?
To be entirely fair, the comment I linked to for the original cost also explains it was an outside donor - Good Ventures if I'm not mistaken, but I couldn't find a source for that - who gave the money specifically for this purchase. So EVF is still at a plus, but it's an... interesting decision on behalf of the donor.
Here is the listing. From the photos, I have to say the place does look quite…effective!
sad reacts only