Dining Area in Lodge

[JJones]

Pretty sure you'd be good, we've allowed groups to use our dining hall before with no problem.

 

[Brother JC]

In New Mexico, if your building turns a positive cash flow you lose your non-profit status.

 

[dfreybur]

In New Mexico, if your building turns a positive cash flow you lose your non-profit status.

Normally the building is owned by a temple corporation, and the temple corporation is owned by the lodge. I *want* the temple corporation to be for-profit for a lot of reasons recently mentioned. It's not a problem for a non-profit organization (lodge) to own a for-profit organization (temple corporation) as long as the money flow is correctly tracked.

If the lodge owns its building directly, that's the problem right there. It should not own the building directly.

 

[Bloke]

Ah, but once you make it income property, you pay property tax at that rate whether you have tenants or not. I've seen plenty of Masonic centers with vacant office space, paying high property taxes. We explored getting full-time renters for part of our building, and it went nowhere. A couple of nibbles, but no renters. There are plenty of shiny new office buildings downtown that have space available.

I wasn't saying that lodges shouldn't do that, and I know that some are very successful. I was more responding to the idea of having some outside management group take care of the building and rent it to the lodge. That puts you in the "income property" category, even though nothing but the Masonic Lodge is housed in the building. If the Lodge owns the building, it's taxed at a fraternal organization rate. Your mileage may vary.

It's all a question of management- be entrepreneurial. Take some professional legal and tax advice, but have some chutzpah... a certain site I know of technically operated illegally, but after 4 years had the cash to remedy the situation which was non-compliant. Without that approach the building would have been sold. It started out as a dump which everyone said I could not lease.... but I did; it's all a question of price, demand (market analysis) and marketing... but just being in the market is important... you've got to be in it to win it.... and asking for expressions of interest will not change your tax status (that was our first step, which failed btw)...

Just remember to fail fast, fail small and fail forward.

Here, we need Past Masters to install Worshipful Masters in a Board of Installed Masters. Lodge No 14 Beetchworths Lodge of St John is amoung the oldest in our state.... at some point, they did not have enough PMs to Install a Master, so they made PMs on sight.... now, jurisdictions which use a Board of Installed Masters will know how naughty that is..... but its only because the broke the rules back in the 1800's and made PMs on site that we now have a lodge 160 years old... makes one think... those guys were practical and because of it they have a very old lodge where another which was prisoner to the rules would have died....

 

[Bloke]

In New Mexico, if your building turns a positive cash flow you lose your non-profit status.

That's just a question of accounting then... but normally it's not the surplus but what you do with it and the vehicle you use to hold it which matters. If what you say is true, no not for profit could exist without an external cash injection because it has to loose money. Get some legal and accounting advice....