Every steeple for sale, in one place — and a way to say “not this one.”
Churches close for ordinary reasons: the congregation ages, the roof needs a hundred thousand dollars, the diocese consolidates. The building goes on the commercial market next to a Wendy's. The people who were baptized in it usually find out from the “For Sale” sign — long after the price was set and the buyer was picked.
This site does two things. It gathers church buildings currently for sale across the country onto one map, so you can see what is happening within driving distance of you. And it lets you attach your name and a number to a building, so a group can form around it before the deal is done.
What a pledge is
A pledge is a public expression of intent: a name, an amount, and optionally a reason. It is recorded so the next person can see the building is not alone. It is not a payment. No card is collected, no money moves, and no escrow account exists yet.
If a building's pledges approach its asking price, we introduce the pledgers to a title company and a real-estate attorney. At that point the group decides the legal form — a nonprofit, a co-op, a community land trust, or one buyer collecting donations — and money starts moving under that entity, through escrow, with documents. Nothing before that point is binding on anyone.
Why pledges instead of a fund
A fund would need to be a security, with all the registration that implies. A map plus a list of names does not. Keeping the site at the “signal” stage is what makes it possible for a hundred small groups to form in a hundred towns without one central entity deciding which buildings live.
What this is not
- Not a broker or an agent. We do not represent sellers, and we do not negotiate price.
- Not an offer of securities, a solicitation of investment, or a crowdfunding portal under Regulation CF. No funds are accepted on this site.
- Not a guarantee that a listed building is available, or that the price is right. Listing data comes from public commercial real-estate sources and goes stale — verify with the broker.
- Not affiliated with any congregation, denomination, or the listing sites themselves.
Where the data comes from
Every building here is a real, currently-listed property, and every row links back to the source that published it: public commercial real-estate indexes in the United States, the Church of England's official list of closed church buildings available for disposal, and Patrice Besse's register of religious edifices for sale in France. The harvest is reproducible — see scripts/ in the repository — and prices are shown in the seller's own currency, with a dollar figure converted at a rate recorded in data/fx.json.
The dataset is deliberately conservative: a building appears only when its own listing text describes a religious building, not because a street happens to be named Church Street, and land parcels with no building on them are dropped.
Build it yourself
This is a prototype and the whole thing is in the open: a Next.js app, a JSON file of listings, a pledge endpoint. If your town has a building on this map, fork it, host it, and put your own name on the list.