Two thoughts:
1 - Why buy? Can't you rent? Personally, I'd get most of the value by living with friends across two floors of a large house (Event Horizon) or in two nearby houses on a street (The Bailey). A few stable families could buy a big house later per Romeo.
2 - Suppose you actually buy a small dormitory or an old tiny hotel. Call this the hard mode version of the project. Such a building would accommodate at least the 20 you're looking for. But it would require commensurate investment. If I imagine pitching this project, my story for some rationalist investor is that it's a socially responsible investment that will pay itself back with some risk and low ROI but that nonetheless delivers social value by growing the rationalist community. But what projects would be run from such a venue, and what is my case for such? I could imagine mitigating the downside risk by arranging a Free-State-Project--like signup, with some deposits. I could increase the upside by promising to make a chain of such houses. I could buffer the EV by just already being a proven competent impressive startup founder. The hard mode version of the project does seem valuable, but not necessarily that valuable compared to how hard and expensive it is. It would take a serious leader to actually drive it.
A huge advantage to buying over renting is you actually get to be in charge of what's done with the space and who lives there, as opposed to a landlord who has different desires. A landlord might want to sell the land to build a zoo, or kick you out so his newly turned 18 son can live there, or simply just not want to divide up the units in your apartment in such a way as facilitates your plans because that'll reduce the building's value.
Rationalists like to live in group houses. We are also as a subculture moving more and more into a child-having phase of our lives. These things don't cooperate super well - I live in a four bedroom house because we like having roommates and guests, but if we have three kids and don't make them share we will in a few years have no spare rooms at all. This is frustrating in part because amenable roommates are incredibly useful as alloparents if you value things like "going to the bathroom unaccompanied" and "eating food without being screamed at", neither of which are reasonable "get a friend to drive for ten minutes to spell me" situations. Meanwhile there are also people we like living around who don't want to cohabit with a small child, which is completely reasonable, small children are not for everyone.
For this and other complaints ("househunting sucks", "I can't drive and need private space but want friends accessible", whatever) the ideal solution seems to be somewhere along the spectrum between "a street with a lot of rationalists living on it" (no rationalist-friendly entity controls all those houses and it's easy for minor fluctuations to wreck the intentional community thing) and "a dorm" (sorta hard to get access to those once you're out of college, usually not enough kitchens or space for adult life). There's a name for a thing halfway between those, at least in German - "baugruppe" - buuuuut this would require community or sympathetic-individual control of a space and the money to convert it if it's not already baugruppe-shaped.
Maybe if I complain about this in public a millionaire will step forward or we'll be able to come up with a coherent enough vision to crowdfund it or something. I think there is easily enough demand for a couple of ten-to-twenty-adult baugruppen (one in the east bay and one in the south bay) or even more/larger, if the structures materialized. Here are some bulleted lists.
Desiderata:
Obstacles:
Please share this wherever rationalists may be looking; it's definitely the sort of thing better done with more eyes on it.