House hacking exit strategies

[Brianna Williams]

I am a first time home buyer and was curious as to what exit strategies most house hackers use for their first house hack. Do I move out into another plex and and rent out both sides of the first property? Do I live there until the mortgage is paid? I know theres plenty of other ideas just haven’t come across them yet!

[William Aung]

I haven't yet purchased an investment property yet, but would love to attempt to chime in!

This is how I would approach the situation:

Typically people who house-hack are utilizing an FHA loan which would require the investor to occupy the home for a year. During this time I would be preparing to refinance into a conventional loan in order to get rid of PMI and mainly to have access to utilize another FHA loan. You can only have 1 active FHA loan at a time, so refinancing would allow me to have it as an option again to use for different property to house hack into.

This would allow me to produce a positive cash flow from the first home due to someone else replacing my position in the home and would help me progress further into quickly acquiring another property with the advantage of the FHA loan(Low downpayment).

After refinancing the second property after occupying it for another year, I would personally look to find another property I could house hack into with another FHA loan, but this time around, I would hopefully have enough cash saved up to be able to purchase another property in this same year through a conventional loan(20-30% downpayment) and have it completely rented out, So during the 3rd year you would at minimum - 4 properties, 3 of which are completely rented out and 1 where you are house-hacking!

There's just such a variety options that you can go from here that there's never a set plan of what you may do once you get started due to whatever deal you may encounter at the time and how you would go about acquiring the property, whether it be conventional, hard-money, private investor, partnerships, 203k etc. 

Hope I didn't butcher anything too hard, I'm still learning everything also!