FHA HouseHack - Can I Have a Friend Live In the Property?

[Eli Sorey]

I live in Socal where it's too expensive for me to buy at the moment. I have a good friend in the South and we're trying to flesh out a strategy where I bring the down payment on an FHA loan for a property there and he occupies the property during the mandatory live-in period. I imagine he would have to be the one qualifying for the loan, and my down payment would count as a gift to him, but I'm not very familiar with how this all works. Is it possible to do this and have the property end up under my name? Is there a totally different strategy to leverage low FHA loan down payments when investing remotely? Has anyone else done something like this? Any advice/reasons to not do this? Thanks!