House Hack: Should I Buy This Duplex?

[Jeremy Raby]

Hi everyone! I'm looking for some advice on a potential house hack. It's a duplex that's been for sale for about 13 months and has dropped $131,000 during that time. According to the house hack calculator that comes with Craig Curelop's "The House Hacking Strategy" book, it would get my girlfriend and me $262/month in cash flow.

There are actually two of these duplexes and one of them was recently under contract when we first went to view the one I'm asking about. They have the same floorplan, are right across the street from each other and have the same owner. We were told a week later that that contract fell through and the realtor even told ours that "if we bought both of them he could get us a deal." They look really nice and it looks like they've had good tenants so far. The location is a little farther out of town than is ideal in our college town, but it doesn't seem like they've had any trouble getting tenants. The town and college have plenty of people willing to live a little bit out of town.

Our plan was to house hack a duplex with an FHA loan, and then, after fulfilling the year residence requirement, move out of our side to travel and rent it through AirBnB so we'd have a place to come back to if needed. This location may not work so well for AirBnB (because most of the travel "traffic" is for college-related events and this location isn't super close). However, the price and condition (or at least what we can see of it) makes us think that maybe we should take the plunge and then get a longterm renter when we move out. This deal seems too good to be true (something's got to be wrong with it, right?).

Would you recommend we start the buying process and spend the money to get it inspected or move on? Why?

Thanks so much for your time!

Jeremy

[Andrew Carlson]

It sounds like a great deal for sure...buy both if you can. My wife and I are travel nurses and we have rented out a room in our house for 5 years. By renting out a room to a friend instead of air bnb we are able to have someone there keeping an eye on the place 24/7, we don’t need to manage people coming and going, and we have been able to keep all our stuff in our house. And when we are done with a job and want to pop home for a bit, our bed is waiting for us.