House hacking in NYC or NY/CT/NJ suburbs

[Jen Lee]

My partner and I are working professionals in NYC/Manhattan and are in interested in house hacking (as far as any suburbs 1-1.5 hrs outside of the city). Our plan is to purchase a multi-family home early next year (with a preliminary budget of $800K or less), live in one-unit and rent out the other(s). We realize the prices here in the area are rather high, so we do not expect our rental income to completely offset our mortgage. But we figured as long as we're paying the equivalent of (or ideally less than) our current rent in Brooklyn, it is better to purchase a home, build equity, and begin our journey as real estate investors! We've started looking at a few places and ran the numbers to see if this was feasible. We've found a couple of homes that could be potentially work — we think it would be difficult but could possibly find something worthwhile with a bit of searching/effort. We wanted to see if anyone had any experiences or stories of others who have successfully house hacked in the NYC area. What are some nice cities that we should look into within our current budget? Conversely, do you think it's just too expensive and not worth house hacking at all near an expensive — should we just continue renting and look out-of-state for REI opportunities?

[Larry S.]

@Jen Lee I'll echo @Jonathan Greene's comments about Hudson County if you want a city feel.  I bought a multi-family in Hudson about six months ago.  I can see Manhattan from my front steps and can be in the Port Authority in less than 30 minutes.  You can definitely find a property for less than your budgeted $800k around here.  

Previously, I came really close to purchasing an out of state property because they are so much cheaper. But instead, I took the same amount of money for a down payment that I was going to use out of state (which required 25% down for an investment loan) and used it to by my place here in northern NJ for 5% down instead. So I now have a property worth 5 times as much as the out of state property and I make more in both loan pay down and cash flow each month.

Feel free to send me a PM if you want to discuss further.  Happy to tell you more, about my agent, etc.