San Diego VA loan House Hack

[Ben Pepin]

I am 20 years old and just moved out to San Diego for the Navy. At the moment I live in the barracks but plan on finding a property to house hack somewhere in the San Diego area using the VA loan, so that I can put 0% down. My only issue is my income. Pretty soon I should be getting a promotion and will then be making about $4,400 per month. I plan on using rental income to help qualify me for a larger loan, but I'm still not sure if that will be enough since San Diego is such an expensive area. Does anyone know of anyone that was in my situation and was successful? Who can I talk to in San Diego that has experience with this?

[Jordan Graham]

Hi Ben,

I am a San Diego investor as well. I purchased my first house hack in La Mesa last October with 5% down... If you have access to the VA I would highly recommend utilizing the 0% down option. I purchased by home for $730k and am renting out the additional rooms which makes it so I am only paying $500 a month for my mortgage currently.

I honestly am not a fan of a lot of the 2-4 unit options here because of the neighborhoods they are located in and a lot of the time the numbers just don't make sense. That being said, I am sure there are still deals to be had.

I prefer the single family option because of all of the flexibility that comes with owning your own land as opposed to a condo or townhome. For instance, we built a driveway with utility hookups that we are going to park an RV on and rent out which will make it so I am almost living for free. We also are in the process of interviewing various ADU companies to built a 1 bedroom which we can rent for around $2,200 a month. When all of that is said and done, we should be looking at around $7,500 in rental income with arounf $4,800 in mortgage payments including the ADU financing. If we had bought a condo we would be limited to what the market rents dictate for that area.

With that being said, it is better to get into the game and buy a condo if that is your only option for the amount you are pre-approved for.

There actually is a new option to use the rental income from a permitted ADU to help you qualify for more by using the predicted future rents of that unit in a SFH.