Creative financing for an outside lender in a house hack

[Robert Freeborn]

Hi BP Fam! My wife and I currently own a condo, but I'm looking to rent this out and house hack a 4-plex. With the price of units in my market, it would take me years to save up the down payment for a multi. I realize that there are ways to get a residential loan that considers rental income (if someone could elaborate on that, it'd be great) but I don't know how or what questions to ask to look into it properly. I was thinking of ways to creatively finance this. My thoughts were as follows: I get a third party lender/investor to come in with the down payment of 10-25%. I take the mortgage out in my name. We would then live in one unit, use two units to pay the debt service and operating expenses, and the fourth unit goes to the lender/investor to pay off their position. Obviously, I don't have any numbers, this is just a general idea. Of course, it would only work on a limited number of properties, but it should be possible, right? Does this sound attractive/doable to anyone? If you were an investor with funds, would you go for something like this? Do you have any suggestions or improvements to this idea?

[Jim D.]

You do not need to be a first-time homebuyer to use an FHA loan; you just can only have one FHA loan at a time. So as long as you don't have that on your condo, that should be an option. Yes, much cleaner than bringing in an investor.