This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Austin Mark, 39, who bought a house in July 2024 with three other people — his husband and another couple, Nate and Stephanie. Business Insider has verified Mark’s home ownership. His words have been edited for length and clarity.
My husband Bryan and I moved from Chicago to the West Coast 14 years ago. We decided to move back to Chicago last year, and our friends Nate Hanak and Stephanie Strother asked if we wanted to purchase property together.
They’re the only people on the planet who we could imagine doing it with. We have a very balanced relationship with them.
We hear a lot of people tell us they’ve always wanted to buy a big house with their friends, and we’ve also heard a lot of people say we’re absolutely crazy.
When we decided to proceed, we started having Zoom calls frequently to ensure everybody was on the same page.
Conversation one was, “Let’s talk about finances.” We wanted to have all of our personal finances on the table so that we knew what everyone was comfortable with. It was helpful to have a really open and honest conversation about where everybody was at.
We put 40% down
In July 2024 we found a multi-unit building that we all liked.
The house was around $800,000. Each couple split the down payment 50/50, and we decided to put down 40% of the total home value.
We wanted to put down more to lower our monthly payments since mortgage rates were so high. The 40% down brought us to a place where neither couple would see a significant increase in their monthly housing costs before and after buying the house.
For our monthly payments now, instead of each couple paying half of the mortgage every month, we actually switch off. One couple pays the whole mortgage for the whole building every other month. It all breaks down to being the same, but it definitely simplifies things.
Not everything is bundled together, though. We decided to separate our taxes and insurance.
With what we are each paying, we never could have found something similar separately, even if each couple had something half the size of this house.
We have an operating agreement
If you buy a house with other people, it’s important to treat it as a business as much as it is a living situation. We had gone through the process with a lawyer of talking about creating an LLC and then ultimately decided that it wasn’t necessary because we don’t intend to rent any parts of our house. Our operating agreement lays out the terms of how finances are split.
The wording of our operating agreement includes all of the legal stuff that you would find in any agreement among business partners purchasing property. We have HOA meetings just like we would if we didn’t know each other before doing this. We take care of things by voting.
Anything to do with our individual units, like a personal aesthetic choice, is with each couple’s own money. We split anything that has to do with common areas or the yard.
It’s a very old building, so we did run into a plumbing emergency not long after purchasing the building. We split the cost of the sewer line clean out. The property has very large trees on it, so we also paid an arborist to come and clear up the trees and split that evenly.
Each couple has two floors
The building at present has four kitchens, four full baths, two half baths, and six bedrooms.
Each couple has a primary unit with an identical footprint, and then we have a secondary unit that’s pretty different. Stephanie and Nate have an attic unit, and my husband and I have the basement unit.
The two primary units have the same footprint, but they look completely different. Mine has all dark wood trim and a very old Chicago prairie style, while theirs is much lighter and a bit more modern. Their attic unit has a really cool skylight, and they like how bright and open it is, while I like playing video games in the basement.
The fact that we’re not sharing kitchens and bathrooms makes it really easy to feel like we’re living our own lives and not in each other’s space.
We refer to it as the “forever home,” which might have been a joke at first, but since we’ve gotten in here, it does feel like it’s a very long-term living solution. We have a ton of space.
If anybody ends up having kids, there’s room to grow within the building already. Because the apartments are separate, it doesn’t feel at all like we’re roommates.
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