Written by David Dodge  

The dream of owning a home feels dead for most people born after 1997. The numbers are brutal: the median home price in the United States has climbed past $435,000 as of late 2025, a 54% jump since the start of the pandemic. Starter homes in the cities where the good jobs actually exist—Seattle, Denver, Austin, Nashville, Miami—now routinely list above $650,000. Meanwhile, the average Gen Z salary hovers somewhere south of $65,000 a year before taxes. Even if you save an aggressive 20% of your income, it would still take you twelve to fifteen years to scrape together a traditional 20% down payment on your own.

That’s not a market. That’s a wall.

But a growing number of twenty-somethings have found a door hidden in plain sight: stop trying to do it alone. Buy the house with your best friends, your siblings, your cousin you actually like, or even your parents who want to help but don’t want to just hand you cash. Pool your incomes, split the mortgage four ways (or three, or five), and suddenly the impossible becomes not just possible, but borderline easy.

This isn’t some fringe hippie commune fantasy. It’s happening in every major metro in the country right now. Fractional-ownership companies that used to cater only to second-home buyers in Aspen or Napa report that their average customer age has plummeted from 52 to 34 in thirty-six months. Real estate agents in Charlotte and Phoenix say one out of every six offers they write for buyers under thirty now has multiple non-spouse names on the contract. Zillow’s internal data confirms it: 16% of recent buyers aged 24–29 purchased with at least one non-romantic co-borrower.

Co-buying isn’t a cute side quest. For an entire generation locked out of the traditional path, it is rapidly becoming the main quest.

Here’s the complete playbook.

Why Solo Buying Stopped Working (and Co-Buying Started Winning)

Imagine you make $75,000 a year. A lender will let you borrow roughly 4.5 times your income, maybe 5 if your credit is pristine and you have no student loans (narrator: you haveily have student loans). That puts your max purchase price around $350,000–$375,000. In half the country that still buys something decent. In the other half—basically anywhere with jobs for college grads—it buys you a 1980s condo with popcorn ceilings, polybutylene pipes, and an HOA that hates happiness.

Now take four people earning $75,000 each. Combined household income: $300,000. Lending guidelines suddenly treat you like a single doctor pulling $300k. You can shop in the $1.2–$1.5 million range if you want. A $750,000 four-bedroom with a basement apartment becomes trivial. Your individual monthly payment drops from a soul-crushing $2,400 to something closer to $800–$900—often less than you’re already paying your landlord for a bedroom in a group house.

The math is only the beginning. Because you’re attacking the mortgage with four incomes instead of one, the principal balance melts faster. Most of your payment in the early years is interest, true, but every extra dollar thrown at principal is effectively four times as powerful. You build equity at quadruple speed.

Then there’s the hidden upside almost nobody talks about: optionality. When one person wants to move for a job or get married or start a family, there are three built-in buyers ready to purchase their share instead of dumping the property on the open market in a bad month. That single feature has saved countless co-ownership groups from the nightmare scenarios you read about on Reddit.

The Legal and Financial Foundation You Cannot Skip

I’m going to say this loudly so the people in the back hear it: if you buy a half-million-dollar asset with your college roommates and your only written agreement is a Google Doc and a pinky promise, you are begging for a nightmare that ends in small-claims court or worse.

The fix is simple, boring, and non-negotiable: hire a real estate attorney who understands co-ownership and draft a rock-solid co-ownership agreement before you ever go under contract. Expect to spend $1,500 to $3,500, depending on your state and the complexity of the deal. That is the cheapest insurance policy you will ever buy.

Your agreement needs to answer every uncomfortable question up front, when everyone still likes each other. Who owns what percentage? (It does not have to be equal. The person who puts down $80,000 while everyone else puts down $40,000 should own more.) How are monthly expenses divided when someone loses their job or decides to backpack Asia for six months? What happens if one owner gets married and their new spouse wants to move in? What if someone dies, gets divorced, goes bankrupt, or simply wants out in three years?

The gold standard structure in 2025 is tenants-in-common (TIC) with a separate written co-ownership agreement. Unlike joint tenancy, TIC lets you own unequal shares and pass your portion to whoever you want in your will instead of it automatically going to the surviving owners. You’ll record a deed that reflects the exact percentages and attach the full agreement as an exhibit.

On the financing side, things have gotten dramatically easier in the last two years. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac both allow up to four non-spouse borrowers on a conventional loan. A wave of specialty lenders—June Homes, Rooftop, Cohabr, Landed—have rolled out products designed explicitly for friends buying together. Interest rates run about a quarter to a half percent higher than solo rates, but the underwriting is more forgiving on debt-to-income ratios when multiple borrowers are involved.

If part of the plan involves renting out rooms or an accessory dwelling unit, look at DSCR (debt service coverage ratio) loans. These ignore your personal income entirely and only care whether projected rental income covers the mortgage 1.25× or better. They’re a favorite hack for four-person groups buying small multifamily properties.

How to Actually Find a House That Works for Multiple Owners

Not every listing on Zillow is co-buyer-friendly. A three-bedroom, two-bath ranch with an open floor plan might be perfect for a young family, but it becomes a pressure cooker when four adults all need privacy and home-office space.

Start with raw square footage and bedroom count. Four adults generally need at least 2,200–2,500 finished square feet and a minimum of four true bedrooms plus some kind of bonus space (finished basement, office, loft). Five or six bedrooms are ideal. Look for at least three full bathrooms—nobody wants to share one shower with three other working professionals.

The unicorn properties are legal duplexes, triplexes, or quadplexes. With an FHA loan, you only need 3.5% down as long as one owner occupies a unit for the first year. After twelve months, you can move out and rent your unit too, turning the entire building into a cash-flow machine. House-hacking a fourplex with three friends is one of the closest things left to a cheat code in real estate.

Another strong play is a single-family home with an existing or permitted accessory dwelling unit (ADU). Cities from San Diego to Minneapolis have loosened ADU rules dramatically since 2020. A detached 600-square-foot studio in the backyard can rent for $1,800–$2,800 a month in most metros, enough to cover half the mortgage by itself.

When you’re scrolling listings, train your eye to spot keywords: “mother-in-law suite,” “income suite,” “dual living,” “basement apartment with separate entrance,” “multigenerational floorplan.” New-home builders are leaning hard into the trend—Lennar, KB Home, and D.R. Horton all rolled out product lines in 2024–2025 specifically marketed to co-buyers and multigenerational families, often with locked-in interest-rate buydowns and $20k–$50k in flex cash.

Turning a Shared House into Real Generational Wealth

Most people stop at “cheaper rent” and miss the bigger picture. Done strategically, co-buying is one of the fastest wealth-creation vehicles available to people without six-figure trust funds.

The first lever is forced appreciation. Four incomes mean you can comfortably finance renovations that a solo buyer would never touch. Converting an unfinished basement into a legal bedroom and bathroom for $45,000 might add $120,000 to the appraised value. Adding an ADU for $110,000 can add $250,000–$300,000 in many markets. You split the construction loan four ways, the value increase lands in everyone’s equity column, and you just manufactured tens of thousands of dollars each.

The second lever is cash flow. A four-bedroom house where three owners pay market rent to the group (deposited straight into the mortgage offset account) often means the fourth owner lives for free. A triplex or fourplex where everyone rents out their unit after the first year can generate thousands in positive cash flow every month while still building equity.

The third lever is the long game. When the group eventually sells or one person wants out, you can 1031 exchange the proceeds into a larger apartment building or even commercial property, deferring capital-gains taxes indefinitely. Solo buyers rarely reach this level because they’re still grinding away at their first $400,000 condo. Co-buyers leapfrog entire decades of the traditional wealth-building timeline.

I’ve watched it play out in real time.

Four software engineers in Denver closed on a 2022-built triplex for $925,000. Each put down $50,000. They occupy one unit and rent the other two for a combined $5,800 a month. Their total payment (mortgage, taxes, insurance, maintenance) is $5,200. Three of them live essentially free, the fourth pays a few hundred bucks, and they’ve each built roughly $300,000 in equity in three years.

Two sisters and their best friend in Atlanta bought a five-bedroom house with a finished basement apartment for $610,000 in 2023. Their parents co-signed but took zero ownership stake. They Airbnb the basement for $38,000 net profit a year. Their projected payoff date on a 30-year mortgage is 2039 instead of 2053.

These aren’t unicorns with genius-level investing IQs. They’re normal 27-year-olds who decided to stop waiting for the market to fix itself and instead changed the game they were playing.

The Bottom Line

The housing market is not going to hand you an easy button. Interest rates may drift down a little in 2026. Home prices almost certainly won’t drop 40% to meet stagnant wages. The solo-buyer path that worked for your parents is broken for your generation.

But you have something they never had in the same abundance: an entire cohort of peers in the exact same financial position, with similar incomes, similar credit scores, and the same frustration at watching rents soar while homeownership slips further out of reach.

One group chat is all it takes.

Send this article to the three people you already split Ubers and vacation houses with. Run the numbers together on a shared spreadsheet. Call a lender who actually understands co-ownership (they exist now—there’s a list circulating on TikTok and Reddit that gets updated monthly).

The best time to buy real estate was twenty years ago. The second-best time is right now—with friends.

Your move.