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Here's the honest truth about buying on the Central Coast: prices are high, and a lot of people decide owning here just isn't possible. We almost did too. Then we found house hacking. You buy a home you live in, rent out part of it, and let your tenants cover most or all of your mortgage. It can be a duplex or fourplex, a home with an ADU, or a house with a few extra bedrooms.
Because you live there, you can use the same owner-occupied loans first-time buyers use, with down payments that can start as low as 3.5% on one to four units. Lenders can often count part of the rent from the other units toward your income too, which is how we qualified for our first one. Every situation is different, so we'll connect you with local lenders who close these loans all the time.
Watch: How Owen & Camille Became Happy House Hackers
The Free Happy House Hacking Guide
From two house hackers who did it themselves
We put everything we walk our house hacking clients through into one free guide for SLO County. Inside, you'll find the five ways to house hack, how to buy a duplex, triplex or fourplex without 20% down, a worksheet to figure out what it will really cost you to live there, our tenant screening process, and where house hacking works best in the county.
We also share our own story: the fourplex we bought with 5% down, the lender who almost cost us the deal, and how it let Camille leave her W2 job to join our business full time.
The best house hack is the one that fits your budget, your comfort with tenants and the life you want to live while you do it. Here are the five paths we see work in SLO County:
Buy a duplex, triplex or fourplex. Live in one unit and rent the others. This is how we did it.
Buy a home with an ADU, or add one. Live in the main house and rent the ADU, or flip it and rent the main house.
Convert space into a JADU. A junior ADU of up to 500 square feet carved out of your existing home.
Rent out spare bedrooms. With Cal Poly and Cuesta nearby, room demand is strong in many areas.
Live in it, then keep it as a rental. Live there at least a year, move, rent it out and repeat.
We talk through all of these, plus the real wins and the mistakes, on the Happy House Hacking Podcast. Start with the episode below, then dive into the rest.
We both came to the Central Coast for Cal Poly, and we watched a lot of friends give up and move somewhere cheaper. We loved it here too much to do that. So we bought a fourplex, a front house plus a triplex, with 5% down. We lived in one unit, put about $30K and a summer of sweat equity into it, and the rent from the other units covered our full mortgage.
It wasn't easy. Owen was newly self-employed, and our first lender couldn't get the loan done, so we switched lenders in the middle of escrow. But it's how we planted roots here, and now we love helping others do the same. Whether you're just curious or already scrolling duplex listings, we'd love to sit down and run your numbers with you. No pressure and no obligation.
