House Hacking A Single Family Home: My Thoughts

Although I personally house hacked a duplex, I considered house hacking a single family home as well.

While I was considering house hacking a single family home, I did a lot of research and put a lot of thought into how I would do it successfully.

So, in this post, I’m going to share my thoughts on what I would have done if I house hacked a single family home and what I would recommend you do.

Verify it’s legal

The first thing I would do if I was planning to house hack a single family home is to make sure it’s legal.

Depending on where you purchase your single family home, there could be local rules and regulations that prevent you from renting rooms to strangers. Not to mention if you were planning to add a separate unit to your single family property for house hacking – that might be against zoning laws in your area.

So, as I said in my “Is House Hacking Legal?” post, I recommend you hire a local real estate attorney that understands the laws in your area.

Learn as much as you can

When I started house hacking, I was thankful to have watched other people manage rental properties for years – even though I never owned property before house hacking.

Watching and learning from landlords before I started house hacking gave me the base level of knowledge needed to start asking good questions. This made searching for information on Google and Biggerpockets much easier than if I knew nothing.

Luckily for you, I’ve posted a lot of house hacking related information on this website and provide you with a solid starting place for learning with my house hacking guide.

So, even if you’re thinking about going down the path of house hacking and know nothing, just reading the information I’ve posted on this website will give you more than enough knowledge to buy your first house hack and self-manage the property.

Prioritize privacy and safety

In most situations, house hacking a single family home is very similar to living with roommates.

You’ll probably share a common living space, cook food in the same kitchen, and possibly even use the same bathroom. This means you’re going to cross paths with the person/people you house hack with relatively often.

With that said, you should prioritize everyone’s privacy and safety.

For example, everyone should have a way to lock their rooms and store their valuable items. This could mean installing smart locks or keypads on everyone’s bedroom that only you and that specific tenant have.

An example of prioritizing everyone’s safety would include making sure that at night, your property is well-lit and you take precautions to reduce the risk of any criminals targeting your property or tenants.

I’d recommend reading this post for additional safety tips: Tips For House Hacking Safely

Plan past house hacking

To plan past house hacking just means knowing what you’re going to do after your done house hacking.

House hacking a single family home means you won’t get to enjoy all the benefits of house hacking and flexibility once you’re done.

You basically have three options:

1. Rent the property out completely and become a landlord
2. Sell the property and move on
3. Live on the property by yourself

Because you don’t have as much flexibility once you’re done house hacking, when analyzing your house hack – I recommend you also analyze the property based on what you plan to do after.

For example, if you’re planning to rent the property out completely and become a landlord after house hacking – make sure you analyze the viability of the property as a full-time rental property.

You’d want to do that analysis so that you can prevent being in a situation where you no longer wish to house hack (or even live in the property) but can’t rent it, sell it, or afford to live there by yourself.

Create a more detailed lease agreement

No matter if you’re house hacking or completely renting a property, you want a detailed lease agreement. However, since you’re going to be sharing common space and the same entrances/exits – your lease needs to be even more detailed

Once again, I’d recommend hiring a local real estate attorney to help you with creating a lease agreement that will hold up in court.

With that said, here are a few questions your lease should answer:

• How many guests can a tenant have?
• How long can those guests spend the night?
• Can guests enter/exit the property without the tenant?
• How will vehicle parking work?
• Who cleans the common areas? Maid? Does everyone just clean behind themselves?
• Are utilities included in the rent? If not, how are they divided?

Those are just a few questions you should have answered inside your lease agreement.

Your lease agreement should clearly set all the rules for your tenants. And you should make the assumption that if the rule isn’t in the lease, it doesn’t exist.

Final Thoughts

• House hacking a single family home is cheaper to start than a multifamily home but will be less profitable and less flexible.
• Learn as much as you can about house hacking (posts on this website will help).
• Make sure you make privacy and safety a high-priority item.

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