BiggerPockets Money Podcast - Is House Hacking Dead in 2026? How to Find Deals That Still Work

Episode Date: October 7, 2026

Is house hacking still a good strategy for reaching financial independence in 2026? Scott Trench and Evan Lawler break down a real house-hacking opportunity, looking at mortgage costs, cash flow, market conditions, sold properties, and how to systematically find real estate deals that can help you build wealth. If you're considering house hacking, real estate investing, or using rental income to accelerate FIRE, this episode offers a practical framework for evaluating the numbers and knowing when to act.To go beyond the podcast:Interested in a Flat Fee Financial Planner? Go to https://biggerpocketsmoney.com/fipro/Interested in Learning More About Buying a Franchise? Check out: biggerpocketsmoney.com/franzyGet 50% Off Your First Year of Monarch by using code ‘Pockets’: https://www.monarch.com/pocketsConnect with Evan Lawler:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_financialfoundation/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@The_FinancialFoundation We believe financial independence is attainable for anyone no matter when or where you’re starting. Let’s get your financial house in order!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Evan found a $660,000 triplex near Philadelphia, and he thought, man, that looks like a terrible house hack. So today, we're putting it to the test. Should he buy house hack or just rent in the greater Philadelphia area? What's going on, everybody? I'm Scott Trench, host of the Bigger Pockets Money podcast here today with also the host, the co-hosts, here in Evan Lawler. Evan, welcome back.

Hey, Scott, thank you so much for having me on today. I'm insanely excited. Before we get into today's discussion, I think we need to acknowledge that you're doing fine right now. The house hack is not really required for Evan to achieve his financial goals. The reason house hack is so discussed and so powerful is because for most people, housing is the dominant reason why they're able to save or not save. You know, if you're earning $60,000 a year, you know, for example, my guess is money you spend on rent would hurt a lot more than what I believe is a six figure plus income. you earn. And so for me, that was the case. When I was 25, I was making $48,000 a year, and that was not as much as you are even adjusting for inflation. So I had to attack housing in order

to get ahead. And that's why it was so important. And so the question is, can a house hack in today's environment in 2026 actually support that? Can it actually lower the cost to live so that your savings rate can be increased by at least some of that offset over renting either, you know, your own place or with a roommate? So that's the question. I think that's why it's so important. And I would love to see if we can do it in Philadelphia, either with the deal you sent me or another deal. Absolutely. I'm excited to get into it. So, Evan, how much are you paying for rent right now? And why is renting more appealing than house hacking to you intuitively? So I'm currently paying $1,200 per month in rent, but I'm upgrading next month to $1,500 per month in rent. So housing is

on my mind. So I'm thinking about house hacking, looking at listings. And I kind of want to leave no stone unturned in my journey to financial independence as I pursue coastfire and maybe in the future traditional financial independence. And I've heard so much about house hacking that I really wanted to dive in and see if it's still possible today. This is a great topic. So I think this is awesome. We did a show a while back about the differences in our approach, right, me being an all-out approach to early financial freedom, house hacking, startup vibes, you know, sales commissions, those types of things, try to drastically increase my income, keep my expenses low, and just get to a true financial independence number as early as I could around age 25 was when I was really in the thick of it.

And you're taking a different approach. You're renting and keeping your expenses very low, but working more traditional career. And you're working just to get to coast five, a couple hundred thousand dollars by 30. Still a very ambitious financial target, but not the several million dollars needed for permanent financial independence at that point. And a lot of advantages to your approach. And one of the big pushbacks I mentioned on the show where we are discussing these differences was the house hack. And I said, man, Philadelphia seems like a great opportunity to house hack the greater Philadelphia area. It seems like there's a lot of opportunities. The prices are low. The rent to price ratios are good. And seems like as good or better opportunity than in Denver 10 years ago. And you thought about that.

And, you know, smiled and nodded politely, I believe. And then you went and actually looked it up and said, you know, I looked at that. And the best deal I can find in the market right now seems to be this one. And it stinks as a house hack. So why don't we talk about that and did I get that right? Is that the right framing for this? Absolutely. You got a house. 100% right. We talked about house hacking. I don't think you can be in the financial independence space without hearing about house hacking, and you certainly can't be around Scott Trench without hearing about house hacking. So it definitely put the thought in my mind, had me thinking about it, poking around at the listings. And I found this one and sent it to you in an

email randomly and said, correct me if I'm wrong, but this is a horrible house hack. And so yeah, that's kind of what spurred this conversation. Okay, so let's take a look here and let's analyze this house hack as a rental property. I'm going to pull up my screen and share it here. We have not yet done this analysis, but this is the house hack. It's a $660,000 triplex, I believe, multifamily in Westchester. Tell me about Westchester as a neighborhood relative to where you live now. I don't know the neighborhoods in Philadelphia very well. Yeah, Westchester is a suburb of Philadelphia, maybe even a little bit outside of a suburb in Chester County. So it's just outside of the radius of the area, but it's not too far away, and this is one of the listings outside of the town.

The town has a university there, Westchester University. It's a really desirable and pretty expensive place to live. This is south of Westchester, which is also in the same direction as the university. So I wasn't totally surprised to see that there is a triplex, but when I was looking through the description and looking at the list price, I was surprised at the numbers, because it just didn't seem to pass the basic rules that I've begun to pick up being in the community. So tell me about what your observations were, what your back of the napkin analysis was like on this place, which, by the way, somebody seems to have liked at some price because it's under contract now just a few days later. Well, there you go. Yeah, there you go. I didn't even see that

before. But my back of the napkin math was just following the 1% rule. So the list price here is $660,000, which I think the 1% rule tells us that you would expect, then all the units to rent out for $6,600 per month. And then looking in the description, they had the units listed. So it's two one bedroom units and one two bedroom unit. And the two one bedrooms were about $1,200 each. And then the one two bedroom was like 1850 or something like that. So a little over $4,000, I think, $4,200 per month in total rents, which seemed too low to justify the cost. This triplex is interesting because one of the units, the big one, is a one-bed-two-bath unit, and that's being listed for $1,800 a month. It may or may not get that.

Units two and three are both occupied, and they're one-bed, one-bath units, currently rented for $1,200 and $1,200 a month, and those leases run through summer of next year. Those are the three properties. It's serviced by one electric meter, which means you're going to have to charge utility fee to the tenants or absorb those costs. as the landlord. And then some other items are individually metered here with electric, hydronic heating, for example. This is a pretty fair weather house hack from what I would take a look at. I don't know the Philadelphia market, but this is presumably the one that you popped out to you because it was among the better opportunities you could find in a cursory search in the greater

Philadelphia area. Is that right? Yeah. It was on the surface, you know, potentially a more desirable option. You know, I think the core problem here is if you were to get a mortgage, let's say put five percent down here. Let's do a little mortgage calculator. We're going to do two sites here for this analysis. First is biggerpocketsmoney.com. And we're also going to go to biggerpocketsmoney.com. Here you go. Biggerpocketsmoney.com.

We're going to go to the mortgage calculator here. And we're going to go to the cost estimator. This is basically a tool I built. It's a little simple tool. You shouldn't take it as a source of truth here. But it's just a little calculator that gives you a snapshot of today's rates. It's not today's rates. It's within the last week.

I think it's updated on a Thursdays. And it tells you what a good rate is right now for someone with your credit score in the last week for mortgages. So we're going to use a 30-year fixed mortgage. We're going to get a $630,000 mortgage. This you can kind of tell if your quote is good. That's what I was attempting to do here is like a quick sanity check against a lender's quote. They'll probably complain about why it's not right or whatever, but I use it as a sanity check and see if I'm getting a good deal or not. So $630,000 loan amount. The interest rate we're going to have at 6.66% here. Loan term is going to be 30 years and you got an excellent credit score, right?

right Evan? Yes, yeah, of course. Okay, so in this scenario, an excellent rate would be a 6.4% mortgage. The average rate would be about 6.6 effective rate here. Here's a fun fact. You're not just buying a house. You're marrying the neighborhood, the commute, the noisy street, all of it, till death or a very motivated realtor, do you part. That's the kind of real talk you get on Own It with Angie Hicks, the new podcast from Angie co-founder, Angie Hicks. She sits down with designers, agents, and everyday homeowners to talk about what actually matters when you buy, renovate, or just try to survive your to do list. New episodes every other week. Subscribe to own it with Angie Hicks

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This is the bigger pockets rental property calculator we've had it for years. And we'll put this down as a $660,000 purchase price. We're going to have 7% closing costs. So we're going to put down 5%. We're going to get interest rate at 6.66%. Gross monthly income is going to be 4200. We're going to have property taxes of 7,800. We're going to have insurance of 2650.

We're going to have repairs and maintenance. We're going to assume 5%. Put capital expenditures at 5%. We'll put vacancy at 5%. We'll put management fees at 10%. This one, we will pay electricity. So let's put a typical electricity bill in the Philly area for an apartment of your size. What do you pay?

My apartment's like, you know, $80 or something. Okay. We'll put $300 then, assuming it'll make. a little bit more. You pay gas? No. I'm going to put another 200 bucks for gas. Is water cheap out there or is expensive? I don't know. I don't know either. We don't pay for that either. Water is expensive out here, but I'm going to say it's 200 bucks because it rains a lot in Philly. Garbage, is that probably included in property taxes out there? I have no idea. I'm in a department, so I don't even know. Okay. This is your problem here is you're going to be strongly negative

cash flow. But if we reduce this loan amount, all of a sudden, we get closer and closer to zero or even strongly positive at various points here. Does that make sense, Evan, here, how the down payment works out? And we've used very conservative assumptions now, or pretty conservative assumptions for parts of this analysis. Right. Yeah, that makes sense. So you come with more cash, so you have less leverage. So there's a smaller mortgage cost. So then by comparison, you have higher relative rents. So then you end up with positive cash flow at some point. That's right. We don't necessarily want to buy this property really at this price at all in this house hack situation. It just, it does change the analysis.

That's the biggest takeaway I think here is that the loan amount makes the property work or not from a cash flow perspective in the near term. And that may be a very uncomfortable answer to does house hacking still work. The other thing I want to point out is right now, I don't know the Philadelphia market. I don't know. You probably know it better than me. And I'm a real estate investor. I just don't know. Every market's different right now.

But my guess is that like many other markets around the country, it is a little bit of a seller's market transitioning to a buyer's market. They're moving into that direction, which means, at least in Denver, for example, you see a lot of properties that are listed much higher than the price that they'll actually sell for. One of the challenges that I think discourages a lot of people in their search for a house hack, a rental property, or even a primary home, is they look at what's for sale, right? right now, right? And what's for sale right now doesn't look great because of that dynamic. So let's actually look at the Philadelphia area. Let's look at only multifamily. I like to put a minimum price because I presume that a multifamily property that's less than 300K has an issue. You know, something going on that is not going to be interesting to us in this particular analysis. So I'm going to put the band at $350,000 to $700,000. And you can see we have a lot of options in

the greater Philadelphia area, which is why I was so surprised as yet. So, like, for example, I don't know this neighborhood, but I see a $350,000 multifamily duplex it looks like here for sale in this area. Is this a good area? I live outside the city in the suburbs, so I don't know the neighborhoods of Philadelphia super well. Maybe we'll put a shout out here. If anybody is an expert in Philadelphia real estate, please reach out to Evan at biggerpocketsmoney.com and Scott at biggerpocketsmoney.com. Evan may not buy a duplex, a house hack of any time. Like, he, he He may be well justified in not doing that. But let's help him actually understand the market, maybe in a follow-up episode.

But my guess is that there's a lot of properties in the Philadelphia area that do a lot better than the one that you sent me, which probably doesn't work unless you put down a huge pile of cash. And why would you to move way out of the city and, you know, commute in in a place that requires that? My guess is you did not find the best deal currently for sale in the Philadelphia market. And my feedback to you and to everyone listening is, I think you went about it the wrong way. I think the way you do this is you say, what does a good house hack look like for me? It's going to be in one of these areas or this radius of town. It's going to have these set of conditions.

It's going to allow me to get close to that 5% down payment and still have rents that cover at least my mortgage payment property taxes and insurance and PMI or significantly offsets those. It would work as a rental property the day I moved out. Like let's put together that ideal house hack. And then don't start your search by looking at what is currently for sale in the greater Philadelphia area. Look at what has sold. So this is what's actually transacting right now in this area, right? And so here's a $440,000, four-bed, four-bath, 1,500 square foot property downtown in Philadelphia.

What do you think this would rent for? Do you have any idea? I have no idea. Looks super nice. That's a real nice looking place. True. Let's look at this. So this sold within the last 12 months just about a year ago. I bet your prices have not moved much here. And it's in this pocket of town. So let's look at for rent now. So in this same pocket of town, a two-bed unit is rented for like 1.9. This might be literally be that same place. Yeah, they're renting it for 1850 right now. That's way closer to this like 1% rule. It's not quite there, but way closer than the property that you showed me and actually sold. So we know what's translating here. Right. And so that would be my recommendation. to you is make a fictionally perfect property that you would buy that would be a no-brainer for you

and see if it exists. And you can keep refining this criteria with an agent locally or in Zillow or you're, you know, in these various tools and see, has anything sold that's met my criteria, anything even close? If it hasn't, then you know you're in fairyland and house hacking certainly doesn't work. If it has sold or a bunch of them have sold, you can keep narrowing your criteria until my sweet spot is you get to five to ten in the last 90 to 180 days, right? Five in the last 90 or 10 in the last 180 days. So once you get to 5 to 10 in the last 90, 180 days, you know that your property is going to hit the market every two and a half weeks on average. And that's an average, right? So this next month, no deals may hit the market that makes sense,

that hit your buy box. Next month, two may hit in the same weekend, right? What you do is you meet with your agent or, you know, you create these searches on here. The simplest one is just call an agent and talk to them and help refine this process. And then they'll send you the next one that hits the market and you react instantly to buying that, right? You've pre-analyzed that you know what you're looking for. The winner hits and you know it works because you've looked at all the ones that have sold just like it. You know it's a good price because that's by definition a good deal. It's all written and you know pre-articulated ahead of time and then you just react and that's how you become a very fast offer. That's why people are able to transact on these good deals within a day or two

have hit in the market. You're going fishing, putting your line in the water with your agent and then you're reacting instantaneously. So again, I don't know if Philadelphia is going to work for you or not. I speculated that on that prior podcast, but I'd be really interested to see if you went through this process, whether or not you'd actually find a good deal in your area that would make sense for you. What's your thoughts on this? That's a super interesting breakdown. It sounds like I went about it a bit backwards. So I started with what is available listed today, not what the price it will sell for. I now understand what is listed today. And then looked at those options and kind of did some numbers and realized that it wasn't going to make any sense. But instead, you're recommending

that I start with, okay, if I could, you know, use a magic spell and have the perfect house hack sitting right next to me, what would it look like? And then once you define that, it makes your search criteria so much easier, it makes it easier to work faster, to begin with the end in mind. And that makes a whole lot more sense for me. And it was not what I was doing at all. So that is extremely helpful. And everything cascades from all that, right? Like fictional perfect the property, or is there even like a cutoff above which you'd be slightly interested? Because I agree, like, you shouldn't be interested in that property. Somebody was. It made sense for somebody. Right. There's a, there's a use case for it. It's not being marketed at a crazy price. It's not failing to clear,

but it doesn't make any sense for this I'm 25 and want a house hack to build wealth strategy, you know, at least in your situation. But that does not mean that the area does not have that. And again, by the way, I think this process of fictional perfection works in a lot of areas, right? I used to use it for hiring executives. Before we'd hire an executive at bigger pockets, I would say, what does a fictional perfect executive look like for this? I wrote the job description and their requirements, and then I'd handed it to an executive search firm or our HR team, depending on the scope of that particular hire, and say, let's go find those folks. Here's my tier one candidate list. Here's a second round draft pick list. Here's, you know, and we go out and you'd be amazed at how often once you do this, that what you're

looking for comes into your worldview. But I don't know, just for your consideration as a default process for many high-stakes decisions. Yeah, I really like the thought process and the systematic approach to kind of developing, like, what is that next move? If I can ask a question about, we talked about cash flow and we talked about mortgage amounts, at what point, what's the other side? So if your goal is cash flow, obviously the answer is zero mortgage, right? Because then you get as much cash in is possible with no cost of the mortgage. But at what point is it too much cash down, right? And how do you balance that with I want to put down the smallest amount possible versus I want the maximum cash flow? I think a perfect house hack. So you're asking us like,

what's a perfect house hack? Right? That's how I'm going to interpret what you just asked here. The perfect house hat is going to allow you to put down three and a half to five percent. And it doesn't have to cash flow. It just has to significantly decrease your cost of living. and then also work as a rental if you were to move out in a reasonable time frame, right? So it may be too much to ask of the market to say, I'm going to move into that property. The other two units are going to fully cover the entire mortgage property taxes, insurance, expenses, you know, and conservative estimation of CAPEX and those types of things. But it may not be too much to ask that you're paying how much in your new place that you're about

to move into next month? $1,500. It may not be too much to ask that you're a cost to live. goes from $1,500 a month to $400 a month. That's real cash flow to you. That's $1,100 a month spread between what you're paying for the rent versus what you'd be collecting from these areas. And here's the circular thing here that makes house hacking really hard is a true rental property must be underwritten very conservatively. And it should be. And you should have those conservative assumptions into the analysis of a house hack for a long-term rental. But during the time you live in

there, you're going to fix it up yourself. If there's a pea trap, which is the waste, water from a sink, right? You're not going to have the plumber go and fix that for your tenant or for yourself while you're living in a house hack. You're going to fix that after work one day. And that's a real advantage. It saves you real dollars, right? It's one trip to Home Depot, maybe three, because it's very, you know, you always miss it up the first time. But that's going to save you real time and it develops a little bit of that skill for, you know, that's very valuable in later real estate investing. And that's a real cost reduction during the time when you're house hacking in the property. That will not be there once you move out and convert it into a rental. Those things should be in the

back of your mind that there's a little bit of, quote, unquote, cheating in the house hacking stage on the cost side, because you can do some of the work that's reasonable to do yourself, yourself. You can manage the property yourself. For me, it would have been preposterous not to manage the property that I was house hacking in because there's no like legal protection from, you know, the LLC or the property manager. If I live next door, I clearly combining personal property and investment there, I had very little to protect at the time. So there was no reason to do that. And it was very easy, right? You just treat your neighbor reasonably well, respond to their issues, shovel the snow, that kind of stuff. It was really not a challenge in a meaningful way to manage the property myself. That may be there

in a few years as you move out. So there's like two sets of analysis. What is it going to look like while I'm in the property? And we can acknowledge that those realities exist, even as we underwrite them conservatively for a long-term hold. And eeks out at least a little bit of a positive of cash flow as a true rental. That's what an ideal house hack would look like to me. And then on top of that, let's say there's a lot of options available. Then we can begin saying, well, I kind of want to live here. Like this is what I would like for my lifestyle and, you know, yada, yada. So I recognize two problems with my approach, which was one, I was not systematically approaching what does the ideal house hack look like. And I think I was also looking for too much. Like I thought that in order to

have an effective house hack, you have to be paying zero or near zero. but it sounds as though if you can get into a property that appropriately subsidizes your own living situation, it can be a huge win for wealth building. Yeah. My first house hack, I think my mortgage was $1,400. I've told this a million times. I can't remember the numbers now, but I think it was like $14 to $1,500 for my mortgage payment, all inclusive of all these things. And the one side rented for like $1,150, and then each side of ours would have rented for $5.50, right? So you add those up, you get to like $17. No, it wasn't perfectly for free, but it was significantly cheaper than if I was renting or even with a roommate, for example. That's a win. That's a real win. That's what I would encourage you to think through is, can I come back and look at the greater Philadelphia area and at least understand the cost or benefit of this decision?

And then, yes, you're right. That property you showed me would be a terrible house hack for you in this particular situation, even if you brought down a ton of cash and made it cash flow. Interesting. Okay. That's a whole other level of. analysis and a systematic approach, not even just like, here are the numbers for this property in a way that I wasn't understanding, but how do you evaluate the next property and where do you look for that? And another, like you went from what's for sale versus what's sold, that blew me away. Because people will ask for a lot, right? And then, like, you know, it'll be sold at a much lower price. And so I'm definitely going to spend the next two hours poking around the Zillow map with the recently sold and kind of see,

see how that changes things. This happens to every home buyer, too, because what homebuyers do, like the typical pattern for a home buyer is, everything looks so expensive, I wish I got that one, you know, you know, and then there's nothing that makes sense in the market. They go look.

And then one day, out of nowhere, a deal that is better than what's currently on Zillow's active listings appears, and they buy that deal. And that's their mistake, right? This is how agents, I think, a lot of agents just, like, make bank over the years, is because the homeowner is anchored to the active listings in the market. And so when something comes on that's better than the other current active listings,

that's the one that they buy and they think they got a good deal. But if they actually zoomed out and looked at the sold inventory, they would know what a real good deal looks like and could have waited for that. The other thing that a lot of buyers make a mistake on when they're buying a house hack or home is they have like an artificial constructed time decay on their purchase, right? my lease ends on September 30th. Therefore, I must buy a house that is ready to move in by September 1st. That drives me bonkers.

I hate that approach. If people take away nothing else from this podcast, it's talk to your landlord and say, I'll pay you $200 a month more going forward for the next six months if you let me go month to month. Like, every landlord's going to say, sure. Congratulations. Not every landlord, but, but, you know, a huge percent of the time they're going to say, sure. And now you're paying $200 a month, which is very, it's a zero, basically. is rounding it is zero compared to your $660,000 duplex purchase here. And you're almost certainly

going to get a $10, $20, $30, $50, $60,000 spread on the decision that is multiple six figures here because of the patience that you can bring to negotiations. You're not going to be rushed into a decision on offer based on this artificial timeline. So I think it's crazy that people do that. You want some more tips on buying your first house hack? Please. Watch this one. This is a fun one. I always like to go to Redfin for this one. And let's do Redfin Philadelphia housing market. We want the data one here. So this is the sales price for Redfin for the last several years.

And you can see that it's a wave, right? It peaks, sales prices peak in July. They're bottom in December or January, right? So look at this spread here, right? We're hovering over this number. In January 2024, the median sale price was $230,000. Six months earlier in July, it was $2,000. That's a nearly 20% change in price.

Now we've got July and August of 2024. That oversold and we're selling out 275-274. And then in February, by January, February, it was 255. So 274 to 255. That's about 8% seasonally within a six-month period. It's going up every year. Seasonally, you can see this pattern reset every year. You can see it in almost every market.

Not every market. You can check and see how yours looks at Redfin's data. In July 2025, prices were 288,000. By January of this year, 2026, they were 269. This is a very predictable pattern you can see it almost every year. When you buy a property in January or February at the bottom of this, right, that's usually January in most markets. This one seems to be February. It's basically the same. To me, what that says and what I've done many times in my life is go under contract between Thanksgiving and Christmas. is it going to take you 30 days to close, right? So you go talk about it with your parents, you know, your family over Thanksgiving dinner, you know, whatever, you know, or the day before Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving, dinner, table. But, you know, while you're watching the Eagles game, maybe in the morning, I think they're playing this year on Thanksgiving. So I wore my,

go bird shirt because we're talking about Philadelphia today. I don't really know the market that well, but I, you know, I know these concepts here that apply to many markets. You talk about it with your family, and then you go under contract and offer with your agent in that time period, you can have very little competition. And you don't always, but you're very likely to get this benefit at buying on the cyclical trow inside of a market. And you're very unlikely to get a good price if you buy in the July, August, June time frame. So that would be my next tip there is look at these and specifically time your house hack purchase, if you're ever interested in doing this, around that trow.

Interesting. That can be a huge difference in purchase price, which can compound year over year. If you were able to get that lower price simply by timing it correctly, that can be a huge. benefit. Yeah, I think it's a big deal. I don't want to overstate it. It doesn't necessarily mean that every deal is going to be there. There's different types of properties that may transact in these periods. I think it is a real factor. And I have tended not always been perfect, but I've tended to try to buy in that time period. It also means you're moving in January. Nobody else wants to move in January. But Evan, you tough it out in the summer with no AC in your car. Oh, yeah. Yeah, car with no AC so I can

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It's definitely making it worth considering. And I had kind of rode off. I almost expected when I sent you that listing, Scott, that you would be like, Evan, you're right. The house hack is dead. There is no hope. But I'm realizing here that there's other layers to this approach. There's more to this analysis.

And it's giving me a lot of hope as far as how to kind of look at this in a different way. Evan, great question. Thank you for bringing me that terrible deal as an example of why house hacking doesn't work. I do not think it has disproven house hacking in the greater Philadelphia area, although it may be that we look through it and we find that house hacking really doesn't work for an Evan in the greater Philadelphia area right now. That could be the case. But if you're interested in exploring more, the process that I recommend for ruling out a house hack, for example, would be this. First, come up with a set of requirements using the rental property calculator on bigger pockets or a spreadsheet or whatever it is that works for you that says

here is what a fictional good house hack would look like for me. Then turn off the active listings on Zillow, go to the sold section on Zillow, and see if anything has come remotely close to what would work. If nothing does, your search is over, you continue on your job and you have a great time as a renter. If it does, as I suspect there will, then you begin poking around and looking at those, analyzing them at a high level, and talk to some agents in the local area that represent investors and go and say, can we look at these? Who's bought this? Would it have worked? Are there any good deal? What can I expect to meet my requirements here? Then you set up a search. You begin actually looking at the live listings as they come on and refine. This is an iterative process. You don't

come up with one one shot here, but you refine it. And as you get more and more comfortable with what a good deal looks like, you get ready to act. You commit to buying, I'm going to buy the next good deal that meets my criteria in this area. I'm going to offer it on it at least. And then when the listing comes in from your agent's auto-generated search, You don't leave work immediately, but you can't see your dinner plans and you go and look at the property that night because one of your preordained winners has come on the market and you're ready to go and act on it. And that's the basics of a process here. For extra credit, you can look at the short-term rental or rent by the room laws in your local area and see if that gives you yet another edge. And for extra extra credit, you can time your house hack search so that you're doing lots of research in the summer and getting ready to count in the winter when the deals get much better.

And the sweet spot, the perfect might be statistically, in that Thanksgiving to Christmas window, but the months leading up to and months shortly following that also are part of that cyclical trial. So that would be my process for your consideration for ruling this out. And my guess is we're going to get a lot closer than this deal that you came in today with. Absolutely. Yeah, that's a great process for breaking down how to approach the house hack. And you firmly convince me that the house hack is not dead, even for Gen Z with house prices the way they are. With this level of analysis, you know, maybe it might be something that doesn't work right this moment or next month or the month after that. But it could be something that over time you wait till an

opportunity is there and then just as you said, you pounce on that. Yeah, but I also haven't proven it's alive yet either. Shrodinger's house hack. Yeah, you may decide, hey, I don't even care how good the numbers are. I don't want to do it. And that's totally valid, right? That's totally fine. Don't do it if you don't want to do it. But I would love to analyze it and see if there's one that would work for heaven. Maybe we can look at the ones that have recently transaction. See, was there one that might have worked in an area you would? would have been happy to live in. Absolutely. Well, cool. Should we get out of here, Evan? Yeah, let's get out of here. All right. That was today's episode of the Bigger Pockets Money podcast.

As a reminder, we have tons of resources going on at biggerpocketsmoney.com. You can go to biggerpocketsmoney.com slash resources and you get access to a whole bunch of financial independence stuff. Some of the real estate investing related tools that we just talked about today are over at Biggerpockets.com. And some are available for free like the mortgage calculator and some require a pro membership like the rental property calculator. So go check those out over at biggerpockets.com if you're interested in the real estate investing angle of this. But that's our show today. Thank you so much for watching and or listening wherever you are. And we appreciate your support. Let us know, Evan at biggerpocketsmoney.com or Scott at bigger pockets money.com if you think the

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