An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. It often indicates a user profile.Late last year, Kelly Clark was flush with cash from a divorce settlement and eager to embark on a new career. It was finally time, she decided, to become a landlord.
While live-in landlords are far from a novel concept, the pandemic-era fever around passive income and real-estate investing has sparked a rise in the popularity of house hacking. TikTok influencers and real-estate gurus quickly picked up on this fervor.
In August 2020, Lehman arrived in Seattle and briefly rented a room from a couple of house hackers who offered to show him how they managed various aspects of being a landlord, including maintenance and rent collection. A few months later, he bought a five-bedroom home for $620,000, putting down 5% of the purchase price with savings from internships and earnings from the stock market.
After buying his first house at 24, Craig Curelop, a former employee of BiggerPockets who's now a Realtor focused on helping investors, told me that he began moving into a new property every 12 months"like clockwork," taking on a new loan each time and refinancing other properties in his growing portfolio. In 2019, he published a book called"The House Hacking Strategy: How to Use Your Home to Achieve Financial Freedom.
"Yeah, it's called 'house hacking," the owner and roommate, also played by Jarman, who has 4 million followers, replies."I make $1,900 off y'all paying rent each month."Recently, some property owners and real-estate influencers have even insisted uponaltogether and replacing it with euphemisms like"housing provider.