Buying a Brownstone/Townhouse with friends?
We are considering looking into buying a brownstone or townhouse with friends. We’ve only started doing the preliminary research, but are looking for advice from those who have done this already. Is tenancy in common better than a coop/condo conversion? Is this a really bad idea for any number of legal/financial/personal reasons? Any advice would…
We are considering looking into buying a brownstone or townhouse with friends. We’ve only started doing the preliminary research, but are looking for advice from those who have done this already. Is tenancy in common better than a coop/condo conversion? Is this a really bad idea for any number of legal/financial/personal reasons? Any advice would be appreciated!
CMU you are wrong, maybe you should not assume things. You know what they say about assumptions.
As for the california positive post, this guy posts each time the topic comes up. If you are buying a house in california, fine, otherwise, do not listen to him.
I’d be happy to share examples. (to counter the post above!) Ask the negative posters how much *personal knowledge* they have. I’d bet it’s one experience. Or one anecdote.
There’s the same attitude about landlord-tenant relationships here. Look at all the advice; 95% of it assumes your tenant/landlord is an a*h trying to screw you. If you go into a business relationship with that attitude, it will probably come true.
Another option (which takes a lot of money up front but you’d get it back) is buy a 4 story house, build a lower duplex in it for yourself. Then put one-floor, 2/3 BR condos on each of the two upper floors then sell them. I’m surprised we don’t see more of this, especially when rents for apartments inside houses won’t do much to help cover the big mortgages on houses in better neighborhoods, as prices go up and up. Whatever you do, never do partnerships with friends or family, in buying any kind of property. I have literally never once heard of a situation like that going smoothly. We have cousins selling a summer home they co-owned with some friends for decades, and after so long sharing ownership of the house, the two owners still manage to squabble over the sale of it making it more difficult.
The level of paranoia and dont-trust-your-fellow-man atttude on this list is sometimes astounding. It seems to extend to everything, landlord-tenant, friends, neighbors etc.
This is done ALL the time in San Francisco, where I used to live, so unless you postulate that NYorkers are somehow fundamentally different than SFer’s (which is quite possibly true) why should it be a no-no here?
I personally know of three such buys (including myself, I went into with not even a friend, but a relative stranger.)
That said, make sure you have a good tenancy-in-common agreement.
Friends/Finances not a good mix!
Wow. Thank you very much for the advice. I was hoping there were some positive stories out there, but it seems like the potential for disaster abounds…
Condoing is a better option. However, I am aware of two situations where people buying a house together with the intent to cond ended up suing each other during the construction phase. You are heading into a very dangerous area.
Buying a house with a friend was the only thing I have ever done that I truly regret.
Even if you have a great relationship with this person, there will come a time when there is conflict, because owning a house is full of decisions. And when that conflict occurs, either one or the both of you has great potential to get really irrational and do something that will ruin the friendship.
This is situational. Houses touch both your *money bone* and your *home/security bone*. So you wind up in a relationship that is not particularly intimate, in which you are seriously fighting over a very intimate set of feelings and problems that have huge importance.
The results can be disastarous.
Thanks for the advice! Any good search terms for the archives? I wasn’t coming up with much when I tried…