It’s a wish that many have had at some point: to build or buy a big house and live with their best friends. For most, it’s a passing daydream. But increasingly, people in Seattle are exploring co-homeownership and making it work.
Co-homeownership is a housing model where multiple people share ownership equity of a property. Friends seek it out for a variety of reasons — to keep costs low, to build community, to mitigate loneliness, to grow old with someone.
“More and more, I’m seeing friends come together, nonfamily members joining forces,” said Ruby Grynberg, branch manager and founder of Salmon Bay Community Lending, a mortgage lender.
In Seattle, rising interest in co-homeownership is so evident that a new crop of housing developments and real estate companies is emerging specifically to sell “fractional” homes — private bedroom suites with access to communal kitchens and living rooms. These models market themselves as a streamlined way to buy a home and build a life with like-minded people. Gone are the days of the affordable starter home. Welcome to the era of the starter home share.
Sharing homeownership doesn’t just allow multiple people to pool their savings for a single down payment. It can also lessen the ongoing financial pressure of mortgage payments. Even wealthier residents are finding that they can buy a more desirable home if they do so with the help of friends. But it can also come with pitfalls, particularly when expectations clash, plans change or friendships rupture.
Here’s how some Seattle friend groups are trying to make homeownership — once the domain of traditional nuclear families — work for the unique contours of their lives, across different generations, income levels and backgrounds.
“We plan our life together”
Among the demographics most interested in co-homeownership are retirees and people close to retirement.
In the summer of 2023, Diane Undi-Haga decided that she’d had enough.
For over a decade, Undi-Haga had lived in a five-bedroom, 3,400-square-foot house in Seward Park, where she took care of her mother until she died. Now living alone, the house felt too big and too quiet. She sold it and moved in temporarily with her friend Sharon Coleman.
The two friends — both single women in their 60s, one divorced and one widowed — had previously bought a vacation cabin together. Now, they thought, why not buy a house together?
“People who are elderly living alone can easily get lost,” Undi-Haga said. She had watched her mother struggle with pain and isolation in her later years. Undi-Haga was determined to stay social and active, and she was drawn to Coleman’s extroverted disposition.
Eventually, they found the perfect place — a waterfront property in Ballard that was advertised as a single-family home but was effectively designed like two separate units connected by a stairwell.
Both women are well-off and have backgrounds in commercial real estate development. But for Undi-Haga, buying a waterfront property alone was always out of the question financially.
Buying with a friend changed things. The Ballard house cost over $4.1 million. Undi-Haga took the smaller, top-floor half, while Sharon took the bigger, lower section. Based on the split, Undi-Haga’s portion came out to almost $1.7 million.
Still, even at a fraction of the list price, she would need to take out a mortgage — not an appealing proposition at the time, when average rates hovered around 8%. “It would have been very painful, as you can imagine,” she said.
Instead, Coleman loaned Undi-Haga the money at a much lower interest of just 3%.
For Coleman, co-homeownership wasn’t something she’d always considered. She loved her old house in Mount Baker, a neighborhood in Southeast Seattle, which she’d designed with her late husband. But living in it alone, she began to feel like something was missing.
“I just felt that I wasn’t fulfilled,” she said. While she appreciates having solo time, she also wanted to keep things fun and interesting. Moving in with her best friend has made that possible.
The two eat dinner and drink wine together most nights. They walk their dogs together every morning by the Ballard Locks. Like sisters, they occasionally argue. A point of contention right now is the garage, and what to do with all the “stuff” in it, Undi-Haga said with a laugh.
The two bought the property as a limited liability company, with each owning a percentage proportional to the amount they contributed to the home price. They named their LLC “Shady Pines” after the retirement home in the TV show “The Golden Girls,” about four older women living together in Miami.
“We plan our life together,” Undi-Haga said. She pointed out that both are at the age where they face increased medical needs. “It’s about looking after each other. I’m going to always make sure she’s home at night, and vice versa.”
A bet that paid off
Co-homeownership can be attractive for young people, who for years have struggled to cobble together the high down payments needed to buy a home in the Seattle area.
In 2008, Sarah Brown and her close friend bought a house together in Beacon Hill for about $278,000.
It was the perfect place for the pair: a ground-level duplex that could be made wheelchair accessible for Brown’s roommate and featuring two side-by-side units, mirror images of each other. The units share a front porch, water and sewage; each has a kitchen, bathroom, two bedrooms and electricity meter.
Neither could have done it alone. Brown’s friend — who declined to participate in this story — had enough money for the $15,000 down payment, raised from friends and community after a traumatic event. Brown had little savings at the time, but she had a steady income as a public school teacher and could afford half the mortgage.
Both felt that buying with a friend would be more stable and more in line with their values than doing so with a romantic partner.
“We felt strongly about not elevating those relationships over friendships,” Brown explained. It’s a bet that paid off. The two are still friends 17 years later. “I certainly have never had a relationship last that long.”
Before buying the home, the two signed a written agreement outlining how they would handle various issues that might arise. They committed to owning the house together for at least five years. After that, if one of them wanted to move out, both would have a say in who could be a tenant in the vacant unit.
Shortly after the purchase, Brown took out a $15,000 home equity line of credit, borrowed against what her friend had put down as their down payment. Brown used that money to pay for repairs, effectively equalizing her financial contribution to that of her friend’s.
Since then, the two have simply split costs down the middle — $1,900 a month each to cover the mortgage, utilities and money for their rainy day repair fund.
She cherishes having a home to recharge, while also having enough space to host friends, family and queer community-building events.
She takes home about $5,000 a month after taxes and other deductions. Stable, affordable, long-term housing has made it possible for her to regularly contribute 15% of her income to mutual aid funds.
“It feels important to continue that spirit of interdependence,” she said.
There have been occasional hiccups along the way. In their early years, they ran into problems with the IRS because Brown and her friend were each claiming half amounts when it came to deducting home costs like interest on their tax returns.
But for the most part, being able to partially own a home has transformed Brown’s life for the better. She expects to pay her mortgage off by 2030; the house’s total value is about $800,000 today.
Brown has mixed emotions about building wealth through owning property. But the reality of the Seattle housing market means that she might not have a choice.
“If I do want to stay in Seattle,” she said, “I would need that full market rate in order to buy something else.”
Growing trend
Numerous real estate projects have cropped up in recent years to make co-homeownership more accessible.
Last summer, developers completed construction on Corvidae Co-op in Rainier Valley, an affordable-housing project of 10 residences built across two single-family lots. Each residence consists of a private studio or one- or two-bedroom unit, as well as access to shared laundry, kitchens and a courtyard. Units ranged between $170,000 and $625,000 in price. The development sold out quickly; the sale of the last unit is currently pending.
“It’s an underserved market that we’re tending to,” said Leah Martin, co-founder of Allied8, a co-developer of the project. The co-op offers low down payments, and four city-subsidized units are subject to income limits.
Later this year, Ballard-based reSpace will also begin selling what it calls “fractional” homes. As the name implies, buyers will be able to purchase fractions of houses, each comprising a private bedroom, bathroom, closet and laundry. Co-homeowners will then share amenities including communal kitchens, living rooms and outdoor spaces.
“People want to live together,” said Katrina Romatowski, founder of reSpace, pointing out that younger people and multigenerational families are most interested in the company’s co-homeownership model. But one of the biggest barriers for people trying to co-buy are the administrative and bureaucratic headaches associated with financing and closing on homes.
In the case of reSpace, the company will effectively take care of the legal structuring required for multiple parties to buy into a property.
“You have your own interest in title, and you have your own mortgage, then you can buy and sell your space, just very similar to the way you would a condominium or a co-op,” she explained. The company plans to list eight units built across three houses in Ballard by summer. Private suites will measure from 275 to 500 square feet and will cost from $179,000 to $299,000.
“It’s a way to get your foot in the door to begin creating equity and having ownership in real estate,” Romatowski said.
Money is only one part of resiliency
Kelly Sommerfeld, 48, Milvia Berenice Pacheco Salvatierra, 52, and Yingzhao Liu, 51, began having earnest conversations about moving in together in 2022. They wanted to build stronger relationships with each other and to live less isolated lives in Seattle.
“We’re nurturing a culture of care amongst each other,” Sommerfeld said. The families imagined their three children growing up as siblings to each other, the adults helping each other through parenthood.
Liu and Pacheco Salvatierra each have a child and are both single moms. Sommerfeld, her partner and their son live in a small one-bedroom house that they own on north Beacon Hill. Previously, their property boasted a massive front yard. Then, in late 2023, the three families broke ground on a 2,000-square-foot, three-story, custom-designed house where the yard once was.
All seven of them — four adults and three kids — plan to move in by the end of the year, when they’ll embark on an uncommon journey of multifamily living. Each member will have their own room; everyone will share the kitchen, living room and outdoor space.
“This is a way to redefine what family is,” Pacheco Salvatierra said. Their co-homeownership model is a more radical experiment than most.
Each participating family will spend a different amount of money on the construction of their shared future home, but they plan to split equity equally. As a group, they see money as just one of many ways of contributing, noting that emotional support, wisdom, planning and guidance were just as valuable.
A house like theirs would normally cost between $1.5 million and $1.8 million to design and build. Because Sommerfeld and her partner have their own architectural services company, they’re contributing around $500,000 worth of labor, design and other unpaid work to the project, in addition to the underlying land. They also refinanced their mortgage to contribute $300,000 to other costs. Liu is contributing about half of the estimated construction costs; Pacheco Salvatierra is covering about 2%.
“If we think about what real resiliency is, money is only one part of it,” said Liu. “I am very willing to give up some of my net worth, so to speak, in order to feel real belonging, in order to know that we have a close circle of people who feel like family, and we can truly rely on in any kind of situation.”
For Sommerfeld’s family, the arrangement may ultimately mean spending more money and ending up with less equity in their home than if they had simply continued to live on their own.
Seen one way, that could mean having less money in retirement, less wealth to pass down to their child and future generations. Seen another, it’s a path to a future where their daily cost of living goes down, as they begin to share expenses with their friends, from their mortgage to groceries. It also means sharing economic stability with people they love and piloting a model of homeownership that isn’t predicated on maximizing personal wealth. For most people, those ideals might sound high-minded, while not being worth much, or anything at all. But they matter to Sommerfeld, Pacheco Salvatierra and Liu.
“There’s what we are relinquishing,” Sommerfeld said, “and there’s what we gain, too.”
