Sydney couple hopes to pool funds with others to buy a house
A SYDNEY family have decided to pool funds with other like- minded families to get a foothold in the property market.
NSW
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IN your 20s, house-sharing meant splitting the chores, the bills, and the rent with strangers.
But now a couple in their 30s are looking at a new kind of house-share — splitting the mortgage with other like-minded couples to help them get a foothold in Sydney’s overheated property market.
Having slogged through auction after auction in Sydney’s inner west, missing out on unliveable dumps going for well over the $1 million mark, Leichhardt couple Ben and Natalie Williams are hoping to pool funds with other couples to buy a big house and split it into three or four apartments, with a shared backyard and possibly shared laundry.
With their careers and support networks in the inner west, the Williams wanted to stay.
But feeling frozen out of the market despite their above-average wages, they knew they needed to get creative to escape the rent trap.
Mrs Williams, 39, said: “Sheer insanity is the only way to describe the current costs of Sydney housing. We went to one auction in Dulwich Hill, a dilapidated dump, and it sold for $1.4 million.”
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The couple, who have an 18-month-old daughter and two older children from a former marriage, posted the idea of co-housing on the Inner West Mums Facebook page last week and it took off. Almost 80 interested parties joined their Inner West Housing Co-op page overnight.
“It is for anyone re-evaluating single-family detached living and re-imagining creative ways to get free from the kind of massive mortgages that current home ownership seems to be demand,” Mrs Williams said.
“We pool our resources and figure out the legalities, whether we become shareholders or strata title. I mean $1 million can’t even buy you a three-bedroom apartment these days.”
Mr Williams, 38, said they were keen to rule out any idea of a “hippie commune”.
“We need to debunk that myth,” he said.
“That’s fine for in your 20s, but we want to progress the conversation beyond smashed avos to whether there are like-minded people who are keen to think outside the box.”
While joint tenancy ideas have been around for a while, a similar concept for co-operative living is in the pipeline for elderly people in Balmain.
The AGEncy Project is a co-housing concept for older people “choosing to live together but separately” in their own houses, villas, townhouses or apartments.
On hand to mentor the Williamses is friend Trevor Thomas who, along with two other couples, bought a four-unit art deco block in Petersham in 1997 for $750,000.
“We all moved in and rented the fourth one out, then one of the couples wanted to sell, so the two of us bought them out and rented it for 10 years,” Mr Thomas said.
“Now we’ve turned the four into two two-storey duplex apartments with shared facilities in the backyard.”