North Portland/Arbor Lodge House Hack

[Chris Wilburn]

Hi BP, 

This Portland market! Home prices are moving like crazy. Trying to catch a deal before rates hit 7%! 

My wife and I are searching for our second property in North Portland.  Our first was a 203K renovation purchase for our primary.  

Now we're looking for a house hack (should have started with the house hack, I know I know haha).  But since she is still a first time buyers we are still getting low down payment options. 

We want to run another 203K, this time converting a basment to ADU (Basically have to do everything: Permit, design, Egresses, full kitchen build, level concrete floors) as well as spruce up the main level. Running rough numbers, we'd want to get $1800/mo out of a basement 2/1 (with shared backyard). Is that competitive in the current market?

Hoping to get a pulse on where North Portland rents currently are and where we think they are headed with the way the city is regulating landlords and how Portland is on a slight population downturn.  Are people seeing rents holding, increasing with rising cost of home ownership?  

Thanks everyone! 

[Matthew Kwan]

HI Chris,
You can always start off on house hacking a multifamily in MI 1-4 units with min 5% down or 3.5% down for FHA. This will allow you to acquire more rental units and also being able to use the vacated unit rents at 75% to help your debt to income ratio DTI.
There is a FHA 100 mile rule if you do plan on using FHA on your 2nd house hack. The fha 100 mile rule will be triggered whenever you try to vacate your current primary and also trying to use the rental income to qualify.

However, this 100 mile rule can be exempted for the following rules

1. Relocation
2. Increase in family size
3. Vacating a joint owned property
4. Non-occupying co-borrower

If you are not trying to use FHA on your 2nd househack, you can use conventional and the rules that I mentioned above will not be a concern.

@Carlos Valencia @Albert Bui