5 Tips for House Hacking with young kids

5 Tips for House Hacking with young kids

Having kids can make real estate investing tough, but it does not have to be as tough as people make it out to be. Too many times I see people using kids as a reason not to invest, too much “I can't invest in real estate because I have kids,” going on. My wife and I flipped that upside down and said “Let's invest because we have kids.” So we did, and in under 5 years we acquired 3 properties valued at $2 million dollars. Here are 5 tips on how to do it.

Screen Realtor or Get Your License

I ended up getting my license long before I officially purchased our first investment property. It made property searching a breeze, I could get in without having to contact an agent but more importantly I did not have to worry about a melt down from one of my kids ending an appointment or irritating a realtor. If you do not want to get your license, find an investor friendly agent and try to get a feel for them to see if kids can come along for the ride. When I take clients out as an agent I make it very clear kids are welcome to help alleviate the stress parents may have shopping for homes with kids.

Multi Family Units Work Well

We like multi-family properties. We like the fact that we can renovate one unit and commute 10 steps to get home. This is a great way to optimize family time. When kids went to sleep I could literally go into the other unit to work. If I had to travel to a new location the process would have been much slower. If you are planning to sub work out, still it is nice to know you do not need to take one more stop to check on progress before you go home.

Ignore The Negative Comments

A lot of people over the years made comments, we had a lot of “Your crazy” and “How can you do that with Kids.” We had it set in our head we wanted to invest to provide a better life for our kids and we were never going to settle for less. Our kids loved living in our multi-family properties, it has been a fun experience for them.

Make It Fun

Kids just want to have fun. They love helping being a part of what we are doing. Any little task I could include my kids they gave it their all. They loved to vacuum and fill up garbage bags. Trips to hardware stores were always fun for them, they like going and seeing the tools and seasonal blow up creatures. Many days I would plan my trips to the store based on when my kids were home from daycare just because they loved it some much. Other days I would leave piles of dust just so my son could use the vacuum and be a part of the process.

Remove The Idea That You Can't

My wife and I have 4 kids under the age of 6 during our second house hack and 3 under 5 for our first house hack. We also have 2 dogs. We also moved to a location where the closest family member was 30 minutes away. Plain and simple what we did was a MUST not what we should do or what we could do, it was what we had to do. We literally created a point of no return. We moved into a property that needed major work and we made it happen. We leverage our greatest strength we have, the love of our children. We made it clear in our heads do or live on the street, each night we went to work to make it happen. Find your reason why and make it powerful.

Thank you for taking the time to read this short article. I hope this was informative and will help lead you to many great deals and great experiences with your family. Please feel free to message me with any questions regarding the home buying process and process of investing with kids. Our adventure has been great so far, we are looking to grow more memories through real estate.