Jack Reid (he/him) currently lives in a nine-person, jointly owned coop in Somerville called the Vivarium. He has been living in one coop or another (all in Camberville) since 2016. He is also the editor/webmanager of the Conviviality blog.

Church on 125 Highland for sale, could be co-op!

Summary of resources mentioned in this post

Introduction

Buying a house is a monumental endeavor in almost all circumstances. Spending a huge portion of your savings on a downpayment, locking yourself into a 30 year loan, and making a decision to stay in a particular place for a while. And while adding more folks to the endeavor has certain benefits (more people generally means more income and more savings) it also adds a complexity. There’s a reason why lots of coops start off with a single landowner and transition over time to some form of joint ownership. This is how Twin Oaks got started after all. Others remain with a sole owner and simply have day-to-day operations happen in a more cooperative fashion.

All that said, buying a house jointly is quite doable. My current coop, the Vivarium, did just that this past March. I thought it might be helpful to share what that process was like. Not an exhaustive guide, but at least a few highlights.

First a brief note, our house-buying was essentially a group of friends (many of whom had prior co-living experience) deciding to form a coop together. Other folks are aiming for something entirely different, perhaps with an explicit political orientation or even just with a more open/formalized admittance process. The steps we followed worked for us, but they might not work for everyone.

Before Starting

From the start, prepare yourself for failure. While we did indeed purchase a house in 2025, this was our third such attempt with varying rosters of participants dating back to around 2000. Being ready - and, more importantly accepting - of this is critical. The last thing you want is to rush into locking yourself into a mortgage for a house you don’t actually like and people you don’t actually want to live with. You and every other person involved need to feel comfortable with abandoning the project or walking away if it doesn’t feel right.

The other thing is prepare yourself for plenty of meetings. Patience is necessary. Getting a group of folks on the same page for ordering takeout can be a trial. Buying an asset measured in hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of dollars is a whole other thing. Patience is required. Our third, successful attempt involved about 18 months of meetings every other week and that was frankly significantly shorter than most of us were expecting. Buying a house is rarely the expedient option, even more so with a group involved.

Before you start your meetings though, you need to figure out whose going to be involved with those meetings. There’s no one way to do this. One of our sister coops started with three-to-four people and ended up with the same three-to-four people. Our first two attempts were similar (four-to-five each). For our third attempt, we tried something different and started with around fifteen. Now mind you, we didn’t plan on sticking with fifteen. It would be awfully hard to find a place in the the Camberville area that could reasonably accommodate fifteen folks. But we expected folks to drop off as our conversations developed (see above: being willing to walk away) and they realized that their house desires differed from that of everyone else or their life goals changed or they just got spooked by the commitment of it all. All of these are perfectly acceptable reasons to not buy a house and it’s how we gradually whittled down to nine people who were still in it.

The final things you need are trust and honesty. If you want folks to be willing to walk away before committing to something they aren’t ready for, you need to provide them with the information necessary to make that decision. That means discussing how much money you’re willing to put down and how much money you’re making. There’s going to be mortgage paperwork involved at some point so social security numbers and tax returns are going to be flying around. You need to be willing to discussing what (and more controversially, who) are dealbreakers for you, no matter how trivial it may seem to you. If you need a garden to be happy, say so. If you are planning on having a child, speak up. If you hate the idea of living with a toddler, you definitely need to say something. Remember the set of folks who are your friends, the set of folks you would rent a house with, and the set of folks who you would buy a house with may overlap, but they are not the same set. Establish those expectations up front and be willing to find out that your best friend isn’t willing to sign a 30-year contract with you.

Meetings, meetings, meetings

I found it helped to have a decently frequent cadence of meetings, with clear agendas and action items, to keep things moving along. While patience is a necessary component of this endeavor, there’s not need to let it drag on longer than it has to.

What to discuss in those meetings? Well, everything really. It might help to look an example compatibility survey. This is based on (but very much not identical) to one that we used pretty earlier on in the process. You’ll see that it contains topics such as neighborhood, size, sex noises, communal food frequency, allergies, plans for children, and much more. The point here is to not take anything for granted and to figure out any potential sticking points before you all move into your forever home together. Such surveys can be helpful for precisely this and thereby provide agendas for many of those meetings. If everyone agrees on say, the preferred temperature in the house, you can acknowledge that and move on. If someone loves to host parties and another person views the home as a refuge from social interactions, that warrants more discussion. Perhaps these are points on which the two people involved can compromise. Or perhaps you can prioritize looking for a house that is easily separable into two distinct sections. Or maybe someone decides that buying a house with this particular group of people isn’t for them.

The point here is to get familiar with each other and start to develop a picture of what living together could look like. Hopefully, over time, you’re able to develop a pretty clear, unified picture that is consistent with the kinds of homes available in your target area. You can also begin to set expectations regarding level of commitment. Has this just been a fun way to get to know your friends better or are you serious about this? We picked a target of five years for our commitment. That is to say, if you aren’t planning on sticking around in the house that we buy together for at least five years, moving forward probably isn’t the move for you. We didn’t formalize this target into contractual language (though you certainly could), but it was a good benchmark to measure your own hesitancy against.

The kind of topics from that survey aren’t the only ones worth talking about, of course. There’s a couple of elephants in the room that warrant discussing.

Financials & Legal

Buying a house costs money. A lot of money. More so than it should (but that’s a different discussion). More specifically, they require both upfront cash for a downpayment and sufficient collective income to qualify for a mortgage. These discussions involve their own set of questions, such as:

Some of these can get quite personal and value-laden, particularly in our capitalist society. I strongly recommend that you try to exhibit grace and empathy here. People can have very different understandings of what stability means to them and money is often a key part of that, whether we like it or not. These discussions are core to buying a house though. You need to know what kinds of properties you are in the market for and even if this is worth pursuing further at all. Try identifying what cost of house you can afford, assuming a 20% downpayment and using any of the many online mortgage calculators to estimate monthly costs (including non-mortgage costs like insurance and utilities). What is your group comfortable with, both upfront and on an ongoing basis? Pull up Zillow or another search app to see what kind of places fall into that price range. Can they fit your group? How well do the mesh with that picture you developed in your head during all those meetings? This is another go / no-go point in the process. If you can’t afford the kind of house that you will all be satisfied in, so it goes. You either need to reformulate the dream house, try to recruit more people (with money), or start hoping you win the Powerball.

The discussion of financial structure is closely tied up with your legal structure, which is its own can of worms and is way too much to get into here. For more information on what a tenancy-in-common set-up can look like, see this earlier post of mine.. And for more information on the various kinds of legal structures that different coops use, I recommend the “Legal Structures for Intentional Communities in the US” essay in Wisdom of Communities: Volume 1 – Starting a Community (and really the entire Wisdom of the Communities series is great, though aimed at a pretty wide variety of intentional communities).

Some of these legal structures may have impacts on your ability to get a loan. Most people think of the classic, federally backed, 30-year mortgage as available to a single person or a married couple, but there’s actually no legal limit on the number of individuals (or their relation) that can be on a mortgage, as far as I am aware. That said, many banks, particularly the large national ones, cap the number of folks they will allow at three or four (I suspect this is just because they have standardized digital forms that don’t accept any more). If you’re above that threshold, you need to look for more local, community banks that are willing to be a bit more novel and maybe do a bit of extra paperwork on your behalf.

If you’re in the Greater Boston area, I recommend Middlesex Federal Savings Bank, who have provided mortgages to multiple groups, some as large as eight or nine (including us!). At time of writing, they’re comfortable working with groups and also darn good at alleviating the concerns from potential sellers who are spooked by this whole “a whole group of people wants to buy my house” thing.

Note that not all legal structures are eligible for the classic 30-year mortgage, even at the more permissive banks. Non-profits, trusts, and other corporate entities fall into a different category and have to pursue alternative funding sources. I don’t have really any experience with these, however, so won’t be going into more detail.

Regardless of what structure you pursue, I strongly recommend you talk to a lawyer about it. Once again, see this earlier post for more details, including a rec on a specific Camberville lawyer.

Looking for the house

Eventually you’ve had enough meetings to be confident in your vision and you’ve got a contract ready to go. Now you just have to find a place to buy. Many of the standard tips for buying a house still apply here, so I will just focus on a few, a couple more coops specific things.

First, I do strongly recommend you hire a good real estate agent. You may think you can go without. Maybe that’s motivation but a fairly common coop preference towards DIY. Maybe it’s motivated by some anti-capitalist distaste for middlemen. Regardless, a competent real estate agent is a genuine asset. Many properties don’t get posted on public platforms like Zillow before being sold and those that due are commonly quickly snapped up by professional developers or landlords (at least in the Boston area). Real estate agents have their own connections that can help you find a house that you just wouldn’t have known existed otherwise.

The right agent can also help represent your coop to a potential seller. As mentioned earlier, many sellers are going to be a bit spooked by a group looking to buy. Questions of complexity and unreliability may enter their head. There’s a good chance that their unfamiliarity with coops will cause them to doubt the practical sustainability, prompting them to instead go with a classic couple or a professional developer instead. A real estate agent can advocate on your behalf and help make you intelligible to the seller.

If you’re in the greater Boston area, I recommend the Surrealtors. They’ve worked with a number of coops and thus both have a sense for what kind of properties your likely to be into and also have experience making that pitch to potential sellers. If you’re looking elsewhere, maybe see if you can find any existing coops and ask who they used. If it comes down to it, you can just start coldcalling agents, but make sure to interview at least a few so you can evaluate which ones are up for the fairly unusual job of working for a coop.

Second, you need to be prepared to make the decision to buy a house quickly. The process from visiting a house, putting in an offer, successive bids, and final acceptance can move fast. With months (or years) of meetings behind you and often a quite long closing process ahead, you may be used to making collective decisions at leisurely pace. That just won’t work here. Your group will need to (a) a streamlined process for deciding when to pull the trigger and (b) agree that, for the duration of the search, this activity is a high priority.

One form this can take is delegating decision-making authority to a subset of folks. Maybe these are the folks who are most qualified to examine a house with a critical eye. Or maybe its the ones with the strongest opinions or constraints on what they are willing to purchase. Or maybe you put some explicit constraints on them (you can put in an offer so long as it fulfills X, Y, and Z condition). In general, this is a major demonstration of the trust you’ve hopefully built up to this point. In our house-buying process, we had one person outside of the country during the search, but that person was willing to trust the rest of us if we said that we found the right place.

A corollary of this speedy decision requirement is that you want to make sure you have initial offer money readily available and are prepared to move downpayment money into a centralized location in a timely fashion. Be this be some jointly owned checking account or just a specific person’s own account, moving tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars around can take quite a bit longer than Venmo transaction, to say the least. Make sure everyone is ready so you don’t jeopardize your quest at the last moment by waiting too long to initiate a money transfer.

Good luck!

Those are the main things. There’s countless small steps and potential barriers, but don’t let that dishearten you. Buying a house with a group is very doable and can be a fun project in and of itself. I’m certainly much closer with this group of friends than I was beforehand (and I had been living with some of them for years!).

And if you end up pulling it off and have some tips of your own to share, even if they contradict my experience, write them up and send them our way, we’d be happy to post them for others to see!

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