Originally published on qathet Living

One was strictly business. The other is an intentional community. Both versions of shared mortgages achieved the same goal: getting people into the housing market who might otherwise be shut out. 

Do something weird.

That’s 460 Realtor Austyn MacKinnon’s advice to first-time home buyers who are navigating a crazy market like qathet’s. She should know. She and her husband did something weird to get into the market back in 2014: they co-bought an $800,000 house with acquaintances.

“There are so many obstacles” to getting into the market, said Austyn, pointing out that in the past year, less than 5% of qathet homes have sold to first-timers. “But if you’re dedicated to making it work, and you’re willing to do things that other people might not consider, you’ll probably be able to buy.”

Co-buying a house was weird back in 2014 – especially the way Austyn did it (more on that in a few paragraphs). But in the years since then, as real estate has become completely unaffordable in Canada’s major cities, mortgage lenders, real estate agents and nonprofits have stepped up to help people make collective buying easier and less strange. Rooted in million-dollar-shack-Vancouver, for example, Collaborative Home Ownership BC sprung up in 2018. Part co-buying match-making service, part advocacy organization, you’ll often hear COHO BC spokespeople on the news extolling the wisdom of collective ownership for both financial and social reasons – all across the province.

Here in qathet, homes became wildly unaffordable for average-earning families within just the last few years (see chart on the next page). There’s no escaping the fact that currently, a mortgage on an average home here, for an average-earning family, will absorb 92% of their monthly income (see chart, again). That’s without paying for insurance, heat, electricity,  or – oh the luxury – food.

Homes are so expensive now – truly, madly, deeply unaffordable – and no one is predicting a return to pre-pandemic prices. What are first-time buyers to do?

Co-buying is, of course, not a new concept here. Land-shares in Lund and on Texada Island date back more than 50 years (in fact, there’s a new association for established and emerging communities: the qathet Community Alliance Association, with four members and growing). 

At least 200 local families are living multi-generationally – that is, with three or more generations in the same house – an arrangement the Federal government recently announced an encouraging tax credit to support. 

And, Austyn – who moved up from North Vancouver during the pandemic – is offering locals her expertise for buyers to replicate what she did back in 2014.

Here’s what she did: as a renter, just after she and her husband got married, the bank wouldn’t lend them enough money to buy a place with a yard. The couple wanted a yard. So, they organized a sushi dinner with a couple in their friend group who were also trying to buy into North Van’s super  hot market. Importantly, Austyn notes, they were not looking to build community or share a kitchen or living room. Instead, this was a business deal. Both couples had a financial and real estate goal, the key to achieving it was to share a mortgage – at least for a while.

At the time, Austyn was working in sales for a high-end car dealership and didn’t have much time to look at houses.  The other couple found one and the group had to act fast – Austyn trusted her husband’s assessment that everything wrong with it could be fixed. Horrified, she first saw it in person on move-in day, with its low ceilings, diagonal door frames, and generally crumbly appearance. Remember: this was an $800,000 home. Mortgage payments alone would be more than $4,100 a month, over 25 years.

Austyn and her husband took the basement, sealed it off from upstairs, and put their energy into renovating it. The other couple lived upstairs. For six years, they shared a yard and some utility bills, and built their equity, credit and families in sync.

Then COVID came. Both couples – now with children – wanted to move; Austyn and her husband had decided to relocate to Powell River where they have family, and their co-owners wanted to move to a swish townhouse in North Van.

“COVID really worked in our favour,” said Austyn. “We got to buy twice the house in Powell River for a quarter of the price of the North Van house.” In other words, her real estate co-buy worked exactly as she had planned.

Austyn’s advice is simple: if you think this is an arrangement you could live with, “pick someone, pick a place, and do it. Even a year or two later, even if it didn’t work out, you can take your equity. You don’t have to stay committed forever – it’s just a way of furthering your life.”

Shop around for a mortgage, she advises, as some traditional lenders balk at mortgages with more than one family unit on the paperwork. That’s left room for other kinds of lenders to make all kinds of co-buying work for people – make sure it works for you, she said.

Austyn also suggested that for her, a thick wall and a bit of social distance made for a good co-buy situation. Had they shared space, or been good friends or close family, it could have turned ugly.

That’s not true for everyone looking to co-buy real estate, of course. At the other extreme from Austyn’s story is Hearthstone Village Cooperative, one of the region’s newest co-buy scenarios.

It is an intentional community, explained one of the cooperative’s founders, Jacqueline Huddleston. There’s shared land, shared decision-making (through sociocracy), shared finances, and the members share their lives.

“A lot of people idealize living in an intentional community but don’t have any actual experience,” Jacqueline said. “This is why we ask people to live on-site for four to six months before they become members. It’s the only way to see if we’re a good fit with each other.”

As an example of the closeness of this community, Jacquie explained that her husband Mark Huddleston died at the beginning of COVID – in a MAID ceremony at the beach, with the members of the village around him, including children and elders. Jacqueline recalls that just 10 days later, the community welcomed its first baby, with most of the members  in the room where Sebastian was born.

“Between Mark dying and COVID, if I hadn’t been living in this community, I would have been a hermit,” Jacqueline said. “But as treasurer and membership coordinator I was forced to interact, and it was a good thing. It helped me through the worst of my grieving.” 

The original group that started Hearthstone began meeting twice a month in 2015. By 2018, they had split into what became Hearthstone Village Cooperative and Blueberry Commons Farm Cooperative, who bought land in Wildwood, more suited to their vision of food production.

Hearthstone was able to buy land with a mortgage from Vancity Credit Union – the founding members provided a large deposit, and remain the guarantors. Each new family buys in with a ‘foundation share,” and then builds their own house. 

To leave the community, they must request to exit and the Cooperative has up to three years to pay them back their foundation share. Members can expedite this process by helping to find a new member to join. 

Six households currently are a part of Hearthstone Village; there’s approval for eight homes on site, and the membership has begun the process of applying to the Regional District for up to 16 homes. Bordering Eagle River south of town, the village is 42 acres of forest, ponds and clearings.

“It’s a lot of work,” said Jacqueline. “We take our responsibilities very seriously. Whenever you have more than one household making decisions about anything, it becomes complicated. You have to show up at meetings, compromise, listen to others, and be open to the idea that you might not know best. You have to be interested in others. It’s a learning process. “It’s not all roses and rainbows, although there are plenty of those moments too. Amazing things happen in community that would never happen living  alone.”

Because living in community takes so much skill and patience, Jacqueline argues, it is not for those who are seeking to heal themselves, or fill a void. You have to arrive with a healthy sense of self. People with emotional maturity and self-esteem. The other skills can be developed if you’re willing to roll up your sleeves.”

Between the two extremes – Austyn’s strict co-buy deal and Jacqueline’s generational intentional community – there are plenty of homebuyers across qathet and BC trying out new models of sharing costs.

Is it ideal? It’s not as easy as just buying a home with your average income, as most people did in the 1980s. But we’re not returning to the economy of the 1980s anytime soon, and co-buying is a way for first-time buyers to get into the market and move forward with their lives and their finances.

“Sometimes in life, you’ve got to do the crazy things,” said Austyn.

If qathet’s economy kept pace with the early 1980s: families should earn $73,563; houses should cost $151,640

If only! What the research for the above chart taught us is that collectively, we’re under-earning by quite a bit. Average family income here was $57,420 at last count, in 2020. According to the Bank of Canada’s inflation calculator, if wages had kept pace with inflation since 1982, the average family should be earning $73,563 this year.

To rub salt in this wound, families are earning significantly less today even with more two-earners (plus side-hustles) than they were 40 years ago with more single incomes. 

Average houses, if they’d kept pace with inflation, should cost well under $200,000. Instead, they’re three or four times that: $659,436.  

Top image credit: Hearthstone founder – the original visionary Mark Huddleston with member Lana Joy Parra and child Sebastian, at opposite ends of life (2020).

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