'We're in it together': These friends chose 'co-buying' to achieve homeownership—how they make shared lives and mortgages work

While homeownership is traditionally viewed as a quintessential rite of passage, for many millennials and Gen Z, the goal of buying a house feels out of reach.

A 2025 Bankrate survey found that 22% of aspiring millennial buyers could not find a property they could afford between 2020 and 2025 and had given up on buying a home. It was the highest percentage among all generations, with Gen Xers at 17%, Gen Zers and baby boomers at 12%.

Some other major obstacles to homeownership include high mortgage rates and low supply.

Amanda Pendleton, home trends expert at Zillow, says prospective homebuyers have had to get creative because they face two major hurdles: saving enough for a down payment and fluctuating mortgage interest rates.

More and more some young aspiring homebuyers are exploring an unconventional way to achieve that American dream: "Co-buying" with friends.

"Co-buying was not a thing a decade ago. This is in response to the affordability crisis we're dealing with," Pendleton tells CNBC Make It.

While some experts say co-buying has become a viable option for homeownership, it's not for everyone. The majority of homebuyers are still taking the more traditional route, with 52% co-buying a property with a spouse/partner and 8% co-buying with a relative, according to Zillow.

In 2023, 14% of buyers co-bought with a friend. But that number dropped to 5% in 2025, according to the real estate marketplace.

Pendleton says one reason the rate of co-buying has fallen in the past few years is that rent prices have stabilized, while mortgage interest rates are almost double what they were during the Covid-19 pandemic.

"The barrier to entry for homeownership is that much higher. You need to stay in your home a lot longer in order to make that purchase cost-effective," she says.

"The idea of buying with a friend sounds great for maybe a few years but knowing that you need to stay in that home now for eight to 10 years might make buying a little less desirable."

Millennials represent the largest generation of people sharing homes with non-relatives, data shows.

In the notoriously expensive housing markets of New York City and Washington, D.C, two pairs of friends found a solution in co-buying. And on the other side of the country, in Portland, Oregon, two couples found it to be the most attainable path to homeownership.

Here's a look inside their unique arrangements and why they say that sharing a life — and a mortgage — works.

Ayesha Rascoe, 40, and Jasmin Melvin, 39, have been friends for over 15 years. In early 2025, the two found themselves divorced and looking for new places to live. Both women work as journalists in the D.C. area — Rascoe is the host of NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday and the weekend host of Up First — and decided to explore buying a home together in Washington, D.C.

"We weren't first-time home buyers," Rascoe says.

"For us, the bigger thing was to have the village,"  Melvin adds.

The pair bought a five-bedroom, four-bathroom house for $905,000. They put down 15% down payment of $133,015, and split the cost 60/40. Rascoe and Melvin signed a 30-year mortgage and divide the little over $6,000 monthly payment the same way they split their down payment.

To protect themselves, the friends entered into a joint tenancy, meaning they each own 100% of the home.

"If something were to happen to one of us, the other person will then solely own the home," Melvin says. "We had to make that decision early on."

"It's untraditional, but you take much bigger risks when you're falling in love and getting married to someone who you've known for maybe three or four years," Rascoe adds.

Buying the house together has helped the women create a village, Rascoe says, and they consider themselves to be platonic co-parents.

"We are raising our kids together. We're partners in that and we are taking care of all five of these kids. We're in it together," Rascoe adds.

When friends and co-workers Gilbert Nyantakyi and Kwame Nkrumah, both 28, realized that they couldn't afford to buy a place in New York City individually, they decided their best strategy would be to go in on a deal together.

Nyantakyi and Nkrumah both work in finance and tech in New York City. Friends for 18 years, the two consider themselves brothers, they say, and have always shared an interest in real estate, they just didn't know the best way to get into the market.

When the two started their home search, they knew they wanted to buy a property with multiple units so they could live in one and rent out the others. They said they didn't want to leave New York City, but initially started looking to buy outside the Big Apple because they didn't believe they could afford anything else.

They toured properties in the tri-state area like Newark, Union City and Jersey City, New Jersey.

"Funny enough, those markets were actually starting to appreciate in value as well. We just thought it made the most sense to come back to our homes, where we're used to," Nyantakyi says. "Why purchase elsewhere for a very expensive price when we could purchase in our home city for a very similar price."

In 2023, after a difficult, months-long process, the two bought a three-family home in the Bronx for $730,000. As a first-time buyer, Nyantakyi qualified for a Federal Housing Administration loan, which allowed the friends to make a minimum down payment of 3.5% or $25,550.

The friends live in a three-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment in the house. Their monthly mortgage is about $5,300, and they use part of the rental income from the other two apartments to pay it and then split whatever is left equally, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.

"From the very start, we knew that this investment would yield the most return after we both move out. If life happens, for example Kwame gets married, I get married and for one reason or the other, we have to move out," Nyantakyi says. "[I] guess that's when the real investment starts."

"One thing about me and Gilbert is that we kind of do everything together. We go to church together, we play golf together. It's been more so an easier journey being roommates as well as business partners," Nkrumah says.

Jendayi Brooks-Flemister, 29, and their partner had been looking for a place to buy in the Portland area for a while, but they said they kept running into issues: Either the house was too far from the neighborhood they wanted to live in, or it needed too much work, which they weren't willing to take on.

"The housing market wasn't working in our favor. It wasn't feeling doable," Brooks-Flemister says.

Friends of Brooks-Flemister and their partner — also a couple — moved to the city around that time and were looking to buy as well. Brooks-Flemister says the couples began to wonder: what if, instead of searching separately, they looked at multifamily homes together?

After months of looking, the four found a duplex with four bedrooms, two bathrooms and a yard in their ideal neighborhood.

"It was kind of like this magical moment had appeared," Brooks-Flemister says. "And it would have been cheaper than if we had bought two homes separately."

In 2024, the couples bought the house for $735,000. Each of the four owns 25% of the property. The group have a monthly mortgage payment of $5,700 or $2,850 per household, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.

Brooks-Flemister says co-buying was the best decision they've made and they don't have any regrets about it.

"I wish I had thought about it sooner," Brooks-Flemister says. "The community alone is the biggest piece of all of it, and it's going to keep growing. I can't wait to see how big our village gets."

Just like with a romantic partner, co-buying with friends can get complicated.

Andy Sirkin, attorney at SirkinLaw APC, says that since there can be many unknowns, it's better to cover your bases before closing the deal.

Pendelton and Sirkin both advise getting everything in writing before co-buying with anyone, even close friends.

"I often tell people that they should think of the agreement as a form of insurance," Sorkin says. "There's a lot of people out there without agreements. What's the problem with that? Well, they're just taking more risk."

An example of an agreement co-buyers can put in place include a TIC (Tenancy in Common) agreement. It allows multiple parties to have ownership in a property but if one dies, the ownership transfers to their estate and not the other co-owners. A TIC allows each co-owner to choose who will inherit their ownership interest upon death.

There is also a joint tenancy agreement, which requires each co-owner's interest to pass to the other co-owners upon death.

"If they ever do have a conflict and don't have an agreement, the cost of that in terms of the impact on their lives is going to be much worse than if they were strangers because now we're talking about a very long-standing and important relationship between the parties that could get undermined or disrupted or maybe ruined altogether," Sirkin says. "That's much bigger than any economic impact that the lack of agreement might have."

Rascoe and Melvin have a joint tenancy agreement in place, and are working on getting other protections in writing as well, they say.

"Getting lawyers involved is genuinely just to make sure that someone else is aware of the agreement," Brooks-Flemister says.

Co-buying is a trend that is here to stay and will continue to be a way for people to achieve the American dream of homeownership, Pendleton says.

"When you're buying a home, you're buying a tiny piece of Earth and there's only so much of that to go around. Over time, home values do tend to rise, and homeownership allows you the opportunity to start building equity and to take advantage of that wealth-building potential. A lot of people want a piece of that even if they may not be in the perfect state of life for that to happen," Pendleton says.

"As long as the barriers to entry of homeownership remain high, I think we're going to see people come up with these new creative ways to make it work for them."

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