LoanManGuy Investor Field Guide

The CoLiving Blueprint

Five doors.
One mortgage.
Very different math.

One family pays one monthly rent. Five adults in the same house create five separate income streams. They do not flinch at the price either, because a private room beats a studio they cannot afford. That is the whole trick, and it is also where most people get it wrong. Below is the unvarnished version.

One lease? Or 5 bedrooms each paying you rent every week?

A year of rent · 5 bedrooms at $311 a week · before vacancy

One lease

$29,400

Rented whole to one family
one lease

2.5 bedrooms = one lease

$80,860

Rented by the room
$16,172 per room annually

2.5 of 5bedrooms filled matches the whole-house lease. Everything above the dashed line is upside — +$51,460 a year of it, same house, same mortgage.

That is gross — before vacancy, utilities, furniture and the mortgage, all of which are real. The honest number is two screens down, and you can move every assumption in it yourself.

Run your own deal

The gross rent is not the story. The spread is.

Five rooms at a $311 blended rate is $80,860 a year on paper. Here is what actually reaches your pocket.

CoLiving Deal Calculator
1.00% of purchase price
+$2,128CoLiving cash flow / month
–$305Whole-house cash flow / month
28.4%Cash-on-cash return
2.7Rooms filled to break even
$89,900Total cash to close & furnish

Defaults are a low-tax, low-hazard market — about 1% of price in tax. Indiana and Ohio buyers should roughly double the tax figure. Furnishing is $5,100 a room plus $6,800 of common areas, and it sits in your cash to close, not your operating budget.

Where the rent goes

$47,797Net operating income / year
$22,266Mortgage principal & interest / year
$25,530Cash flow / year

That is your deal, on one screen.The Blueprint has the other fifty-nine pages — the room rate card, the state map, six markets scored, and the financing. A name and an email is the whole ask.

Get the full Blueprint — free ↓

The number nobody posts

How empty can it get before it hurts?

This is the honest test. Not what it earns full — what it survives half-empty. At the settings above, the house covers every expense and the entire mortgage payment once this many rooms are occupied:

2.7 of 5 rooms. Below that you are feeding the property out of pocket every month.

Deal-killer

If a property only works at 100% occupancy, it is not a deal. It is a bet. Underwrite it at three of five rooms and see whether you still want it.

If you already own a rental

That cash-to-close figure is the part that stops most people. If you already own a property, you may not need new money at all — the conversion budget can come out of its equity, interest-only during the draw, and your first mortgage never moves. I originate these directly.

Start a HELOC application →

Before you get excited

Three things kill these deals. Two are invisible on a listing.

01The unrelated-occupant cap

Most city codes let a single-family house hold "one family" — then define family as a capped number of unrelated adults, usually three, four or five. If your city says three, a five-bedroom room rental does not fit the definition. The fix, where there is one, is a different use classification with licensing attached — not a permit. Birmingham works out to two.

02Parking

Five residents, two driveway spaces. A parking complaint is the most common way a code officer first learns your house exists — which is how the zoning problem finds you. Buy near transit.

03The appraisal ignores your room income

You built an operating business; the appraiser values a house against house comps. The operating premium never shows up in the refinance. Bedrooms and bathrooms do.

Two of those three are invisible from the listing.The occupancy caps, the state-by-state removal rules and the insurance trap are all in the Blueprint, with the checks to run before you offer. Name and email, ten seconds.

Send it to me — free ↓

Get the full analysis

This is the short version.

The calculator above is yours — keep the link, send it to your agent, run every house you look at through it. The complete guide runs to about sixty pages and covers what this page only gestures at:

The room rate card — priced by room size and by market, because a 100 sq ft box and a primary suite are not the same product.

A state-by-state map — where removal is fast, where just-cause law makes it slow, and the nine states plus DC where this is genuinely hard.

Six markets scored twice — once on yield, once on compliance. The ranking inverts.

Five ways in — convert a rental you own, house hack, BRRRR, buy empty, or buy one already running. $32,300 to $89,900 of cash.

Jason Andrews · Mortgage broker, 19 years, access to 240+ lenders · NMLS #102708. Nothing to buy: no course, no coaching. I earn when a loan closes, which is why I'll tell you when a deal doesn't work.

Where should I send it?

Name and email, and the Blueprint opens on the next screen. No questionnaire to get through first.

No credit pull, nothing on your record, and I don't sell or share your details. You'll get the Blueprint immediately, then four follow-up emails about this strategy over about two weeks — unsubscribe from any of them in one click. Prefer to talk? Book a call instead. Jason Andrews, NMLS #102708.