LoanManGuy Investor Field Guide

The CoLiving Blueprint

One house.
Five rent checks.

A normal 5-bedroom rental produces one monthly payment. Rent the rooms individually, and the same house can produce five separate income streams.

Whole-house rent

$2,450/mo

One lease, one payment

Rented by the room

$6,750/mo

5 rooms × $1,350

Same house. Same mortgage. Very different revenue model.

The rest of this page shows you where the math works, and where it doesn’t.

Base case: $311 a week per room, gross, before vacancy, utilities, furniture and the mortgage, all of which are real.

Before it’s obvious

Most investors still aren’t looking at houses this way.

Airbnb sounded weird. Ride sharing sounded weird. New models usually do, right up until they don’t.

Renting your spare room to a stranger sounded like a bad idea. So did getting in a car with a driver you’d never met. Both took years, both got fought over the whole way, and both ended up changing how people actually live.

CoLiving might be on that same track. Might be. I’m not going to pretend I know, and plenty of housing ideas never got past interesting.

What I can tell you is that people who study markets for a living have started counting this one. Grand View Research projects the global co-living market growing about 13.5% a year through 2030; Market.us projects about 15.4% a year through 2034.

Before you get too excited, look at what they’re actually counting. That’s big professionally run co-living buildings, a lot of them overseas. It is not a five-bedroom house rented by the room, and it tells you nothing about whether your deal works. All it tells you is that real money has started paying attention.

Here’s the part that matters. Both of those models spent years arguing with city councils, and this one will too. Which is why the first question on any house is what your city allows, not what the rooms rent for.

Sources: Grand View Research, Co-living Market Size, Share & Trends Report, 2025–2030; Market.us, Co-living Market, 2025–2034. Both are paid industry reports, and neither firm shows its work.

Why now

Housing got expensive. Really expensive.

And not for a small group of people. Half the renters in this country now hand over more than 30% of what they earn just to keep a roof over their head. The cheap apartments did not get pricier. A lot of them simply stopped existing.

So the question becomes pretty simple: what if we used the houses we already have a little smarter?

Rent a five-bedroom house to one family and you get one rent check for the whole thing. Rent it by the room and the same house can hold five working adults, each of them paying less than a whole apartment would cost them, and the owner potentially collecting more in total than one lease would ever produce.

Nobody has to build anything. The rooms are already there. Somebody just has to rent them one at a time.

49%of renters spend more than 30% of their income on rent and utilities: 22.7 million households, and 12.1 million of those spend more than half.
9.3Mfewer apartments renting under $1,400 a month than there were in 2014.
9% vs 30%how much renter incomes rose since 2001, against how much rents rose.

Now the honest part

I am not going to tell you this fixes the housing shortage. It doesn’t. It is one thing that works in some markets, on some houses, for some owners, and whether yours is one of them comes down to what your city allows and what the property’s own numbers say.

That is what the rest of this page is for.

Figures: Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, America’s Rental Housing 2026, using 2024 data.

Run your own deal

$80,860 in rent.
Here’s what you actually keep.

The opportunity is not more rent. It is learning how to look at a normal house differently. Five rooms at a $311 blended rate is what it looks like on paper. Vacancy, running costs and the mortgage all come out of that first.

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 5 bedrooms 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 below, and you can move every assumption in it yourself.

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.

Line by line

Where the rent goes.

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, the money to do the conversion may already be sitting in it. A HELOC is a second loan against that equity, so your first mortgage stays exactly where it is: same rate, same payment. During the draw period you pay interest only on what you actually use. Whether it makes sense depends on your equity, your rate and what the conversion costs. I originate these directly, and I’ll tell you if the numbers don’t work.

Start a HELOC application →

Get the full version. Free.

This is the short version.

Some of the best things in life are free.
So is this Blueprint.

About 60 pages. Real numbers. Real deal-killers. Nothing to buy at the end.

01Is this house even a candidate?

Bathrooms · layout · parking · occupancy limit

02What each room is really worth

Priced by room size · by market · off real listings

03Markets that die on the rules

Six markets, scored twice · yield, then compliance

04How you pay for it

Buy · convert · house hack · BRRRR · DSCR · your equity

05Running it once they move in

Screening · nonpayment · lawful removal · PadSplit

06What kills the deal early

Occupancy caps · licensing · the insurance trap

This isn’t easy money. It’s a housing model worth understanding before everybody understands it.

I built it so you can look at a listing and know what questions to ask before you get emotionally attached to the deal.

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.

Why is this free?

I originate loans. I don’t sell information decks.

I made this for the investor looking for new ways to create revenue. Is CoLiving for everyone? Probably not. New ideas seldom are.

But sometimes the people willing to look at a property differently see an opportunity everyone else walked right past.

This Blueprint is for you to use. Run properties through it. Learn the model. Figure out what works and what doesn’t.

When you’re ready to buy, refinance, or fund a deal, I’d like the chance to earn your business.

That’s it. No course. No upsell. No catch.

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. Prefer to talk? Book a call instead. Jason Andrews, NMLS #102708.