What Is House Hacking

House hacking is living in one part of your property and renting out another. A spare bedroom. A converted basement apartment. A backyard ADU. One side of a duplex. Weekend Airbnb'ing your extra space while you're out of town. All of it counts, and the models are different enough that "house hacking" as a single idea can mean very different day-to-day lives.

The core promise is the same across all of them: lower your housing cost while building wealth, in the same house, at the same time. For most people that's possible because of owner-occupant financing — loan programs built for someone who's going to live in the property, with down payments an investor buying the same building could never touch.

This hub is where to start if you're still asking "does this actually work, and is it for me?" The articles below walk through the four ways people do this, how to tell if a space will actually rent, and the honest comparisons — house hacking against renting, against buying a straightforward rental, against Airbnb — so you can see where it fits before you get further in.

One note on language: house hacking is not the same thing as coliving. Coliving is a related but more advanced model, built around shared living as the product rather than a byproduct of owning a bigger property. Almost nobody starts there, and nothing on this page assumes you will.