Is House Hacking Dead in 2026? How to Find Deals That Still Work

0:00Evan found a $660,000 triplex near Philadelphia and he thought, man, that looks like a terrible house hack. So today, we're putting it to the test. Should he buy, house hack, or just rent in the greater Philadelphia area? What's going on, everybody? I'm Scott Trench, host of The Bigger Pockets Money Podcast here today with also the host, the co-host, we're both co-hosts. Here in Evan Lawler, Evan, welcome back. Hey Scott, thank you so much for having me on today. I'm insanely excited. Before we get into today's discussion, I think we need to acknowledge that you're doing fine right now. The house hack is not really required for Evan to achieve his financial goals. The reason house hack is so discussed and so powerful is because for most people, housing is the dominant reason why they're able to save or not save. If you're earning $60,000 a year, for example, my guess is, money you spend on rent would hurt a lot more than what I believe is a six-figure plus income that you're earning.

1:04For me, that was the case. When I was 25, I was making $48,000 a year and that was not as much as you are even adjusting for inflation. I had to attack housing in order to get ahead and that's why it was so important. The question is, can a house hack in today's environment, in 2026, actually support that? It actually lower the cost to live so that your savings rate can be increased by at least some of that offset over renting either your own place or with a roommate. That's the question. I think that's why it's so important. I would love to see if we can do it in Philadelphia either with the deal you sent me or another deal. Absolutely. I'm excited to get into it. Evan, how much are you paying for rent right now and why is renting more appealing than house hacking to you intuitively? I'm currently paying $1200 per month in rent, but I'm upgrading next month to $1500 per month in rent. Housing is on my mind. I'm thinking about house hacking, looking at listings. I kind of want to leave no stone unturned in my journey to financial independence as I pursue coast fire and maybe in the future traditional financial independence.

2:06I've heard so much about house hacking that I really wanted to dive in and see if it's still possible today. This is a great topic. I think this is awesome. We did a show a while back about the differences in our approach. Might be being an all-out approach to early financial freedom, house hacking, startup vibes, sales commissions, those types of things, try to drastically increase my income, keep my expenses low and just get to a true financial independence number as early as I could. Around age 25 was when I was really in the thick of it. You're taking a different approach. You're renting and keeping your expenses very low, but working more traditional career and you're working just to get to coast fire, a couple hundred thousand dollars by 30. Still a very ambitious financial target, but not the several million dollars needed for permanent financial independence at that point. A lot of advantages to your approach. One of the big push facts I mentioned on the show where we are discussing these differences was the house hack. I said, man, Philadelphia seems like a great opportunity to house hack the greater Philadelphia area. It seems that there's a lot of opportunities. The prices are low. The rent to price ratios are good.

3:06It seems like as good or better opportunity than in Denver 10 years ago. You thought about that and smiled and nodded politely, I believe. Then you went and actually looked it up and said, I looked at that and the best deal I can find in the market right now seems to be this one and it stinks as a house hack. Why don't we talk about that and did I get that right? Is that the right framing for this? Absolutely. You got a hundred percent right. We talked about house hacking. I don't think you can be in the financial independence space without hearing about house hacking. You certainly can't be around Scott Trench without hearing about house hacking. It definitely put the thought in my mind, had me thinking about it poking around at the listings. I found this one and sent it to you in an email randomly and said, correct me if I'm wrong, but this is a horrible house hack. That's what spurred this conversation. Let's take a look here and let's analyze this house hack as a rental property. I'm going to pull up my screen and share it here. We have not yet done this analysis. This is the house hack. It's a $660,000 triplex, I believe, multifamily in Westchester.

4:10Tell me about Westchester as a neighborhood relative to where you live now. I don't know the neighborhoods in Philadelphia very well. Yeah. Westchester is a suburb of Philadelphia. It may be even a little bit outside of a suburb in Chester County. It's just outside of the radius of the area, but it's not too far away and this is one of the listings outside of the town. The town has a university there, Westchester University. It's a really desirable and pretty expensive place to live. This is south of Westchester, which is also in the same direction as the university. So I wasn't totally surprised to see that there is a triplex, but when I was looking through the description and looking at the list price, I was surprised at the numbers because it just didn't seem to pass the basic rules that I've begun to pick up being in the community. So tell me about what your observations were, what your back of the napkin analysis was like on this place. By the way, somebody seems to have liked at some price because it's under contract now just a few days later. Well, there you go. Yeah, there you go. I didn't even see that before. But my back of the napkin math was just following the 1% rule.

5:13So the list price here is $660,000, which I think the 1% rule tells us that you would expect then all the units to rent out for $6,600 per month. And then looking in the description, they had the units listed. So it's two one-bedroom units and one two-bedroom unit. And the two one-bedrooms were about $1,200 each. And then the one two-bedroom was like 1850 or something like that. So a little over $4,000, I think $4,200 per month in total rents, which seemed too low to justify the cost. This triplex is interesting because one of the units, the big one, is a one-bed two-bath unit. And that's being listed for $1800 a month. It may or may not get that. Units two and three are both occupied. And they're one-bed one-bath units currently rented for $1225 and $1200 a month. And those leases run through summer of next year. Those are the three properties.

6:13It's serviced by one electric meter, which means you're going to have to charge utility fee to the tenants or absorb those costs as the landlord. And then some other items are individually metered here with an electric hydronic heating, for example. So, I think that's a fair weather house hack from what I would take a look at. I don't know the Philadelphia market, but this is presumably the one that you popped out to you because it was among the better opportunities you could find in a cursory search in the greener Philadelphia area, is that right? Yeah. It was on the surface, potentially a more desirable option. You know, I think the core problem here is if you were to get a mortgage, let's say you were put 5% down here, let's do a little mortgage calculator. We're going to do two sites here for this analysis. First is biggerpocketsmoney.com, and we're also going to go to biggerpockets.com. Here you go. Biggerpocketsmoney.com, we're going to go to the mortgage calculator here, and we're going to go to the cost estimator. This is basically a tool I built. It's a little simple tool. You shouldn't take it as a source of truth here. But it's just a little calculator that gives you a snapshot of today's rates. It's not today's rates. It's within the last week. I think it's updated on the Thursdays.

7:14And it tells you what a good rate is right now for someone with your credit score in the last week for mortgages. So we're going to use a 30 year fixed mortgage. We're going to get a $630,000 mortgage. This you can tell if your quote is good. This is what I was attempting to do here. It's like a quick sanity check against a lender's quote. They'll probably complain about why it's not right or whatever. But I use it as an entity check and see if I'm getting a good deal or not. So $630,000 loan amount, the interest rate, we're going to have at 6.66% here. Loan terms going to be 30 years, and you've got an excellent credit score, right Evan? Yes, of course. OK, so in this scenario, an excellent rate would be a 6.4% mortgage. The average rate would be about 6.6 effective rate here. Here's a fun fact. You're not just buying a house. You're marrying the neighborhood, the commute, the noisy street, all of it. Till death or a very motivated realtor, do you part? That's the kind of real talk you get on own it with Angie Hicks, the new podcast from Angie Co-Founder Angie Hicks.

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9:20something amazing. Get more with Northwest registered agent at Northwest registered agent.com slash money free. When's the last time you enjoyed checking your finances? Well, Monarch is trying to change that. Open it up in a couple of minutes, you know, exactly where you stand. With your spending, your goals, your net worth, your investments, everything, all in one place. Those wherever you go, quick check in on your phone between meetings or check the bigger picture on your laptop on Sunday night. Everything sings, everything refreshes whenever you want. Use the code pockets at monarch.com to get your first year of Monarch core, half off at just $50. That's 50% off your first year at monarch.com with the code pockets. Let's go to the rental property calculator here. This is the bigger pockets rental property calculator we've had it for years. We'll put this down as a $660,000 purchase price. We're going to have 7% closing costs. So we're going to put down 5%. We're going to get interest rate of 6.66%.

10:21Gross monthly income is going to be 4200. We're going to have property taxes of 7800. We're going to have insurance of 2650. We're going to have repairs and maintenance. We're going to assume 5%. But capital expenditures at 5%. We'll put vacancy at 5%. We'll put management fees at 10%. This one we will pay electricity. So let's put, what's like a typical electricity bill in the affiliate area for apartment of your size. What do you pay? My apartments like $80 or something. Okay. We'll put 300 bucks then, assuming I'm going to do a little bit more. You pay gas? No. I'm going to put another 200 bucks for gas. Is water cheap out there or is expensive? I don't know. I don't know either. We don't pay for that either. Water is expensive out here, but I'll be going to say it's 200 bucks because it rains a lot. And Philly Garbage is that probably included in property taxes out there? I have no idea. I'm in a department, so I don't even know. Okay. This is your problem here. You're going to be strongly negative cash flow. But if we reduce this loan amount, all of a sudden we get closer and closer to zero or even strongly positive at various points here. Does that make sense, Evan, here? How the down payment works out? And we've used very conservative assumptions now or pretty conservative assumptions for

11:25parts of this analysis. Right. Yeah. That makes sense. So you come with more cash, so you have less leverage. So there's a smaller mortgage cost. So then by comparison, you have higher relative rents. So then you end up with positive cash flow at some point. That's right. So I necessarily want to buy this property really at this price at all in this house act situation. It just, it does change the analysis. That's the biggest takeaway I think here is is that the loan amount makes the property work or not from a cash flow perspective in the near term. And that may be a very uncomfortable answer to does house hacking still work. The other thing I want to point out is right now, I don't know the Philadelphia market. I don't know. You probably know it better than me. And I, you know, I'm a real estate investor. I just don't know. I'm not saying that the market's different right now, but my guess is that like many other markets around the country, it is a little bit of a seller's market transitioning to a buyer's market, right? They're, they're moving into that direction, which means at least in Denver, for example, you see a lot of properties that are listed much higher than the price that they'll actually

12:28sell for. One of the challenges that I think discourages a lot of people in their search for a house hack, a rental property, or even a primary home is they look at what's for sale right now, right? And what's for sale right now doesn't look great because that dynamics. So let's, let's actually look at the Philadelphia area. Let's look at only multifamily. I like to put a minimum price because I presume that a multifamily property that's less than 300K has an issue. You know, something going on that is not going to be interesting to us in this particular analysis. And it's 350,000 to $700,000. And you can see we have a lot of options in the greater Philadelphia area, which is why I was so surprised to see that. So like, for example, I don't know this neighborhood, but I see a $350,000 multifamily duplex it looks like here for sale in this area. Is this a good area? I live outside the city in the suburbs, so I don't know the neighborhoods of Philadelphia super well. Maybe we'll put a shout out here. If anybody is an expert in Philadelphia real estate, please reach out to Evan at Bigger

13:32PocketsMoney.com and Scott at BiggerPocketsMoney.com. Evan may not buy a duplex, a house hack of any time. Like he maybe, well, justified in not doing that. But let's help him actually understand the market, maybe as a, in a follow up episode. But my guess is that there's a lot of properties in the Philadelphia area that do a lot better than the one that you sent me, which probably doesn't work unless you put down a huge pile of cash. And why would you to move way out of the city and, you know, commute in a place that requires that? Because you did not find the best deal currently for sale in the Philadelphia market. And my feedback to you and everyone listening is, I think you went about it the wrong way. I think the way you could, you do this is you say, what does a good house hack look like for me? It's going to be in one of these areas or this radius of town. It's going to have these set of conditions. It's going to allow me to get close to that 5% down payment and still have rents that cover at least my mortgage payment, property taxes and insurance, MPMI, or significantly offsets those. It would work as a rental property the day I moved out.

14:34Like let's put together that ideal house hack. And then don't start your search by looking at what is currently for sale in the greater Philadelphia area. Look at what has sold. So this is what's actually transacting right now in this area, right? So here's a $440,000 four bed, four bath, 1500 square foot property downtown in Philadelphia. What do you think this would rent for? Do you have any idea? I have no idea. It looks super nice. That's a real nice look in place. True. Let's look at this. So this sold within the last 12 months, just about a year ago, I bet your prices have not moved much here. And it's in this pocket of town. So let's look at for rent now. So in this same pocket of town, a two bed unit is rent in for like 1.9. This might be literally be that same place. Yeah, they rent to get for 1850 right now. That's way closer to this like 1% rule. It's not quite there. But way closer than the property that you showed me and actually sold. So we know what's translating here, right?

15:34And so that would be my recommendation to you is make a fictionally perfect property that you would buy. That would be a no brainer for you and see if it exists. And you can keep refining this criteria with an agent locally or in Zillow or in these various tools and see, has anything sold that's met my criteria, anything even close. If it hasn't, then you know you're in fairy land and house hacking certainly doesn't work. If it has sold or a bunch of them have sold, you can keep narrowing your criteria until my speed spot is you get to 5 to 10 in the last 90 to 180 days, right? 5 in the last 90 or 10 in the last 180 days. So once you get to 5 to 10 in the last 90 to 180 days, you know that your property is going to hit the market every 2 and a half weeks on average. And that's an average, right? So this next month, no deals may hit the market that makes sense that hit your buy box. Next month, 2 may hit in the same weekend, right? What you do is you meet with your agent or you know, you create these searches on here. The simplest one is just call an agent and talk to them and help refine this process. And then they'll send you the next one that hits the market and you react instantly to

16:36buying that, right? And then you re-analyze that you know what you're looking for, the winner hits and you know it works because you've looked at all the ones that have sold just like it. You know it's a good price because that's by definition a good deal. It's all written and you know, pre-articulated ahead of time and you just react and that's how you become a very fast offer. That's why people are able to transact on these good deals within a day or two of hitting the market. You're going fishing, but you're lying in the water with your agent and then you're reacting instantaneously. So again, I don't know if Philadelphia is going to work for you or not. I speculated that on that prior podcast, but I'd be really interested to see if you went through this process, whether or not you actually find a good deal in your area that would make sense for you. What's your thoughts on this? That's a super interesting breakdown. It sounds like I went about it a bit backwards. So I started with what is available listed today, not what the price it will sell for. I now understand what is listed today and then looked at those options and kind of did some numbers and realized that it wasn't going to make any sense. But instead, you're recommending that I start with, okay, if I could use a magic spell

17:38and have the perfect house hack sitting right next to me, what would it look like. And then once you define that, it makes your search criteria so much easier. It makes it easier to work faster, to begin with the end in mind. And that makes a whole lot more sense for me. And it was not what I was doing at all. So that is extremely helpful. Everything cascades from all that, right? Like fictional perfect property or is there even like a cut off above which you'd be slightly interested? Because I agree. Like you shouldn't be interested in that property. Somebody was. It made sense for somebody. Right. There's a use case for it. It's not being marketed at a crazy price. It's not failing to clear. But it doesn't make any sense for this. I'm 25 and want a house hack to build wealth strategy, you know, at least in your situation. But that does not mean that the area does not have that. And again, by the way, I think this process of fictional perfection works in a lot of areas. I used to use it for hiring executives. Before we'd hire an executive at bigger pockets, I would say, what does a fictional perfect executive look like for this? I wrote the job description and their requirements.

18:41And then I'd hand it to an executive search firm or our HR team, depending on the scope of that particular hire. And say, let's go find that those folks. Here's my tier one candidate list. Here's a second-ground draft pick list. Here's, you know, and let me go out. And you'd be amazed at how often, once you do this, that what you're looking for comes into your worldview. But I don't know, just for your consideration, is a default process for many high stakes decisions? Yeah, I really like the thought process and the systematic approach to kind of developing like what is that next move. If I can ask a question about, we talked about cash flow and we talked about mortgage amounts. At what point, what's the other side? So if your goal is cash flow, obviously the answer is zero mortgage, right? Because then you get as much cash in as possible with no cost of the mortgage. But at what point is it too much cash down, right? And how do you balance that with, I want to put down the smallest amount possible versus I want the maximum cash flow? I think a perfect house hack. So you're asking me, what's a perfect house hack?

19:42That's, that's, that's how I'm going to interpret what you just asked here. The perfect house hack is going to allow you to put down three and a half to five percent. And it doesn't have to cash flow. It just has to significantly decrease your cost of living and then also work as a rental if you were to move out in a reasonable timeframe, right? So it may be too much to ask of the market to say, I'm going to move into that, that property. The other two units are going to fully cover the entire mortgage property taxes insurance, expenses, you know, and, and conservative estimation of catbacks and those types of things. But it may not be too much to ask that you're paying how much in your new place that you're about to move into next month, 1500. It may not be too much to ask that your cost to live goes from $1500 a month to $400 a month. That's real cash flow to you. That's $1,100 a month spread between what you're paying for the rent versus what you be collecting from these areas. And here's the, the circular thing here that makes house hacking really hard is the true rental property must be underwritten very conservatively.

20:44And it should be and you should have those those conservative assumptions in to the analysis of a house hack for a long term rental. But during the time you live in there, like you're going to fix it up yourself. If there's a P trap, which is the wastewater from a sink, right? You're not going to have the plumber go and fix that for your tenant or for yourself while you live in a house hack. You're going to fix that after work one day. And that's a real advantage. It saves you real dollars, right? It's one trip to home depot, maybe three because it's very, you know, you always mess it up the first time. And that's going to save you real time as it develops that a little bit of that skill for, you know, that that's very valuable and later real estate investing. And that's a real cost reduction during the time when you're house hacking in the property. That will not be there once you move out and convert it into a rental. Those things should be in the back of your mind that there's a little bit of quote, unquote cheating in the house hacking stage on the cost side because you can do some of the work that's reasonable to do yourself yourself. You can manage the property yourself. For me, it would have been preposterous not to manage the property that I was house hacking in because there's no like legal protection from, you know, the LLC or the property manager.

21:45If I live next door, I clearly combining personal property and investment there. I had very little to protect at the time. So there was no reason to do that. And it was very easy, right? You just treat your neighbor reasonably well, respond to their issues, shovel the snow, that kind of stuff. It was really not a challenge in a meaningful way to manage the property myself. That may be there in a few years as you move out. So there's like two sets of analysis. What is it going to look like while I'm in the property? And we can acknowledge that those realities exist, even as we underwrite them conservatively for a long term hold. And eeks out at least a little bit of a positive cash flow as a true rental. That's what an ideal house hack would look like to me. And then on top of that, let's say there's a lot of options available, then we can begin saying, well, I kind of want to live here. Like this is what I would like for my lifestyle. And, you know, yadda, yadda, yadda. So I recognized two problems with my approach, which was one, I was not systematically approaching what does the ideal house hack look like. And I think I was also looking for too much. Like I thought that in order to have an effective house hack, you have to be paying zero or

22:48near zero. But it sounds as though if you can get into a property that appropriately subsidizes your own living situation, it can be a huge win for wealth building. Yeah. My first house hack, I think my mortgage was $1,400. I've told this a million times. I can't remember the numbers now. But I think it was like $14,000 to $1,500 for my mortgage payment, all inclusive of all these things. And then one side rented for like $11.50. And then each side of ours would have rented for $5.50, right? So you add those up, you get to like $17. No, it wasn't perfectly for free, but it was significantly cheaper than if I was renting, even with a roommate, for example, that's a win. That's a real win. That's what I would encourage you to think through is, can I come back and look at the greater Philadelphia area and at least understand the cost or benefit of this decision. And then yes, you're right. That property you showed me would be a terrible house hack for you in this particular situation, even if you brought down a ton of cash and made it cash flow. Interesting. Okay. That's a whole other level of analysis and a systematic approach, not even just like

23:49here are the numbers for this property in a way that I wasn't understanding, but how do you evaluate the next property and where do you look for that? And another, like you went from what's for sale versus what's sold, that blew me away. Because people will ask for a lot, right? And then like, you know, it'll be sold at a much lower price. And so I'm definitely going to spend the next two hours poking around the Zillow map with the recently sold and kind of see how that changes things. This happens to every home buyer too, because what home buyers do, like the typical pattern for home buyers, everything looks so expensive. I wish I got that one. You know, and then there's nothing that makes sense in the market. They go look, and then one day out of nowhere, a deal that is better than what's currently on Zillow's active listings appears, and they buy that deal. And that's their mistake, right? This is how agents, I think a lot of agents just like make bank over the years is because the homeowner is anchored to the active listings in the market.

24:50And so when something comes on that's better than the other current active listings, that's the one that they buy. And they think they got a good deal. But if they actually zoomed out and looked at the sold inventory, they would know what a real good deal looks like and could have waited for that. The other thing that a lot of buyers make a mistake on when they're buying a house hack or home is they have like an artificial constructed time decay on their purchase, right? My lease ends on September 30th. Therefore I must buy a house that is ready to move in by September 1st. That drives me bonkers. I hate that approach. If people take away nothing else from this podcast, it's talk to your landlord and say, I'll pay you $200 a month more going forward for the next six months. If you let me go month to month, like every landlord's going to say, sure, congratulations, not every landlord, but, you know, a huge percentage of time they're going to say, sure. And now you're paying $200 a month, which is very, it's a zero basic. If you're running it at zero compared to your $660,000 duplex purchase here. You're almost certainly going to get a $10,20, 30, 50, $60,000 spread on the decision that

25:57is multiple six figures here because of the patience that you can bring to negotiations. You're not going to be rushed into a decision on offer based on this artificial timeline. So I think it's crazy that people do that. You want some more tips on buying here at your first house hack? Please watch this one. This is a fun one. I always like to go to Redfin for this one. And let's do Redfin Philadelphia housing market. We want the data one here. So this is the sales price for Redfin for the last several years. And you can see that it's a wave, right? It peaks sales prices peak in July. They're bottom in December or January, right? So look at this spread here, right? We're hovering over this number. In January, 2024, the median sale price was $230,000. Six months earlier in July, it was 270. That's a nearly 20% change in price. Now we've got July and August of 2024. That over saw not $275, $274. And then in February, by January, February, it was $255.

26:58So $274 to $255. That's about a 8%. Seasonally, within a six month period. It's going up every year. But seasonally, you can see this pattern reset every year. You can see it in almost every market, not every market. You can check and see how yours looks at Redfin's data. In July 2025, prices were 288,000. By January of this year, 2026, they were 269. This is a very predictable pattern. You can see it almost every year. When you buy a property in January or February at the bottom of this, right? It's usually January in most markets. This one seems to be February. It's basically the same. To me, what that says and what I've done many times in my life is go under contract between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Is it going to take you 30 days to close? You go talk about it with your parents, your family over Thanksgiving dinner, whatever. The day before Thanksgiving, they'll talk about business at the Thanksgiving dinner table. While you're watching the Eagles game maybe in the morning, I think they're playing this year in Thanksgiving. I wore my GoBird shirt because we're talking about Philadelphia today. I don't really know the market that well, but I know these concepts here that apply to many markets.

28:02If you talk about it with your family and then you go under contract and offer with your agent in that time period, you can have very little competition and you don't always, but you're very likely to get this benefit at buying on the cyclical trial inside of a market. You're very unlikely to get a good price if you buy in the July, August, June timeframe. That would be my next tip there is look at these and specifically time your house hack purchase, if you're ever interested in doing this around that trial. Interesting. That can be a huge difference in purchase price, which can compound year over year. If you were able to get that lower price simply by timing it correctly, that can be a huge benefit. Yeah, I think it's a big deal. I don't want to overstate it. It doesn't necessarily mean that every deal is going to be there. There's different types of properties that may turn back in these periods. I think it is a real factor and I have tended not always been perfect, but I've tended to try to buy in that time period. It also means you're moving in January. Nobody else wants to move in January, but Evan, you tough it out in the summer with no AC in your car. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

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31:11Same day coverage, no medical exam. You just answer a few health questions online. Up to $3 million in coverage, some policies as low as $30 a month. So building a two or three layer ladder that used to take a month of appointments is something you can knock out before your coffee gets cold. Get your free quote at ethos.com slash BP money. That is ETHS.com slash BP money. Application times may vary and rates may vary. How am I doing so far? Is this helpful? Is this starting to at least maybe make it worth considering? It's definitely making it worth considering and I had kind of rode off. I almost expected when I sent you that listing Scott that you would be like, Evan, you're right. The House hack is dead. There is no hope. But I'm realizing here that there's other layers to this approach. There's more to this analysis. And it's giving me a lot of hope as far as how to kind of look at this in a different way. Evan, great question. Thank you for bringing me that terrible deal as an example of why House hacken doesn't work. I do not think it has disproven House hacking in the greater Philadelphia area.

32:14Although it may be that we look through it and we find that House hacking really doesn't work for an Evan in the greater Philadelphia area right now. That could be the case. But if you are interested in exploring more, the process that I recommend for ruling out a House hack, for example, would be this first come up with a set of requirements using the rental property calculator and bigger pockets or a spreadsheet or whatever it is that works for you. That says here is what a fictional good House hack would look like for me. Then turn off the active listings on Zillow, go to the sold section on Zillow and see if anything has come remotely close to what would work. If nothing does, your search is over. You continue on your job and you have a great time as a renter. If it does, as I say, expect there will, then you begin poking around and looking at those analyzing them at a high level and talk to some agents in local area that represent investors and go and say, can we look at these? Who's bought this? Would it have worked? Are there any good deals? What can I expect to meet my requirements here? Then you set up a search. You begin actually looking at the live listings as they come on and refine. This is an iterative process.

33:16You don't come up with one shot here, but you refine it. And as you get more and more comfortable with what a good deal looks like, you get ready to act. You commit to buying, I'm going to buy the next good deal that meets my criteria in this area. I'm going to offer it on it at least. When the listing comes in from your agents' auto-generated search, you don't leave work immediately, but you can see your dinner plans and you go and look at the property that night because one of your pre-ordained winners has come on the market and you're ready to go and act on it. That's the basics of a process here. For extra credit, you can look at the short-term rental or rent by the room laws in your local area and see if that gives you yet another edge. For extra credit, you can time your house hack search so that you're doing lots of research in the summer and getting ready to count in the winter when the deals get much better. The sweet spot, the perfect might be statistically in that Thanksgiving-to-Christmas window, but the months leading up to and months shortly following that also are part of that cyclical trowel. That would be my process for your consideration for ruling this out. My guess is we're going to get a lot closer than this deal that you came in today with.

34:19Absolutely. That's a great process for breaking down how to approach the house hack and you firmly convinced me that the house hack is not dead. Even for Gen Z with house prices the way they are, with this level of analysis, maybe it might be something that doesn't work right this moment or next month or the month after that, but it could be something that over time you wait till an opportunity is there and then just as you said you pounce on that. Yeah, but I also haven't proven it's alive yet. Shrodinger's house hack. Yeah, you may decide, hey, I don't even care how good the numbers are. I don't want to do it. And that's totally valid, right? That's totally fine. Don't do it if you don't want to do it. But I would love to analyze it and see if there's one that would work for it heaven. Maybe we can look at the ones that have recently transactions. See, was there one that that might have worked in an area you would have been happy to live in? Absolutely. Well, cool. Should we get out of here, Evan? Yeah, let's get out of here. All right. That was today's episode of the bigger pockets money podcast. As a reminder, we have tons of resources going on at bigger pockets money.com. You can go to bigger pockets money.com slash resources and you can access to a whole bunch of financial independence stuff. Some of the real estate investing related tools that we just talked about today are over at bigger pockets.com.

35:25And some are available for free, like the mortgage calculator and some require a pro membership, like the rental property calculator. So go check those out over at bigger pockets.com if you're interested in the real estate investing angle of this. But that's our show today. Thank you so much for watching and listening wherever you are and we appreciate your support. Let us know Evan at bigger pockets money.com or Scott at bigger pockets money.com. If you think the house hack is alive or dead in your market and why see you next on. I'm skeptical of a lot of financial products, but life insurance isn't one of them at least not term life for the vast majority of you listening. Term life is simply the right answer. And the smartest way to buy it isn't one big policy. It's a ladder. Your need for coverage isn't flat. It declines over time. You've got a 30 year mortgage, a couple of young kids, maybe a spoused-man career. In 15 years, the mortgage is going to be smaller and the kids are almost launched. So instead of buying one giant 30 year policy you'll overpay for, you stack a few, say a 10 year, a 20 year, and a 30 year layer. So your total coverage steps down as your actual obligation step down. You only pay for what you actually need when you need it.

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