With home prices high, some buyers are asking, “What if I didn’t have to cover the down payment alone?” By taking a team approach—pooling funds with friends, family or even strangers—the cost of homeownership could feel more manageable.
About 60% of renters say they’d consider co-buying with friends, with interest strongest among younger generations who are concerned about housing affordability, according to a Rocket Mortgage survey conducted earlier this year.
Years before co-buying gained traction, Nikki Merkerson, then a mortgage broker in New York City, had the idea to team up to get into homeownership. She found a Brooklyn multifamily brownstone she viewed as both a “dream home” and a strong investment, but she couldn’t qualify for financing on her own. She partnered with a coworker to purchase the property, structuring it as a formal partnership with defined ownership shares, later buying out her partner and keeping the home long-term for her family.
The experience shaped her view of co-buying as not only an opportunity to own but also a wealth-building strategy. It ultimately led her to create Pairgap, a platform designed to structure co-buying arrangements.
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“The housing market is getting so expensive, especially in high-cost cities,” Merkerson says. “As it gets more and more expensive to buy, more people are co-buying together,” combining incomes and assets to qualify for a mortgage.
Tech Companies Step Into the Co-Buying Space
Jointly buying among friends and family—once largely done informally—is now increasingly getting supported by technology platforms that can help match buyers, even assess compatibility and structure formal agreements to avoid problems later on. Real estate professionals are turning to these tools to connect buyers to co-buying partners—whether for a first home, investment property or second home.
But co-buying arrangements can come with added complexity: What happens if one person wants to sell? How is equity divided? What if disagreements arise, or if someone’s financial situation changes?
Pairgap, for example, structures co-buying agreements through what Merkerson calls a “real estate prenup.” The platform also uses personality and risk-based assessments to help match co-buyers, helping to reduce potential conflicts before buyers ever reach the closing table.
“We have a real estate prenup that goes over all the roles and responsibilities of each buyer, what percentage of ownership buyers have and also an exit strategy,” she says. Also, real estate agents remain essential, helping to identify suitable properties and closing transactions for shared ownership or investment opportunities.
Here are a few co-buying tech platforms emerging:
- Pairgap: Matches co-buyers—friends, families, investors and strangers—and provides tools to create and manage co-ownership agreements while real estate professionals handle the property search and closing.
- Pacaso: A luxury second-home co-ownership platform that partners with real estate professionals, who remain involved in transactions, while Pacaso manages structure, scheduling and co-ownership.
- CoBuy: Software for group purchases, budgeting and ownership agreements, with real estate professionals supporting transaction execution.
- Joynt: A co-ownership management platform that provides support throughout the process, while also working alongside agents and brokers.
Pitching a Different Way to Buy
With buyers entering co-ownership for different reasons, Merkerson says co-buying is spanning a wide range of relationships and situations.
“We get a lot of couples coming in, family members going in together or even a single mom with adult children recently,” she says. “They bought a mother-daughter property in New Jersey.” She also notes growing investor participation with co-buying arrangements used for property investment. “It’s really people across the board doing this,” she adds.
At its core, Merkerson says, co-buying expands access to homeownership by sharing financial responsibility.
“You may not be able to qualify on your own so combining incomes increases buying power,” she says. “It makes the monthly payments more affordable because you’re splitting the payments. So, if you have two buyers or even four buyers, you can split those payments, and it becomes more affordable monthly.”
Similarly, companies like Pacaso are formalizing shared ownership, but its platform is geared to co-buying purchases for second homes and vacation properties.
“You can buy as little as an eighth or as much as one half of the home,” Austin Allison, co-founder and CEO of Pacaso, told Real Estate Today. “We help manage the entire experience. … The co-owners own 100% of the home … as that home appreciates in value, you and your co-owners get your pro-rate share of the appreciation,” he says, highlighting the difference between co-buying through his company versus a timeshare arrangement.
Plus, he says, real estate agents remain central to the co-buying process. “We actively partner with real estate agents,” Allison says. “It works very similar to a whole home transaction,” but Pacaso handles managing the co-buying relationship among the parties.
Allison believes several forces are driving the growing interest in co-ownership. “The first is housing affordability,” he says. “When things become less affordable, it makes sense for people to pool resources together.” He also points to lifestyle shifts, particularly among luxury buyers: “They’re looking for hassle-free ownership.”
Plus, Merkerson views a growing acceptance over the idea of co-ownership—a shift she believes is well underway.
“Co-buying is the future, and it’s the present,” she says. “We’ve already done it in the past, but I think it’ll be more mainstream because of technology” that is helping to bring more people together and structure these deals. To a growing number of buyers, co-buying is opening doors that would otherwise remain closed.
