The growing co-buying trend is allowing some aspiring homeowners to escape the rental market and access the wealth generation of real estate investments.

Sitting around a large conference table at an Elevated Title office in South Denver, Ellie Adelman and Jaser Alsharhan are ready to finalize their purchase of a house. It’s the first time either has bought property, and they’re visibly excited, each poised with a pen to begin signing documents.

The two have been roommates since 2018, first in a big house with six other people, and then renting a three-bedroom apartment together for the last two years. Both work in nonprofits, and they were paying $2,500 (plus $75 each for parking) a month to rent. At 2,800 square feet, with five-and-a-half bedrooms and four full bathrooms, the house they’re purchasing together has a mortgage just slightly higher than their previous rent. As long as they can rent out at least one of the rooms, if not two, their living costs will be less than renting.

Adelman and Alsharhan are part of a growing co-buying trend, where two or more unrelated, unmarried people are increasingly purchasing property together. Nationally, co-buying increased by an estimated 771% between 2014 and 2021, gauged roughly by co-owners with different last names, according to the Wall Street Journal. Companies such as Pairadime, Live Work Denver, CoBuy in Seattle, and GoCo in Toronto have emerged over the past few years to facilitate co-buying.

Working with realtor Bri Erger, one of the three agents at Live Work Denver, along with founder Laura Cowperthwaite and Sarah Wells, Adelman and Alsharhan were able to purchase a single family home at market rate in an area known for unaffordability. Denver is the ninth most expensive metro area in the nation, according to an analysis by mortgage and home equity research firm HSH. To afford a traditional mortgage, a person needs to make at least $148,000 a year, if they have 20% down. If they only have 10%, the necessary salary jumps to about $173,000.

“The single-family home dominated landscape of today’s cities represents an outdated and implicitly racist housing model that caters pretty exclusively to a nuclear heteronormative family,” says Jonathan Cappelli, executive director of Neighborhood Development Coalition (NDC), a group of affordable housing nonprofits across the Denver-Metro region. That model doesn’t correspond to the many ways people choose to live with one another, he says.

“As a strategy, co-buying represents the decommodification of housing — radically increasing access to housing and encouraging communal forms of living. It lifts up an alternate vision of the role of homeownership rooted in collectivism and collective wealth-building.”

The co-buying model promoted by Live Work Denver and others isn’t house hacking — a way to generate passive income by renting out part of a property to cover the mortgage and make a profit. Co-buying, instead, provides an opportunity for some to escape the rental market and access the wealth generation of real estate investments. While most people who co-buy are drawn to it initially by the affordability aspect of it, Erger says, they soon realize the benefits of communal and community living.

“Traditionally speaking, people think I need my own space and my own property and my own thing. But if you’re trying to counter the capitalistic norms regarding ownership, I think this is a really good option,” Alsharhan says. “Personally, I know I live better with people around. I feel like I’m a part of something bigger than myself and also it feels good to feel supported.”

Independently, both Alsharhan and Adelman say they may have been able to buy their own condos in Denver if they had wanted. “But because we’d been around so many great examples of co-buyer power, we realized if we pooled our resources that we could afford something bigger,” Adelman says.

Read more at Next City.