Couples choose co-ownership
Four couples tame the ‘weird beast’ of co-owning a home. Kylie Klein-Nixon reports.
Four couples were hiking in Te Urewera when the idea first took root: What if we all bought a house together? The tight-knit group of Wellingtonians were tramping in Te Urewera when the idea first took root: What if we all bought a house together? Somewhere along the Waikaremoana track, lawyer Charlotte Shade planted the seed.
The group were all in their 30s, a mixed bag of professionals, instructors, technicians and a PhD student; co-ownership was on the rise, banks were open to accommodating multiple mortgages on a single property; and with their combined borrowing power the four couples could buy a million-dollar home on achievable mortgage repayments.
More importantly, perhaps most importantly, they could stay together.
‘‘I think people often immediately think that it is about saving money and getting on the property ladder but that really was not it,’’ says group spokeswoman Shade. ‘‘That is a really lovely silver lining, a byproduct of what we all wanted to do anyway.’’
Buying a home meant couples Rupert Snook and Jody Burrell, Charlotte Shade and Mike Robinson, Rosie Sievers and Jesse Kearse, and Thom Mellor and Grainne Patterson, who had already lived together in a rental, could stay together, an informal family of choice with shared values and outlook – a new kind of commune for the new-ish millennium.
‘‘We are definitely pretty values based people,’’ says Shade.
‘‘It is quite hard to move away from ‘this is my stuff and my space and my money and my everything, my needs’, to saying ‘if we look after everybody, then actually our needs will be met and we will have no scarcity of money and resources’ or all the other good things that you get from spending good times with other people.
‘‘It sounds very idealistic but I think we have a good shot at doing it.’’
And doing it they are. When we drop in to visit them, the group has been living in their new, four-bedroom home in a suburb of Lower Hutt for about a week.
A stylish, 1970s, chalet-style home, with multiple open plan levels, exposed beams and a chic steeply pitched roof, the home is spacious and cosy at the same time. The furniture is a selection of Mid-century hand-me-downs and op-shop finds.
Nestled in among the trees, there are bright green views of the Eastern Hills bush from almost every window, as well as a view of the harbour and Matiu/Somes Island. When we duck out on to the balcony for some pictures, a pı¯wakawaka flits around, darting through the fronds of a giant punga. It is almost like living in a treehouse. It was a ‘‘very, very fitting’’ home for them, says Shade, not the least because the flat where they were living when they hatched this plan was nicknamed The Treehouse.
‘‘The community itself feels really friendly. We have already met our neighbours.’’
The original idea was to try to be ‘‘a family of a new sort’’, living intentionally with sustainability and the environment in mind, communally at a time when couples are having fewer children or living alone together for a decade before even thinking about children.
‘‘None of us wanted that, we did not want that isolation. We wanted to be with other people.’’
Watching them interact, it is clear building a family is exactly what they have done. They have in-jokes and banter, they coo over house mascot Sticks, a gorgeous black cat.
There is no TV as none of them watch it. Instead they play board games – cloak and dagger spy game Codename is firm favourite – play music, have singalongs and just spend time enjoying one another’s company.
It is an incredibly warm and relaxed environment. But there is a lot of hard work and four mortgages underpinning that laidback atmosphere.
Children, money, sleeping arrangements, what happens if one of the couples breaks up, even who does the dishes, were all issues hashed out long before anyone signed the group’s detailed co-ownership agreement. ‘‘We have had lots of really hard conversations, which I think is absolutely vital for this kind of communal living.
‘‘Once you are living together, having conflict within your living space is pretty destabilising. So we talked about our general vision being that we want to live together for as long as it works for everyone.’’
That means a home where babies will always be welcome (in fact, there is one on the way already), even if it means they may have to look at moving to a larger property in the future; no minimum period for staying at the house, housemates can begin discussions to leave whenever they want; paying into a hardship fund, for use in the event someone loses a job, or is struggling to pay their share of the mortgage; and having agreements and plans in place to deal with breakups.
And as for the cleaning roster, it is very simple – ingeniously so.
‘‘The system that has worked best for us is that one person has a single job that they do all the time: Someone is the rubbish person, someone is the vacuuming person, someone is the toilet cleaner.’’
Compulsory meetings once a week and tackling issues before they become problems are also crucial to the smooth running of the home.
Anyone seriously contemplating co-ownership should ‘‘move in to a rental together for a while’’ first, Shade says, for both practical and more abstract reasons: it makes the complex administration of buying a house easier and you will soon get a realistic idea of whether you can share a home.
Ultimately, it takes years to build the kind of trust and connection this group shares, and that is the real key to making it work.
Children, money, sleeping arrangements, what happens if one of the couples breaks up, even who does the dishes, were all issues hashed out long before anyone signed the group’s detailed co-ownership agreement.