Sebastian del Castillo spent the first half of 2022 scouring the internet for a home that he and his partner, Silviana Russo, could afford in the neighborhoods straddling the Queens-Brooklyn border. But despite their $750,000 budget, the couple, who were renting in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, kept coming up empty.
“We were thinking, what can we find within our budget?” said Mr. del Castillo, 40.
“And the answer was nothing,” added Ms. Russo, 32.
Their friend Ben Loy was in a similar predicament. Mr. Loy, 42, was eager to move out of his cramped one-bedroom rental on the East Side of Manhattan. His budget was also around $750,000, and his search had been equally frustrating.
All three were looking for room to grow: Mr. Loy wanted a second bedroom to use as an office; Ms. Russo and Mr. del Castillo, who plan to have children, wanted space for a nursery.
One day, Mr. del Castillo started looking at homes for $1 million or more, just to see what was out there, and noticed that many listings in that range were two-family houses.
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What if the three friends joined forces on a purchase?
“Suddenly I was like, ‘Well, this is tenable,’” said Mr. del Castillo, a retail logistics manager. “I knew we could borrow to get a big enough mortgage to get a duplex on our own and rent out the other half, but we didn’t want to be landlords.”
Mr. Loy was intrigued. “It started as a half-joking thing, but the seeds were planted,” he said. When the couple began sending him links for homes in Ridgewood, Queens, he jumped in.
“It just made a lot of sense,” said Mr. Loy, a software engineer. “If I were to buy a condo or co-op, I’d have an HOA I needed to deal with, so I might as well buy with friends.”
The trio, all fans of tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, met years ago at a gaming store in Williamsburg. “Ben is our couple friend,” said Ms. Russo, a media producer. “Couples have couple friends, and our couple friend just happens to be Ben.”
With their funds pooled, the trio could afford a two-family home for up to about $1.2 million in Ridgewood, the fast-developing Queens neighborhood just over the border from Brooklyn.
“I noticed about five years ago that Ridgewood was where a lot of people who were being priced out of Bushwick were going,” Ms. Russo said. “And I thought, now is the right time to buy in Ridgewood, because in another five years it’s going to be too expensive.”
They connected with Sheila Fairweather, a broker with Oxford Property Group, who wasn’t surprised to find three friends buying together. “Two-families are so common out here,” she said. “Why go for a one-family when you know someone who can live in the downstairs and split the mortgage?”
The two parties wanted to split the costs evenly, so they aimed for a two-family house with units of comparable size and quality.
They also met with a lawyer and discussed contingencies. If, say, Mr. Loy brought a partner into his home, he would continue to pay his full portion of the mortgage. If Ms. Russo and Mr. del Castillo had a baby, Mr. Loy said he would be eager to babysit. They all pledged not to offer their units as Airbnbs, and if one of them had to temporarily move out and sublet, the others would get a vote on the new housemate.
Among the properties they considered:
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