For years, Aviva Maslow and her younger sister Elana casually joked about buying a home together. The two had grown up in a tight-knit family in Marin County, north of San Francisco, before going their separate ways for college and early careers. By the time Aviva, 34, and Elana, 32, circled back to the area around the COVID-19 pandemic, the difficulties of buying a home were setting in.
“We used to say that the only way we could afford a house is to get a duplex,” said Aviva Maslow, the assistant director of a nonprofit Jewish family camp near Yosemite National Park (the camp where both she and Elana met their future husbands years ago). “It was like a joke, but also not a joke. At some point, it began to morph into something more real.”
That point arrived in 2024, when Aviva and her husband, Noah Orgish, 33, an educational technologist, welcomed their first child, Aurora. Elana Maslow, a school social worker, and her husband, Gabe Lehman, had already begun looking for a home, but the market was daunting.
The couples had grown close over the years, so the idea of looking for a place together didn’t feel odd. “The family connection was great,” said Mr. Lehman, 32, a journalist. “The other reality was that neither of us could afford on our own to buy a house in much of the Bay Area.”
All four ultimately agreed on the outlines of a search, confined to a fairly narrow slice of the East Bay that included North Oakland and Berkeley, two coveted destinations with median single-family home prices north of $1 million. The couples wanted distinct living quarters that were roughly equal in size and value, ideally with three bedrooms and two baths each.
Homes fitting that description “are gems in the Bay Area,” said their broker, Nasim Pasallar, with Golden Gate Sotheby’s International Realty. “And having such a communal culture here really translates into real estate. Berkeley in particular is very dense, either with duplexes or with a family home in front and an in-law unit in the back.”
The couples each had about $200,000 to put toward a house, with a total budget up to around $1.4 million. The purchase arrangement, known as a joint tenancy in common, meant that all four would be listed as owners of the full property and would have to collectively approve things like upgrades and repairs to either home.
In this case, the couples temporarily set aside forging a legal agreement — “We’re family. It’s nothing that would tear us apart,” Aviva Maslow said — and moved on to a thornier issue: Could they find a place they all agreed on, and could they do it on a schedule that satisfied everyone?
“Elana and Gabe generally act faster on things than we do, so it probably took longer for them than if they’d done it on their own,” Mr. Orgish said of the search. “But for us, it was faster than if we’d been doing it on our own. What we all knew was that we wanted that sense of community.”
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