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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe used to say that the only way we could afford a house is to get a duplex,\u201d 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). \u201cIt was like a joke, but also not a joke. At some point, it began to morph into something more real.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The couples had grown close over the years, so the idea of looking for a place together didn\u2019t feel odd. \u201cThe family connection was great,\u201d said Mr. Lehman, 32, a journalist. \u201cThe other reality was that neither of us could afford on our own to buy a house in much of the Bay Area.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Homes fitting that description \u201care gems in the Bay Area,\u201d said their broker, Nasim Pasallar, with Golden Gate Sotheby\u2019s International Realty. \u201cAnd 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
In this case, the couples temporarily set aside forging a legal agreement \u2014 \u201cWe\u2019re family. It\u2019s nothing that would tear us apart,\u201d Aviva Maslow said \u2014 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?<\/p>\n
\u201cElana and Gabe generally act faster on things than we do, so it probably took longer for them than if they\u2019d done it on their own,\u201d Mr. Orgish said of the search. \u201cBut for us, it was faster than if we\u2019d been doing it on our own. What we all knew was that we wanted that sense of community.\u201d<\/p>\n
Find out what happened next by answering these two questions:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For years, Aviva Maslow and her younger sister Elana casually joked about buying a home together. The two…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":281867,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[121190,143,33329,145,144,46923,8264],"class_list":{"0":"post-281866","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-oakland","8":"tag-berkeley-calif","9":"tag-oakland","10":"tag-oakland-calif","11":"tag-oakland-headlines","12":"tag-oakland-news","13":"tag-real-estate-and-housing-residential","14":"tag-san-francisco-bay-area-calif"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=281866"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281866\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/281867"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=281866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=281866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=281866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}