Guest Speaker: Ben Sammut, Mortgage Broker with Mortgage Gate

This episode is about Shared Ownership from the mortgage broker’s point of view. As housing prices in Toronto climb, we have to find creative solutions to home ownership. I’m a big advocate of friends buying houses together.

• Recommendations for people contemplating on sharing a property with a friend, a stranger, or anyone else
• The benefits to combining incomes on paper
• Do the parties have to share their intimate financials with each other?
• What if one party loses their job? Or becomes ill, how does the mortgage get paid?
• What if one of the partners wants out of the ownership?
• The structure of mortgage payments if the partners aren’t equal
• How would it work if one partner has more money than another partner?
• How much would the 2 parties have to put down as a downpayment if the house was less than $1 million? What about over $1 million?
• Purchasing a duplex with a legal basement apartment
• What happens if that basement apartment is not legal? How does that affect financing?
• What if the partners need to do renovations to create 2 separate spaces in the house? How can they finance those renovations?
• What if they have a renter in a third unit?
• Should they form a corporation in order to buy a place together?