How to Use Roommate & Rental Income to Qualify for a Mortgage
Earn Your Leisure
iHeartPodcasts
4.8 • 7.8K Ratings
🗓️ 1 November 2025
⏱️ 14 minutes
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Summary
In this insightful clip from EYL, MG The Mortgage Guy joins Troy Millings and Rashad Bilal to break down creative real estate hacks that can help you qualify for a mortgage and scale your income—especially if you’re not navigating the process alone! Discover how you can leverage roommate (or "border") income, even if it's a boyfriend, girlfriend, or college roommate, to boost your mortgage qualification. MG explains Fannie Mae’s Homeready program, which lets you use documented rental payments from roommates to strengthen your application, as long as you’ve collected proof over at least 9 of the last 12 months. The clip dives into the vital importance of documentation—leases, payment records with memos clarifying "rent," and making sure everyone’s on board. They also discuss common scenarios, like living with a partner (who isn’t on your lease), and how putting everything in writing can unlock significant buying power, all while keeping your finances and future flexibility secure. Graduating college soon? MG reveals a little-known hack: you can use your college history as work history for mortgage qualification, and if you’ve collected rent from roommates (with all the right paperwork), that’s extra income to help you buy your first home right after graduation! For those interested in maximizing every opportunity, they touch on leveraging an ADU (Accessory Dwelling Unit) for long- or mid-term rental income, and how areas near hospitals, airports, or New AI data centers can create lucrative mid-term rental plays—ideal for traveling professionals, corporate consultants, or construction workers on multi-month assignments. Whether you have a pool to rent out (think Swimply), extra space in your home, or are just getting started, this strategy-packed clip is a must-watch for anyone looking to house hack, generate additional income, or simply make smarter real estate moves. Hit play to learn how better documentation, teamwork, and a little creativity can make real estate investing more accessible than you ever thought possible! *#RealEstate #HouseHacking #MortgageTips #EYL #RoommateIncome #ADU #HomeBuying #FinancialFreedom #Swimply #Investing #CollegeHacks #WealthBuilding*
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | If you have a swimming pool, I'm not sure if you guys, Trevor Shaw, have you ever heard of a thing called Swimpley? |
| 0:05.0 | No. |
| 0:06.0 | Is that when you rent the pool? |
| 0:07.0 | You can rent you can rent your, you can rent your, you can rent out your backyard. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? You can run out your backyard. You can run out your pool. Like I have one of my mentees. Every year she rents out her backyard, her pool here in New York, and it pays her mortgage for the year. |
| 0:23.0 | Like, it's incredible. rents out her backyard, her pool here in New York, and it pays her mortgage for the year. |
| 0:22.6 | Like, it's incredible, right? Because people treat that like an event space for the day, right? So you can have somebody's backyard for eight to ten hours and you're paying two, three hundred dollars an hour for the full use of their backyard |
| 0:39.2 | and their swimming pool. |
| 0:40.6 | So there's so many different ways to house hack and generate money with a single family |
| 0:46.9 | or a duplex to make it more affordable. |
| 0:50.5 | Now also here's another thing that people don't really realize is that |
| 0:56.7 | border income, aka if you have a roommate, what people don't know is Fannie Mae will allow you to use this border income to help you qualify for a mortgage under the Fannie Mae home ready program. |
| 1:10.7 | Now the requirements is the borrower must have a history of receiving that rental income |
| 1:16.4 | for at least nine of the past 12 months. |
| 1:20.3 | And you need documentation, such as your lease agreement and show proof of receipt |
| 1:25.4 | that your roommate has been paying you to, |
| 1:30.3 | or since you lived in an apartment together, and then you can use that income to help you qualify for a mortgage. |
| 1:35.3 | So to break that down, just in quick layman terms, if you are living with someone right now and you have a lease and they're on the lease with you, |
| 1:43.3 | if they're your bona fide roommate, not just someone who's just in the house and you have a lease and they're on the lease with you if they're |
| 1:44.2 | your bona fide roommate not just someone who just in the house and you say hey |
| 1:48.4 | they live here no they have to be on your lease if you know you are in position to |
| 1:53.8 | qualify for a mortgage faster than they are what you should do is collect the |
| 1:59.3 | money their portion of the rent money from them |
... |
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