PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- When Naama Gidron and her husband, Peter Wuhrl, decided to buy their first home in Providence last year, they started out by scouring the area for single-family houses.
They soon realized it would be a tough choice. The homes in their price range were away from the city amenities that attracted them to Providence in the first place.
"It just felt like there wasn't enough going on out there for me," Gidron said. "I like to be able to walk to a cafe."
Their solution was to become live-in landlords in a two-family home on the city's thriving East Side. Now, they've got two bedrooms, a small yard, a two-car garage and an attic space they can use as an office. The $1,000 rent they're paid every month for the unit downstairs helps pay their $2,400 mortgage payment, and they can walk to cafes and other shops just a few blocks away.
Real estate agents say they're seeing more first-time home buyers purchasing two-, three- or four-family buildings as a way to get their foot in the door of homeownership. Realtor groups say there is no reliable way to track numbers of two- and three-family houses nationally, but in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, those numbers have more than doubled in the past decade.
"It's more bang for the buck," said Michael Young, president of the Rhode Island Association of Realtors. Young said multi-family homes have always been popular as investments, and in the 1950s and 1960s were thought of as a way for working-class families to become homeowners. These days, increased rents and skyrocketing real estate prices have led to a modern surge in multi-family sales, he said.
Larry Yameen, a real estate agent in Lawrence, Mass., 20 miles north of Boston, recently put a two- and a three-family house on the market. Within five days, he had shown one 15 to 20 times and the other a dozen times, he said. Most of the people looking were first-time buyers, he said.
Yameen has been in the business for 30 years and said he's seen interest come nearly full-circle.
"We used to see these young couples buying the multi-family home, selling it for the single-family home. All of a sudden, these young people just seemed to want to go into the big single-family home right away," Yameen said. "With the pricing now . . . they're looking at multis a little differently."
Nick Retsinas, director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University, agreed that part of the interest is fueled by the increasing prices of single-family homes.
"When people look at that price appreciation, they're looking at other options," including condos and owner-occupied multi-family homes, Retsinas said.
The trend seems to be centered in the Northeast, around cities such as Boston and Providence that have an older housing stock made up in many areas by multi-family homes, real estate experts said.
