Duplex house designs

There is a lot of talk about getting your first house. It’s part of the American Dream to get a house and maybe get a dog named Rover. But maybe someone’s first home should instead be a duplex. Why would I propose such a thing? Is it possible I am a secret Russian spy that hates American pie? No, there are simply too many advantages to buying a duplex first.

Buying a duplex has a number of financial advantages over buying a house. A lot of people assume that duplexes would sell for about twice of what a house sells for in the same neighborhood. This is rarely the case. Duplexes are more frequently about 1.5 times the price of a house in a given area. So to pick an easy number if a house is selling for 100k then a duplex should be selling for 150k.

So let’s compare buying a house to a duplex. To keep things the same let’s assume we have 20k to put down and we are looking in the Austin real estate market so that the taxes are 2.5 percent of the purchase price and insurance is 0.4 percent of the purchase price.