4 Cities Where You Can Live for Free in 2025

Dave:
These are four cities that you can live for free in 2025. Today we’re talking house hacking. You buy a multi-unit property and your tenants drastically reduce or maybe even completely eliminate your own living expenses. The thing is, it doesn’t work everywhere, so you have to pick carefully and stick around because in today’s episode we’ll tell you where you should be looking. What’s up everyone? It’s Dave Meyer here on the BiggerPockets Podcast and today on the show we’re talking about where to house hack. And this question is a little bit trickier than it might seem and a little bit trickier than it used to be because you got to pick a market that has strong fundamentals for real estate, but also you got to pick a place that you actually want to live and work. And when you do all that calculation, often it’s a smaller cross section of cities than you might think, but we’ve done that research for you, we’ve crunched the numbers and we found four really solid markets for house hackers in 2025 and we’re going to share them with you today. Joining me on this episode, we have two guests. We have Craig Curelop, who’s a former BiggerPockets employee who achieved financial freedom mainly through house hacking, and now he’s an agent and investor both in Colorado and in Idaho. And we have Austin Wolff who’s a current BiggerPockets employee and data analyst who has house hacking experience himself. Austin, thanks for joining us here today.

Austin:
Happy

Craig:
To be here.

Dave:
And Craig, welcome back to the BiggerPockets podcast. Always good to see you.

Craig:
Yeah, always good to see you too. Love being here.

Dave:
Alright, Austin, let’s start with you. You are an analyst. You’re always looking at housing markets and today we’re talking about house hacking, something I guess all three of us have experience with, which is fun. You’ve pulled four markets that you think are especially appealing to house hackers and basically the format of the show, Craig, that we want to do is Austin. He’s going to pitch them to us and then we have to decide if we would want to move there and house hack. Before we get into that, maybe Craig, let’s have you do this. You wrote a book on it. Define for us house hacking. What is it? Why should people consider it?

Craig:
Yeah, so house hacking is, in my opinion, the best real estate strategy and it is basically you’re buying a one to four unit place with a low percent down. Typically that’s three to 5% down. You have to live in that house or duplex, triplex, quad for at least a year and you rent out the other parts of the house so that you can either offset your mortgage or live entirely for free. Thereby eliminating what likely is your largest expense and getting a jumpstart on real estate investing.

Dave:
Wow, that was very concise. I’m glad you wrote a book about it. That was way faster than I could have done that, but yeah, it’s an amazing strategy. I don’t have numbers for this, but I feel like the majority of investors I know at least who are starting in maybe in their twenties or so do get started investing. I did it for quite a few years. Craig sort of famously did it many different times to an extreme and Austin most recently tried his hand at it as well. Craig, just tell me there’s a spectrum in house hacking of how much sacrifice you’re making. I’m trying to think of the right way to say this, how much sacrifice you have to make to balance the cost savings and income generation and your own personal comfort. So can you just tell us a little bit about that spectrum?

Craig:
Yeah, so in the book we talk about the comfort continuum, right on the left side of that is comfort and on the right side of that is profit and you start, ideally you start on the profit side, so you’re going to have less comfort, more profit. For me it was living behind a curtain in my living room while Airbnb out my bedroom. And so yes, highly profitable, very low comfort, and I don’t know if this is intentional or unintentional, but as I moved to each successive house hack, my second one, I had my own bedroom, so now I rented by the room, so a little bit more comfort, but I still had a little bit of an uncomfortable situation living with people that I didn’t know. Then I moved to the next one where I had a single family home with a mother-in-law suite downstairs. So I Airbnb the mother-in-law suite and I actually just rented out two of the extra rooms. So instead of having five roommates, I had two. And then I ended up getting to the place where I met my now wife. We moved in together and we occupied the entire upstairs by ourself and we Airbnb the downstairs. And so I think there’s levels of house hacking all the way up until having a mansion with additional dwelling unit
And even if it’s not going to even come close, a thousand bucks a month is a thousand bucks a month and you can meet some cool people and yeah, it is pretty fun.

Dave:
I’m glad you said that because I generally just think that people overestimate the discomfort piece of it. You went pretty far doing the curtain thing. I personally wouldn’t do that, but I did it for years where I lived in sort of the smallest unit in a multi bedroom place and it was fine. I never really even saw it as all that different to living in an apartment where you have neighbors. I happened to be the property manager and so I had some more responsibilities, but it wasn’t like some weird uncomfortable thing. So let’s talk about markets now and move on. So Austin, tell us first this idea that you should pick a market for house hacking. It’s interesting, right, because most people would assume that they’re going to house hack where they live currently. Why would someone consider moving for a house hack?

Austin:
Yes, there are certain cities where the prices have risen so much in the past five years and with mortgage rates being where they are, that house hacking just might simply be unfeasible if you don’t have quite a bit of money to put down, especially coastal cities like Los Angeles, the Bay Area, maybe Seattle, maybe Portland, if you’re just getting started, there are probably better markets to get started in today than maybe your own backyard.

Dave:
Yeah, I think this is really important because there was a time in place, especially pre pandemic when pretty much anywhere it works to house hack, but that has shifted a little bit where the cost of ownership and rent have moved in such a big different direction that it doesn’t make sense everywhere. Craig, is that sort of your experience or do you still think most cities work?

Craig:
I think every city works honestly. It just is the perspective on what you come to. So even if you are in a San Francisco or in LA and you can somehow afford a duplex, triplex, or quad or you can afford a house that you can rent the rooms out to my opinion is that the more expensive places, they’re more expensive because more people want to live there and if more people want to live there, co-living is probably a thing. Heck, some people share bedrooms in San Francisco and New York and all that kind of stuff, and so you kind of just have to get creative with it. That being said, Austin, I’m excited to hear about the data that you’re sharing today and if we can agree or disagree with it.

Dave:
Alright, well let’s get into the markets then. Austin, you’ve done the research, you’ve done a lot of research into other strategies and best markets and things to consider, but what about moving somewhere? That’s the thing that is so hard and I think is really personal to people is what kind of city that you would consider moving in. So when you pick these four markets that we’re about to talk about, did you factor that in at all?

Austin:
I factored quality of life a little bit. That being said to me, the most important thing was understanding the underlying fundamentals of the market first because again, there’s great people out there everywhere, there’s great locations and there’s going to be great stuff no matter where you move to. So metrics matter to me first and then quality of life and certain qualitative factors matter to me second.

Dave:
Interesting. All right. I think we’re going to disagree on that one, but I am going to, we’ll listen to the markets that you have to pitch and Craig and I will weigh in. So what is market number one that you

Austin:
Pick? The first market I pick, I’m going to talk about Fayetteville just because it’s closest to home. It was home actually.

Dave:
Yeah, that’s just the market. You did house hack in?

Austin:
Yes, yes, yes. The median price there is below the national average and the median rent there is $1,600, but specifically the rent to price ratio is also above the median. The rent price ratio in Fayetteville is about 0.47%. The rent price ratio nationally across the board is about 0.35, so it’s a little bit better. There’s wage growth happening there, there’s job growth happening there, so you have white collar jobs being added into the area and the university there has been increasing their admissions year over year, which is also pretty interesting. You have this influx of people coming from all around the country. A lot of the people moving to this area are coming from the surrounding states, Texas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Missouri, and they’re either coming there for jobs or a lot of people that I spoke to in Fayetteville are coming there because they thought Fayetteville was just a better place to live than where they’re coming from.

Dave:
See quality of life.

Austin:
Quality of life, yeah.

Craig:
Awesome. So I know next to nothing about this market other than the fact that I know Henry Washington lives somewhere around there and I think it’s like the capital for mountain biking. Is that correct?

Dave:
Yeah, it’s one of them,

Craig:
Yeah. Okay. So quality of life seems solid. I like the numbers. I’m kind of laughing to myself because when I started investing it was the 1% rule everyone was talking about. Now the national average is the 0.35% rule. But anyway, a question about Fayetteville, is there any sort of geographical constraints? Do they have mountains or anything else that I need to be aware of?

Austin:
So there are a little bit of hills, but not as Haley as Los Angeles, not as flat as Phoenix. Tell us why you’re thinking about that, Craig.

Craig:
Well, my biggest concern there is that if tons of people flood in there, I mean they can just build houses. They can build houses pretty quick these days, and so just the supply and demand that’s happening there. Dave and I talked about this the other day, but we both enjoy investing in places that have some sort of geographical constraint, whether that’s Denver with the mountains, I invest in Idaho, we have a massive lake and there’s Indian reservations all around and they’re very hard to build on those. And we also have two, I’m like a valley, so at some point there’s going to be nowhere to build and prices are going to go up. And so it sounds like Fayetteville is a great market in terms of, hey, you can probably cashflow here and your lifestyle is going to be pretty dang good. I feel like colleges make places a little bit more lively. Totally. I’m sure there’s good food and good restaurants and good sports games to attend and lots of entertainment, biking capital of the world. I think it’s going to take you a lot of units to achieve the same amount of wealth as you would in a market like Denver or somewhere else.

Austin:
I agree. And these next markets that I’m talking about, they’re affordable for that very reason. There are pretty much no geographical constraints upon supply, so they haven’t appreciated as quickly as other markets in the past five years. So you’re absolutely right on that one. That is one trade off that you’ll probably be making with these markets.

Dave:
All right, well, I like it. I think if I had to vote, which I’m going to make you vote Craig too, on whether I would house hack there, I would say yes on northwest Arkansas. I’ve just heard Henry and Austin talk about it enough that it seems like a fun place. It seems like there’s a lot of good stuff to do and the job growth is great and me, my strategy has always been to continue to work a full-time job and use my income from my job to invest in real estate. And I like that Northwest Arkansas has jobs that I would be personally interested in. That would be good. I’m not currently a mountain biker. I’m to injury prone for that sport, but I like outdoors stuff and so I think there would be enough outdoor recreation for me, so I would do it. Craig, yes or no?

Craig:
I would say yes as well for basically all the same reasons as you Dave, and then what I mentioned previously.

Dave:
Okay, that was our first market. We are going to take a quick break before we hear about our other three markets, but first, want to thank our sponsor for this week’s episode of Bigger News, which is the Fundrise flagship fund, invest in private market real estate with the Fundrise Flagship fund. You can learn more about it at fundrise.com/pockets. We’ll be right back. Welcome back to the BiggerPockets podcast. We are talking today about the best markets to house hack in. We got Austin Wolf, we got Craig Op talking about which markets we would personally choose to consider if we were to start over again and House hack Austin pitched us Northwest Arkansas, a place where he did house hack. We’re going to move on to his other three pitches. Austin, what is the second one you’re going to pitch us on?

Austin:
I want to pitch you guys on Chattanooga, Tennessee. As far as metrics goes, it’s cheaper than Northwest Arkansas. The median price is about $300,000 and the median rent is only a hundred bucks shy of Fayetteville, about $1,500. So the rent price ratio is actually better than Fayetteville at 0.5%. The median wage is a little bit below Fayetteville, but they actually have had pretty strong white collar job growth, certainly better than the national median, better than the other two markets. I’m going to get into a little less good than Fayetteville because they don’t have such a strong return to office policy that’s driving growth there. But regardless, what they do have is a citywide smart grid that has started to attract more startups into the area because they just provide really fast internet to residents of Chattanooga. This is something that the city has been investing in over the past decade. So I really like that about Chattanooga. I really like its focus on startups and I like the rent price ratio there. And now what I don’t like about it is probably the same thing that I don’t like about Fayetteville is the weather. Chattanooga has those hot summers and potentially really cold winters.

Dave:
Alright, so what are the jobs there? Is this because of this bar grid, is it really attracting that many tech jobs that you could earn a decent income in Chattanooga?

Austin:
The main jobs in Chattanooga are manufacturing and logistics. Their startup scene has started to grow, but it’s nowhere near other markets that you’ve heard about.

Dave:
Alright, I don’t know. What do you think,

Austin:
Craig?

Craig:
How close is Chattanooga to Nashville?

Austin:
So Chattanooga is a two hour and 10 minute drive away from Nashville too far too far, and it is about two hours and 10 minutes away from

Craig:
Atlanta.
So you’re kind of in that middle ground. Chattanooga, I have a soft spot in my heart for it because I feel like there’s some country songs that sing of it, but I really enjoy investing for cashflow and appreciation and there it just doesn’t feel like I’m going to get much of that. That being said, if you live in Chattanooga, I don’t think there’s a single market that I would totally say no to house hack in. I would house hack in LA and I would house hack in Chattanooga, but would I move from where I’m at right now to go house hack in Chattanooga? Probably not.

Dave:
Yeah, I’m on the same boat. I think if you live in Chattanooga, the fundamental sound great to house hack, you’re probably going to really reduce your cost of living. You’re probably going to make a lot of money. To me. I think there’s two things that I don’t like about it. Craig sort of alluded to it with asking where Nashville was, but I think you just need a bigger economic engine for me to feel comfortable with it. Northwest Arkansas, Walmart is an economic engine all by itself. It’s basically the equivalent to a whole state worth of economic power. There’s other companies in northwest Arkansas that I really like. Chattanooga might have some stuff. I’m skeptical that fast internet is enough to draw people. They need a talent pool. You need a lot more than that. And so yeah, it might attract local businesses to move from another city in Tennessee to Chattanooga, but I am skeptical that you’re going to see major corporately relocations there. I can’t name a single company that’s headquartered out of there, so for me, it’s just not a place I would uproot my life for. But it does sound like some of the metrics are pretty solid. All right, so we got two nos. Sorry, Austin.

Austin:
Darn it. All

Dave:
Right, what’s

Austin:
The third one? Alright, third, let’s talk about Charlotte. North Carolina. Listeners have probably heard it before. I don’t know if listeners think that it’s expensive, but it’s still less than the median price. The median price in Charlotte is about 370,000. It’s about 30,000 more than Fayetteville, but the median rent is also a little bit higher as well about 1700. And so that rent price ratio is still greater than the national median at 0.47%. It also has the highest median wage out of these group of cities because they just have so many great jobs. Finance jobs, more tech jobs, more white collar jobs coming into support this finance hub that Charlotte is. So as far as underlining metrics goes, I actually like Charlotte the most. I also think it’s most poised for growth. If people have been listening to me before, I’ve been unable to stop talking about North Carolina and how they’re reducing their corporate income tax down to zero by 2030, which should definitely attract more finance jobs to the area. So I’m actually really excited about the underlying fundamentals of Charlotte and the fact that the median price is still lower than the national median makes me very happy.

Dave:
Yeah, I mean I love Charlotte personally as a market. I think this has pretty much everything. I would look for one, it’s big enough of a city where I think there’s going to be fun stuff to do. You guys know I really like eating and North Carolina, it’s got some good food, so I’m interested in that. I think North Carolina has a good climate and just the strong foundation of finance and insurance that is just a really good solid economic engine. Those things do go through cycles, but they’re not as recession prone to things like tech. As we’re seeing these are good, solid high paying jobs and like Austin said, there’s still going to be upward growth for prices because it’s still so low. I mean, you look at other areas where there’s such a strong economic base like places on the west coast or the Northeast, the price point for homes are double this.
So I think you see a lot of strong fundamentals at a more affordable price point. The other thing I really like is that they have a great higher education system in North Carolina and that’s going to provide really good talent pool for the whole state. So employers I think are going to be incentivized to go to North Carolina. Austin’s done some great work talking about the tax environment there. That’s really good. I just think the job growth and population growth in North Carolina is going to be excellent. Charlotte, I have some friends who live there. People say it’s a great place to live, so I think it’s got everything I would look for. If I were moving somewhere, I would legit consider Charlotte.

Craig:
There’s a lot of people that live over on the east coast and Charlotte feels like a pretty good, hey, it’s a quick one hour flight. We can still kind of get back and see family pretty easily and they’ve got a lot of population all kind of coming too right in the middle there. Charlotte, I feel like is pretty insulated from natural disasters. They get a little bit of the remnants of a hurricane, but they’re not going to get a ton of snow and they’re not going to get a whole ton of rain. I have to imagine the smokies aren’t crazy far away from there. So you’ve got some good mountains to see. And I don’t know if, I’m sure everybody that is listening to this podcast has been through the Charlotte airport, and so it’s definitely a place where a lot of people go to and to be able to fly direct almost everywhere is also a very awesome thing to do. So I would say yeah, Charlotte would for sure be something.

Dave:
I’m so glad you brought that up, Craig, because having a good airport is so important to me on a personal level just because I like to travel, I travel for work and Charlotte has a great airport. I don’t even know where Chattanooga would fly to. So I do think it’s super important. I also like the fact personally that you are driving distance to a lot of other attractions. I don’t know, I think it’s a far drive to the coast, but you can reasonably do it. Like you said, the Smokies aren’t that far. A lot of fun stuff in Virginia. There’s stuff to do. So I like the idea of being able to do road trips. Personally, if I was moving somewhere, this would have the right blend of fun nearby great jobs, a lot of fundamentals. All right, Austin, you’re back on track. Yay. All right, so we’ve heard our first three markets, which are northwest Arkansas, Chattanooga, and Charlotte.
We’re going to take a quick break, but when we come back we’ll hear Austin’s fourth market and we’re going to talk to Craig a little bit about tactically if you wanted to go ahead and move for real estate, move for house hacking, how to actually pull that off. We’ll be right back everyone. Welcome back to the BiggerPockets podcast. We’re talking house hacking and Austin, it is time for you to tell us the fourth market you recommend for house hacking so far. Craig and I like two of yours. We like northwest Arkansas, we like Charlotte. We’re not so excited about Chattanooga. Let’s see, are you going to go 50 50? Let’s see if you can go three for four. What’s the fourth market?

Austin:
Oh man, this one is probably my favorite market to talk about is Indianapolis.

Dave:
Oh,

Austin:
This one’s a sleeper market that not too many people are talking about. So Indianapolis, lemme just pitch you on why I think it’s great. Number one, the median price there is 275,000. That is the cheapest one I’ve talked about so far. The median rent is about 1500, so that rent price ratio is 0.54%, definitely higher than all the other markets I’ve talked about today. It’s continued to grow in jobs even more so than Columbus, Ohio or Cincinnati or other surrounding Midwest metros. In fact, as far as Midwest Metros goes, it is my favorite just because of job growth alone. It also has the same affordability as many metros in the Midwest. Indiana is also a very business friendly state as opposed to Illinois and Indianapolis itself is a very pharma friendly place. They manufacture medical equipment. They have Eli Lilly there, which is one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world.
So they have a lot of bio jobs as well as manufacturing jobs there, which I really like. And again, they have a lot of finance jobs that are being added into the area. There is one sector that is actually seeing decline, and that is what the Bureau of Labor statistics calls information jobs. So basically software developers that actually has been declining over the past 10 years. Every other area has seen an increase, so tech jobs are more or less leaving the area. Every other kind of job has been entering into the area. So that is something to keep in mind. Your appreciation isn’t going to be as much in Indianapolis because it is flat as far as the eye can see. There’s no restrictions as far as building goes. And again, that’s why it’s so affordable. So that is one thing to keep in mind.
It’s a very big sports town, so if you’re into sports, you might like Indianapolis if you don’t hate the teams there. As far as actual housing stock goes, a lot of the multifamily housing stock in the inner city area is very old. And so there are a lot of opportunities to do maybe live in flips or rehabs of this housing stock. So that’s another thing that I would actually consider a pro of this market is there’s a lot of opportunity to get your hands dirty and really do some value adds. So I’ll stop talking. Maybe I convinced you enough. I don’t know. We’ll see. This might be 50 50 for you guys.

Dave:
All right. Craig, what do you got? What do you think about Indy?

Craig:
Indy sounds like a great city, and I think again, if you live there, it’s a good place and you should house hack there. I honestly might even invest in a multifamily property there. I feel like if my strategy and my thesis was a cashflow play, but again, I really like the markets where you can get cashflow and appreciation. And so I would probably say no to Indianapolis.

Dave:
I’m torn on Indianapolis, honestly, because I would invest there as a long-term rental investor. I would consider right now buying a duplex. I think value add is a really good opportunity there. I don’t know if I’d personally lived there, just to be candid, because you just told me that tech jobs are declining, which I think is okay from a fundamental standpoint. It’s just what I’ve always worked in. And to me, the reason I moved to Denver, and I loved Denver in 2009 was like you could get tech jobs and at that point Denver was still relatively cheap. And to me that was the dream. You can live somewhere where it’s not super expensive, but you can get a nice high paying job. And I don’t know if I’d be able to do that in Indianapolis. But I think for people who are in financial services, I know that they have pretty good jobs there. If you’re in healthcare, I would definitely consider Indianapolis. I think Austin’s right that just long-term fundamentals of Indianapolis are really good. If it’s the kind of lifestyle that you would like there.

Craig:
Do you guys know anybody that’s moved to Indianapolis? Honest question.

Dave:
A couple of coworkers that BiggerPockets live there.

Craig:
Oh, okay. But they didn’t move there.

Dave:
Yeah,

Craig:
They were just born there. I don’t know. I feel like there’s just so you hear people moving to cities, right? Fayetteville? Charlotte, not Chattanooga.

Dave:
Yeah, it’s not passing your sniff desk.

Craig:
Yeah, and this is very much what I do is sniff tests.

Dave:
Alright, well Austin, I think we’re going to give you, Craig and I are not quite 50 50 because I’m almost there in Indianapolis. We’ll give you 60 out of a hundreds.
But these are great markets. Again, like Craig and I are basing some on our personal strategy. Austin’s talking about his personal strategy. The goal here is to help you all understand some of the metrics and the way that we think about these things. So you can do similar analysis for yourself. Craig, I just want to spend a few minutes, we don’t have too much time, but I do want to just ask you, what are two or three steps if you were going to consider moving for real estate? And I think it’s worthwhile, people move for jobs all the time. If you want to move for real estate to optimize for your real estate investing career, what are the two or three first things that people should do?

Craig:
I would say number one step is you’re going to want to talk to an investor friendly agent in your market that invests in that market, that helps house hackers in your market. And that can basically guide you into what strategies work best. As you saw today, what’s going to work in Fayetteville is not going to necessarily work in Charlotte. And you may not know that if you’ve never been to the market before. Number two, I think you got to go visit, go visit and check out the city and make sure you like the city as well as your employer. I mean, I guess I’m just saying what I did because it did work out for Denver for me. Yeah,

Dave:
Yeah. All right, great. Well, thank you so much. I appreciate it. Hopefully this is all helpful for you. If you want more resources on how to house hack or how to actually pull this off, Craig gave us a brief overview, but there’s tons of information on biggerpockets.com about house hacking. Craig’s written an entire book about it that we’ll link to below. But highly recommend the strategy for anyone who’s considering getting into investing. All three of us have done it. Many, many, many of the real estate investors who I am friends with and know and who are successful started with this way. And so I know it sounds to some people like it’s crazy to move your life for real estate, but people move for jobs, people move for a lot of different things. And if you want to prioritize real estate, which teach the own, but if you want to prioritize it considering a market that’s going to help you set you up for long-term success in real estate, this could be an option for you. So Craig, thanks for being here, man.

Craig:
Thanks for having me as always, man

Dave:
And Austin, thank you for joining us.

Craig:
Thank you.

Dave:
And thank you all for listening. We’ll see you soon for another episode of the BiggerPockets podcast in just a couple of days. If you know someone who’s been trying to get into real estate, thinking about it, doesn’t know how to do it, and you think they might benefit from this, make sure to share this episode with someone who you think would be a good house hacker. Thanks again. We’ll see you soon.