It’s hard enough for two people to make a life-altering decision about buying a home. Mix in a third, and you’ve got a recipe for anarchy.
But Lillian Whithaus, Anita Brown and Treva Obbard seem to have it figured out. “We consider ourselves a family unit,” said Ms. Whithaus, 29, from Davis, Calif. “Maybe the best way to say it is that Anita is my fiancée, and then Treva is our partner and friend, collectively.”
In 2018, when Ms. Whithaus and Ms. Brown returned to the San Francisco Bay Area after college in Pennsylvania, a couple of realities set in: They were headed toward a committed relationship, and they were going to need a place to live. They were also going to need some help affording one. So they called up Ms. Obbard, a friend of Ms. Brown’s from high school in nearby Albany, Calif., figuring that the three of them could pool enough rent money for a decent place.
The money mattered. But the three also found they were a good fit in terms of temperament and interests, like their shared love of reading and of “Dungeons and Dragons,” games of which they hosted each week with groups of friends.
As they bounced around a few shared rentals, Ms. Whithaus and Ms. Brown, 29, came to regard Ms. Obbard, 31, as an essential part of their long-term future. That included home ownership — and, someday, family. “We’re all looking forward to being co-parents together,” Ms. Obbard said. “Buying a house was really the first of a two-part plan.”
With Ms. Whithaus and Ms. Brown both working in library science, and Ms. Obbard in the nonprofit fundraising world, the search for a home in their preferred area — in and around Oakland and Berkeley — was going to be shaped by their need to keep the monthly mortgage payment under control.
What wasn’t a problem, it turned out, was the trio’s ability to create consensus.
“It’s something they are very skilled at doing,” said Mischa Lorraine, an agent with Golden Gate Sotheby’s International Realty, who worked with the women after a referral. “They broke down decision-making processes and handed them off one to the other, and then always came back with a unified response.”
Using inheritance money from Ms. Brown and Ms. Obbard, the women had cash for a down payment. With all three chipping in, they set their budget at about $1.4 million, including any needed renovations. Their purchase would be a pure co-ownership, one-third apiece regardless of initial contributions, something all three agreed to put in writing.
By last fall, they were ready to begin looking seriously. But the Bay Area’s notoriously tight housing market had a way of quickly ratcheting sales prices upward, and their desire for a house big enough to accommodate a family, with access to mass transit, was another wrinkle in the math.
“Somebody spent a lot of time and money making it a beautiful home,” Ms. Whithaus said of this three-bedroom, two-bath, Craftsman-style from 1912 in Oakland’s historic Temescal neighborhood. Though a bit smaller than what the three wanted at 1,447 square feet, the house was move-in ready with upgraded hardwood flooring and fixtures, an open living-dining room, rebuilt bathrooms, and a beautifully redesigned kitchen and breakfast nook. A separate studio unit opened to a private, tiled backyard with plenty of space for entertaining. At $995,000, the home appeared to be deliberately underpriced, meaning that a bidding war was likely. Annual taxes were about $18,000.
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Mark Kreidler
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