What an owner living in a house hacked duplex needs to put in writing before move in
The financial side of house hacking gets discussed constantly. What gets almost no attention is that the owner is the landlord and the neighbor at the same time, and that changes the tenant relationship in ways worth writing down before move-in rather than discovering later. Owners who live in one unit of a two or three unit and rent the rest often use the same lease template an off-site owner would use, then are surprised when a tenant knocks at 10pm about a dripping shower, leaves a note about shared laundry, or assumes the parking spot nearest the door is negotiable because the owner's car is sitting in it. Worth putting in writing before move-in: specific quiet hours, exactly who has access to which shared spaces and when, a clear channel and response-time expectation for maintenance requests so a doorstep knock isn't the default, parking assignments spelled out rather than assumed, and a shared understanding of what counts as an emergency versus something that waits until morning. What tends to get handled fine as it comes up is the smaller day to day friction, so long as the boundaries above are set before anyone moves in rather than negotiated in the hallway.
