Noam Dolgin is a matchmaker—but not the romantic kind. Dolgin, a real estate agent in Vancouver, runs Collaborative Home BC, a service that pairs up prospective homebuyers who are looking to co-own houses with strangers. Co-ownership is one of the new creative solutions people are dreaming up in order to get into an increasingly unaffordable housing market. In 2017, only 30 per cent of Canadians said they’d be open to this arrangement; that number is now closer to 50 per cent, with younger people more interested in the idea.
Dolgin recently spoke to Maclean’s about how his real estate matchmaking service works. It largely depends on the property: perhaps one buyer occupies the main floor and the other takes the top, or a family lives in a main house with a single person in a laneway unit. To see if buyers are a fit for co-ownership, Dolgin has them write about how they live their lives and what they want from the property. Buyers chat, go for coffee, suss each other out. “The whole process is like a marriage,” Dolgin says. “The first stage is dating—in terms of both people and the property. When you’ve got a sense of what you want and a partner who fits, then you enter the engagement phase: you’re discussing finances, personality quirks and worst-case scenarios. If you’re still a fit after all that, then you see a lawyer, sign the papers and throw a kick-ass housewarming party.”
—Emily Landau, executive editor
