Duplex Real Results: Q3 2026

Every quarter I publish the ledger for the building I live in: what the tenant and the guests actually paid, what the bank took, and the gap in between. The baseline is the year-one ledger, twelve months from June 2023, where the tenants covered about 73 percent of the payment. This is the first quarterly update, and it covers the three months the basement has been running mostly as month-plus furnished stays instead of nightly bookings.

What came in, month by month

Basement figures are what the furnished stay paid for the month, before cleaning, supplies and the water bill. The upstairs rent is paid weekly, $284 a week, so July had five payments and August and September had four. Annualized it works out to about $1,230 a month, against $1,100 in year one. The payment is principal, interest, property tax, insurance and FHA mortgage insurance.

What changed since year one

The rent is higher, and weekly. The upstairs rent is about $1,230 a month now against $1,100 in year one, collected weekly, and it has not gone up this year. Weekly rent makes the monthly column jump around: a five-payment month looks like a raise and is not one.

The basement changed shape. After a bad guest dispute I moved most of the calendar to furnished stays of a month or more. Fewer turnovers, less per night, and so far more per month. Year one the basement averaged $991 a month on nightly bookings; this quarter it averaged $1,300. All 92 nights are booked, by one furnished stay scheduled to run the whole quarter; the last half of September was still ahead when I published.

The payment went up. The monthly payment rose to $3,200 in June, from about $3,000 before, and it was $2,880 in year one. That $200 increase took back about half of what the higher rent and the steadier basement added.

What the tenants did not cover this quarter

Same rule as the year-one post: the payment is not the whole cost of a 1925 duplex. Utilities for the whole building ran about $800 this quarter. There was no one-time repair work this quarter. With utilities on the ledger, the tenant and the guest covered 73 percent of the $10,400 I spent on the building in the quarter, and 79 percent of the payment alone, against 73 percent of the payment in year one.

Why I count the whole cost and not just the mortgage is in effective housing cost.

The mortgage side repeats every year. The repairs do not, but something always does. That is why the quarterly ledger counts both.

The running total

The running total starts with this quarter: $7,592 in, $9,600 out on the payment, $2,008 from me. Each quarterly update will add a row.

To run the same gap column on a building you could actually buy, put the price, the rent and a current rate into the free house hacking calculator. The last column above is the number it returns.

Frequently asked questions

Is a house hack still covering the mortgage in 2026?

On my duplex the upstairs rent and the furnished basement covered about 79 percent of the $3,200 payment in the third quarter of 2026, leaving about $669 a month for me before utilities and repairs. In year one the same figure was 73 percent and $789.

Do month-plus furnished stays earn less than nightly Airbnb bookings?

Per night, usually yes; per month, not on my basement. Nightly bookings averaged $991 a month in year one, and one furnished stay booked for the whole third quarter of 2026 pays $1,300 a month with no turnovers.