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My campus has several fraternities with multiple houses, one with 5. My chapter has had two for the last couple years, and had two at one point before when I was an active.
Multi houses come in two varieties. There's several houses basically right next to each other, and there's an official houses in one place with a party house in a completely different area.
The multi houses together isn't as ideal as one facility of sufficient size. Obviously those don't exist right now, and we're working on it, but it takes time. Still, they function pretty close to the same way.
The two different areas situation is more problematic. It does work on the surface. We can rage at a remote party house without trouble and still have a decent public house. However, for us at least, it did end up with a very serious division in our chapter. The party house was rented by individual members, and they were in charge of the place, not the chapter. That's where people went for parties & hanging out. They did things there that were FAR outside the risk mgmt or even the law and we had no say in it. People didn't hang out between classes or evenings at our main house. It was a bad situation. There was eventually a fight for our identity and a membership review that threw out several members.
I wouldn't recommend multiple houses. If you HAVE to do it, it needs to be short-term and you need to know what you're getting into so you can mitigate the problems that come with it.
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