Student Rental - How many students based on septic?

[Sara Hanson]

Hello,

I am a new invester, and have had quite the rocky start. We've been housing students in some spare bedrooms for almost 2 years now in our own home, and an opportunity came up to purchase a house 1 house down from ours. We did, and the plan was to house students during winter (3 miles from State University) and STR for the summer (plus some time for family to visit and stay).

Well our first batch of students had a party, and even though we thought we were good friends with the neighbors, and we were at the scene within a half hour of the party starting, some not so savory neighbors (stabbed us in the back) reported us to the town.  We were operating without a "special permit" to have more than 3 unrelated individuals, so they almost dinged us for that.  However we were already working on the documents to apply for the permit (we owned the house for a total of 1 month), and we are cooperating, so the town didn't fine us and is helping us through the permit process.  The other thing they wanted to ding us on is that we had 5 students living there with a 4 bedroom septic.  We did not actually have 5 students living there (although we were looking), so that was easily solved.  Now that I'm doing more research, does the town/State have grounds to stand on when it comes to limiting how many people are in the house based on septic?

I'm not sure if this is a gray area, where maybe we can't advertise "5 bedroom",  but we might be legal to have 5 people.  Septics are sized to assume 2 people/bedroom.  Anyone have knowledge on this?  I have a feeling there is no solid language on it, but it can be interpretted different ways.  Thank you for any advice!