Renting my new investment by the room

[Keeya WangJones]

Hi BP, It has been an exciting year but also a painful one. I finally bought my first investment property and put a some funds into to create a granny flat studio. Unforeseen because mostly lack of experience and it’s my first property, it has been extremely hard to rent out my house. Under some unfortunate circumstances, I lost a tenant that was doing a test 6 month trial of renting the granny flat and garage to a month-to-month lease for musIcal needs. It was a good situation until a neighbor was extremely mean to them and threaten them. Lease was immediately converted to month-to-month. Garage as storage. Long story short... I’m having a hard time renting out my house now. It attracts families and the family market do not want to share the property land usage with other people. They have very specIfIc family needs. My house has been empty for too long. Going on 3 months. I removed all restrictions such as no dogs. Therefore, now I would like to just rent my main house by the room. 3 bedroom and 1 bath. Large bedroom at 400 sq ft. I know that I‘m inviting higher turn-over but it‘s better than an empty home. Empty of people and furnishings. Has anyone start from scratch in renting by room before? Did you post the entire ad for the home or did you just post one ad per room? OR both. How did you obtain tenants? I‘m posting currently on Craigslist Essentially, the tenants are strangers. How did you deal with conflicts? How did you land your first tenant to occupy one room? How did you get the other rooms rented once you got the first one done. I WISH I COULD POST ON A ROOMMATE SITE THAT SHOWS HOMES AVAILABLE SPECIFICALLY FOR ROOMMATES. Any other advice is appreciated. I have to get my main house rented ASAP. Vacancies are taking a huge financial toll. Cheers!

[Nicole Marshall]

@Keeya WangJones I rent 3 bedrooms in my house, but I also live there, so it's definitely different than a completely "hands-off" rental. However, the process to find roommates should be similar. I post on Craigslist, Nextdoor, my work classifieds section, my college alumni classifieds, and sometimes facebook marketplace (but I get more spam and weirdos through that). I've found roommates through all platforms. You can also post through Zillow, which will automatically post for you on Hotpads and Trulia, though Zillow itself will not actually post a "single room" ad. 

When you get responses from potential renters, via email, watch the grammar. This is usually a red-flag for me, if their grammar is poor. Trust your judgment when you meet them in person. If something seems off, but you're not sure what, it's your intuition. For example, I had a very pleasant guy come look at one of my rooms. He seemed super nice, well-groomed, educated, but something felt off to me and I didn't know what. So I googled his name and yep, he had 2 arrest records in 2018, one of which was "battery by strangulation". 

You will absolutely want to do a background and credit check, and even ask for a recent paystub. You may want to ask them to get renter's insurance too, and check with your current homeowner policy as well.

Seeing as it's around the holidays... it's likely you may not find a renter until the new year. I'm having issues finding tenants right now as well, where usually I can find one within a week.

Good luck, and feel free to message if you have any questions. :)