House Hacking Specifics (yard, mail, utilities) - Making a SFH into 3 separate units

[Rene Hosman]

Question/Advice needed about having a three-unit house hack in a residentially zoned neighborhood. 

Looking to hear from someone with experience house hacking a single family into multiple units in a residential area. I plan to live and flip a house that already has three entrances and is easily divisible. And after a year move out of the property entirely and rent all three units. I am curious to hear from people who have done something similar about:

1. If you ran into any issues leasing because of the zoning restriction, I don't particularly expect the city to come after me but I'm curious if anyone has had a negative experience or any zoning issues. I don't plan on ever trying to sell the units individually, just rent them that way so it appears to me it won't be an issue but I'm curious if anyone had a different experience

2. Did you divide the yard up with fences, or give the yard to certain units, or make it a communal amenity?

3. How do you handle mail when you have multiple tenants living in what the tenants consider to be separate units? 

4. Curious how and where you marketed the units for rent and what verbiage you use to say it's a separate unit that shares walls?

5. How do you handle utilities if you can only get one utility bill for the property? Are utilities included in rent and you keep yourself as the account holder? Looked into some tech solutions like a sense electricity monitor which can help assign electric usage by unit but in CO we have some large heating bills in the winter and the furnace is gas so I'm not sure how that would work...

Background about the property:

6bed/4bath

Three different entry points, one external door per unit

One entrance is the "main entrance" to the home, one is a door in the side yard, one is a door in the backyard.

House is divided into main house with upstairs 2-bed + office unit (1), downstairs walk-out basement 2-bed unit (2) and 2-story above the garage 1-bed unit (3)

State is CO, not in Denver proper but a nearby suburb

The suburb has a lot of small multifamily (2-8 units) so it's very common for the area but not necessarily as common for this particular bock which is mostly ranch-style homes

Plenty of parking, so that is not an issue

The unit is zoned residential without the ability to register it as a multifamily with the city but there is commercial and mixed use/multifamily across the street so it's not super out of character for the neighborhood and I'm not worried about neighbors complaining 

I currently have three rentals in the Denver area - two are mid-term rental condos in Denver, one single family home in a Denver suburb I live in and house hack by renting out the top floor but will be renting as one unit single family home when I move into this next property for simplicity sake. So I'm not new to investing or managing but certainly still have so much to learn!