Newly finished basement suite; lease/rental questions

[Jarrod English]

Hello,

I've finally taken my first step towards real estate investing and have a finished basement suite in my home. It has a separate kitchen and laundry. Now that the basement suite is done, I'm thinking it would be very smart for me to move out after completing some renos upstairs and renting out the upstairs. Even if I move into an apartment for rent or stay with a friend and pay some $500-$700 a month, I'd still be making money on the upstairs.

So my 2 options for the current basement suite are:

- I could rent out the whole suite with utilities/internet for maybe $1200-$1400.

- Or do it based on room with utilities/internet at around $500-$700 per room for 3 rooms. One room is large, one is medium and one is small so I was thinking of charging $550 for the small room, $600 medium and $650 large (possibly $1800/month).

If I go the individual room route, I would have to furnish it and would put in a dresser, bed and desk. I like this route because I also don't have to worry about people moving in and out and hauling their furniture through the suite as everything is brand new down there haha.

So my questions are more related to if I go on a per room basis and buy beds, my mom suggested buying mattress protectors and plastic sheets for the beds to protect them. I'm wondering if tenants would be uncomfortable with that as I imagine it's noisy to sleep on. On the plus side it protects the beds and I don't have to worry about replacing them (though they'll only be $100 or so for a small mattress). Does anyone have any experience with this sort of thing?

I was also curious about chores, specifically shoveling snow as I won't have any shared space with the tenants. Winter is coming and I will be living upstairs and figured it's fair that I shovel the front walks and the tenants would shovel on the side of the house which is where they would walk to get to the back door. Does that sound reasonable?

And then the taking care of the bed coverings and the snow shoveling, is this something that should be written down in the lease? If I furnish things, should there be some sentence in the lease about "all furniture in the suite is property of the house" so there's no disputing what's owned by me/the house if there are issues with a tenant and furniture? If something gets damaged then it's covered.

I think that's all I have for now but I'm sure there will be lots more to come so I'll use this thread to bounce ideas off everyone.

Any help is greatly appreciated!