Utilities

[Joseph Adelmann]

Hey BPers,

How is everyone doing? I will be closing on a three unit house at the end of the month which does not have separate utility hookups for each unit. What is the best way to still have the tenants pay their share of the utilities? I was thinking about dividing the utility bills based on square footage. So if one unit is a quarter of the building's square footage, the tenant in that unit is responsible for a quarter of the total buidling utilities. Thanks for the help!

Joe Adelmann

[Account Closed]

Combined utilities is a tough one. If you raise the rent and then include utilities in the rent, then they will not care how wasteful they are.

If you have them split it, then someone will be mad because their neighbor is wasteful.

Is it too cost prohibitive to separate out the meters? If so, then I would tell them that the first $100 (or whatever works for you) is included in the rent. Anything over that will be split among the tenants, based on square footage.

This is what I usually do. I'd love to hear other successful ways of dealing with this.