Bedroom rental hacking

[Matt Anderson]

I own a couple single family homes in the St. Louis area near a dental school. I have been thinking about renting out the bedrooms rather than the whole house.  The house is a 3 bedroom 1.5 baths kitchen living room, family room and rents for $900.00 a month.  The thought would be to rent out the bedrooms for $400-$500 and include the utilities in the rent.  The tenants would get an entire house and utilities for $400-$500 a month. Wondering how the leases are worded for this type of rental though. 

Give me your thoughts and experiences.

[Jermaine Chad Ingram]

@Matt Anderson good morning. It will be difficult to set up what’s called an SRO (single room occupancy) because the house does not have a sprinkler system which is required for a single room occupancy. Also the bedroom doors inside of a house cannot lock from the outside (fire codes) so it would be difficult for people to lock their rooms legally if you have a shared home of unrelated adults. St. Lucie county allows nine unrelated adults to live in one house

what you are looking to do is to rent a house to roommates. you’re not looking to rent people a room.

If you’re paying for utilities what happens when people run the air conditioner and leave the windows open?

It will be very difficult to get three or four people to share bathrooms, so you’re looking for a very specific kind of person or quality of resident. What are you gonna do about cleaning are these people expected to clean the common areas or will you pay for it?

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