Thinking about using sub-metering.

[Marvin Meng]

Hi all! I'm curious if any of you have switched to sub-metering on units for which you previously paid water. I've got 9 units I'm presently paying for water on. Can you generally describe what your experience was switching over? Thank you!

[John Warren]

@Marvin Meng I looked into it several times for buildings in the Berwyn area. The problem is that the older buildings were not plumbed for separate meters, so unless you have an outlier where the potable water has lines separated out for each unit, then you probably would have to re plumb a building in order to sub meter. 

One strategy a lot of investors i know have been using is RUBS. You bill back the water bill to the tenant based on the square footage of the building. There is a bit of leg work involved initially, but if you have good software it is not too hard to do. I believe my friend that is doing this uses Appfolio to split the bill up.