Tenant asking for rent reduction (unrelated to COVID).

[Kamran Rahman]

Hi all

I’ll jump right into things.  

Context:
I have a 3 bedroom condo  2 rooms are rented out. Tenant A is an A+ tenant  Tenant B is a C+ tenant. I used to occupy the third room as a house hacker, and am planning to rent it out to a third tenant  

Summary of issue:

Tenant B is asking that I lower their rent by 6% due to a number of reasons that seem somewhat frivolous. Her overarching theme is that she’ll have to share common space with another person, and she would hope to get a 6% rent reduction 

My immediate answer to her:

I have no plans to reduce rent at the moment. If the concern is money, I told Tenant B that I have some work she can do around the rental for $. This sum of $ is worth about 3 months of the savings she would have gotten, if she had reduced rent. In this same convo, I reminded her that I had given her some paid work to do and she never did that, to which she responded that that work had slipped her mind. Long story short, my current position is that rent stays the same and I have a couple paid projects she can work on (assuming the work doesn’t slip her mind, again). 

The updated answer I am contemplating 

I did research to see what fair rent is for my unit, if I rent it out to a single family. I found that $2k is the fair rent. 

Currently, my goal is to make a total of $2.3k in monthly rent (so a 15% premium on the market rate for a single family). I personally do feel like that premium is fair, given the additional overhead involved for me when renting out by the room. 

Question to audience:

Objectively, does my current stance sound fair and reasonable? If I actually went down the path of cutting rent for Tenant B, I am also contemplating proactively doing the same for Tenant A (I don’t want roomies to think people are getting preferential treatment). However , I’m super apprehensive about this because I feel like this will not only set a precedent, but I also feel like Tenant B will ask for even more things in the future (which she has a tendency to do).