Room rental home layout.

[Ian Dale Ibrado]

Looking to do room rental as first investment. What do you guys have as layout? Majority of homes in canada has basements. Looking to to make a basement 100% bedrooms. What are your thoughts on that? Not having a common area.

[Ben Einspahr]

@Ian Dale Ibrado, Rent by the room HH'ing is an excellent REI strategy and works excellent out here in Denver, CO with the high cost for rent (very similar to Edmonton). I like to call it recession proof investing. Numbers are different in AB but for Denver, a conservative approach is about $800/month for a room with a shared bathroom and $900/month for a room with its own private bathroom. And these are just standard run-of-the-mill 10x12 rooms. Nothing fancy.

So a few tips and tricks for RBR HH'ing:

1). 4+ bed house. Anything less does not see to do well after moving out in the Denver metro market.

2). Egress widows. For basement rooms, do not rent out any room that do not have proper egress. Others may disagree but my opinion, not worth the risk.

3). No more than two tenants sharing one bathroom. For example, if you have a 4bed/2bath and one of the bathrooms is connected to the master bed. That means the other 3 rooms are sharing a bathroom. May not be the best option at 6:30AM when everyone is wanting to shower before work :)

4). And the secrete sauce, as @Nicholas Coulter mentioned,  not furnishing living room with a TV. This will keep the tenants hanging out in there room and keeping to themselves. = less tenant headache.

Hope this helps