Rent by Room vs Multifamily

[Hariharan Elavarasan]

If I do a rent by room strategy, do I need to furnish the bedrooms? What do you i need to furnish them with? 

I feel like if its a whole unit like in multifamily I dont have to, but I’m not sure. 

How do you advertise a rent by room? Can you on Zillow or do they only allow rentals by the unit? 

[Miller McSwain]

I'm a rent-by-room investor in Colorado Springs, and I wondered the same things before I got started.

I ran a study in my market and investigated rental rates for furnished vs. non-furnished rooms (by aggregating data from Zillow, Roomies, etc). In my market at least, I found that the rent received was surprisingly almost equivalent for furnished and non-furnished. So we aren't furnishing bedrooms unless we have to. We do furnish shared spaces though (living room, dining room, etc) because things would get dicey when a tenant who owns the dining table moves out, then the remaining tenants wouldn't have a table anymore 😂. Additionally, we provide all pots/pans/utensils, etc for the kitchen.

In some cases, you may need to furnish bedrooms though. For example, when we move out of our current house-hack, we are going to furnish the bedrooms in the basement. The railing at the staircase has to be removed to get certain pieces of furniture down, and I don't want to do that every time there is a turnover. So I'd like to leave them unfurnished, but furnishing them is probably the best move, unfortunately.

One benefit to furnishing is that tenants are likely to stay longer because they'd rather not move their furniture out. If you have a furnished room, you are more likely to have turnover because it is super easy for the tenant to pick up and go.

As for listing rent-by-room, we've had success with the following sites:
- FB Marketplace
- FB Groups
- Zillow
- Roomies.com
- Roomiapp.com

I hope this helps 😊