House Hack - Renting By The Room

[Anthony Rini]

Hey everyone, I'm a first-time buyer looking to find a multi-family property with vacancy in order to house hack. However, it seems that there hasn't been much coming on the market and I'm considering shifting my focus and taking a look at single-families while renting by the room. 

I'm mainly just wondering if anyone has had experience renting by the room in the Pittsburgh area (excluding South Side), especially in the south hills (Dormont, Brookline, etc.). If so, was it difficult to find tenants, and do you think it's something worth looking into based on your past experience? Any insight would be very much appreciated, thanks!

[Miller McSwain]

We were in the same boat as you! We started by looking at small multifamilies to house-hack, but the purchase prices were just too high in our market to get any cash flow. Instead, we started looking at single-family homes and renting-by-the-room.

This has totally worked for us! In fact, we are getting 2x the rental income when comparing rent-by-room to traditional LTR.

As for finding tenants. We've had 2 turnovers so far. For the first, we had a new tenant move in the day that the other moved out. For the 2nd, I think we had ~2 weeks of vacancy before the new tenant moved in. The great thing about rent-by-room though is that vacancy doesn't mean we are recieving $0 in income. We still have income from the other bedrooms! So paying the mortgage didn't become difficult at all.

We put our rent-by-room listings on the following sites:
- FB Marketplace
- Local FB Groups
- Zillow
- Roomies.com
- Roomiapp.com
- Roomster.com (paid)