How To Get Rent Estimate of SFH When Using Rent By Room Strategy?

[Jared Dewey]

I think I've concluded that I want to start out house hacking by buying a sfh and renting out each of the rooms, I think it will do fairly well as I also live near a college and can rent out to students to get higher cash flow than a traditional 2-4 unit. Another reason I think this is a great move to getting started as all of the 2-4 unit properties are much more expensive in my area. Only issue is when I'm trying to practice running the numbers all the videos continuously make an arbitrary number up and say we'll just charge this and never really explain too much. When using tools like Zillow they estimate rent based on renting out the entire house to one person (or so I believe). Other sources just say go and compare and use some rent estimate tool. I think its hard to use these pieces of advice as using the rent by room strategy doesn't really take in account the fact that your renting a room along with an entire house so it doesn't really compare when looking at other rental listings. Maybe other people are talking about other rental listings with the rent by room strategy (I can't find any) and or I'm not looking hard enough and not looking in the right places? Maybe there is a certain metric to use when regarding square feet? I honestly don't quite know and am obviously a little lost on this topic.