All Forum Posts by: Anthony Rini

@Anthony Rini renting by the room works great. I imagine in a big city like Pittsburgh you won't have a hard time finding tenants. It can be scary though. To test it out you could make a "fake listing" and get a feel for the demand. Or go to local meetup groups and see if anyone else is doing it. 

It's a super common fear that "I won't be able to find tenants for my bedroom rentals and then I'll have to pay for the whole mortgage". If you advertise well with good pictures, good description of who you are looking for, a good description of who you are and price it correctly - you will get demand. 

I have had a ton of luck with apartments.com (they bought Cozy). I list my rooms for rent here and then they put the listing on several of their affiliate sites. I get a couple interested leads a day.

Apartments.com is also where I have tenants fill out a background and credit check, set up automated rent payments, and upload renter's insurance. It's pretty sweet and free for me.

I also have some nice auto messages I use to do the initial "screen" to save my time from the tire kickers and the "is it still available" annoyers.

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)

I house hack rent by the room in Philly, shoot me a DM if you have any questions.

Hey dude,

Much respect! To keep it straight forward - first step in the process is going to be getting a pre-approval letter from a bank. If you wanna PM me on the side with any questions about this process let me know. From there, you're going to have to compare the prices/rents you think you can get. With high interest rates at the moment, cashflow might be a little tough unless the price point is pretty low. If this is the case, I'd do the rent by the room strat until you can refi in a year or two! 

Renting by the room is very possible, it's what I did for my first house hack. I don't know too much about your area but if you can afford a multi-family duplex or triplex then that is probably the best way to go. If not, SFH with at least 3 bedrooms work as well. Make sure the agent you're working with knows about the house-hacking strategy and can help you run numbers!

Quote from @Dennis Nguyen:

Renting by the room is very possible, it's what I did for my first house hack. I don't know too much about your area but if you can afford a multi-family duplex or triplex then that is probably the best way to go. If not, SFH with at least 3 bedrooms work as well. Make sure the agent you're working with knows about the house-hacking strategy and can help you run numbers!

Echo'ing Dennis here - find a good agent in your area that can help you with the numbers. It can be intimidating (especially for the first time). 

Additionally, make sure you maintain some portion of the money you've saved for reserves. I notice some first-time investors forget to budget for that & run into trouble paying off maintenance costs. 

Fantastic! Sounds like you are making a great decision when it comes to investing. Best advice I can suggest for someone looking to house hack, in addition to finding a good lender and saving for a down payment, is to research the areas you are looking to house hack. In addition to finding a place that you want to live, you need to be mindful of the areas and their growth/decline for future investment. I can tell you personally i have a few investors who are pulling out of South Side quickly because the market there is slowly declining. It use to be an A area but now is B (in my opinion) which I am basing off of crime, rental desirability, Days on market for flips, etc. Keep an eye on areas like Bellevue, Avalon, Brighton Heights, etc that are near the new Esplande Development as well as any other area with major growth or steady appreciation. Also, I know some people really like room rentals but I would steer away. It is much harder to find good, LONG TERM tenants in a room rental versus a duplex/triplex. Room rentals have much higher turn over from my experience where often our tenants in a nice duplex/triplex stay 2-4 years or longer.

Hope that helps and congrats!

Welcome! And congrats on taking action