All Forum Posts by: Miller McSwain

We are rent by room house hacking similar to your son. We don't have any issues renting the 2 rooms that share a bathroom, but there are some things we do to help with this.

1. The rent for the rooms with shared bathrooms is lower than the rooms with the private baths. So anyone who is looking to save more, obviously will consider opting for a shared bathroom.
2. Like you mentioned, we do pay for a house cleaner to clean all shared areas once per month (this includes the shared bathroom).
3. We provide all shared supplies for the house (trash bags, dish washing soap, etc). This includes toilet paper, hand soap, etc for the shared bathroom. This helps reduce some friction because tenants who share that bathroom don't fight about whose turn it is to buy the TP. Just don't buy single ply 😂

In our case, we are renting-by-the-room. We are living in our house-hack right now, but when we move out in a couple of months, we do plan on having the tenants do some of the touring.

I know a local investor who does exactly this. In order to reduce the amount of time she has to spend at the property, when a prospective bedroom tenant wants to tour, she has one of the existing residents tour them around. She doesn't financially compensate the current resident, she just said that the residents appreciate the opportunity to meet the prospect and have some say in if they get rented to.

So we will be doing something similar!

@Ryan Thomson

Great breakdown! Stoked to buy again at ~10% less purchase price when compared to last year!

@Linitha Tadsina

Cash flow is definitely tough to find here for a traditional long term rental. In my experience, you likely need to use an enhanced cash flow strategy if you need cash flow on day 1 (rent by room, medium term rental, short term rental)

 Thanks! There are 3 baths. So 1 is a private bath, another is shared by 2 rooms, and another is shared by 3 rooms :)

We are basically just walling off part of a huge living room basement to make the new bedroom. So it will be a smaller living room and bedroom 👍

I was in a similar situation in Colorado. In our case, the multifamilies were just too expensive and didn't cash flow if each unit was rented traditionally.

INSTEAD, we ended up purchasing a SFH and renting out the rooms. We actually almost hit the 1% rule when we move out (which is basically impossible in our market). We purchased for $460k and we are building a 6th bedroom right now. Currently, our room sour renting for ~$750/room, so when we move out that will be $4500/month! On a traditional lease, this house would probably rent for $1800/month, so definitely consider rent-by-room, STR, or MTR on a SFH!

I'm not exactly sure what your strategy is, but we had similar concerns and have found ways to do these tasks remotely.

We are renting by the room, and we didn't want to have to go to the property for showings, move-in/out inspections. For showings, all of our tenants have actually signed sight-unseen because we post a video walkthrough of the property; however, I'm sure someone will want to walk through physically at some point. In this case, I know a rent-by-room investor who just gets one of the other housemates to show them around, so that is probably what we will do.

We have a cleaner clean our property once per month. This is ~$130/month and just ensures that each bedroom/property is ready to be listed as soon as a tenant moves out because it is always clean! We just have her make video recordings of the unit before and after a new tenant moves in. I've also heard of folks having the outgoing tenant record a video of the unit condition and have the incoming tenant record a video of the unit condition. You could compare the two videos and perhaps make security deposit deductions if needed.

So in short, if you are renting by room, the other roommates can probably do some of this lifting. If you aren't doing rent by room, perhaps having a cleaner/handyman do some of the work could help!

There are probably a lot of good ones, but this is working for us:

We are using the "rent-by-room" strategy, and we put electronic locks on all bedroom doors and the front door. Our locks allow us to remotely add a pin for a new resident, make temporary pins for handymen/contractors, etc.

We looked for any lock that uses the "TTlock" app on Amazon. That way, all of our locks are in the same app and have the same functionality.

For exterior deadbolt locks (front door, garage door), we used this:
https://a.co/d/2SFMNcy

For normal interior locks (bedroom), we used something like this (the ones we have are currently unavailable, but this has similar capabilities):
https://a.co/d/8C6nYen

You can create codes from anywhere without the locks having internet connection because it can create them using an offline algorithm. But if you want to create specific codes with certain digits (instead of random), you either need to be close enough to the lock to use bluetooth or you need to have a gateway. The gateway is just a hub that all the locks connect to.

We are using this one, but there are other options:
https://a.co/d/0kEUCXv

I'm currently house hacking (rent-by-room), and we have had no issues filling our units. We've had 2 turnovers so far, with 0 vacancy (new tenant moved in the day the previous moved out). We do list our units on a lot of sites though to ensure we get lots of interest.

Like I said, we only have experience with rent-by-room, but I'll list some sites for other strategies too 😊

Traditional Long Term Rental:
- Zillow
- Realtor.com
- Hotpads
- FB Marketplace
- FB Groups
- Apartments.com
- Craigslist

Rent-by-room Rental:
- FB Marketplace
- FB Groups
- Zillow
- Roomies.com
- Roomiapp.com
- Roomster.com

Short-Term-Rental:
- Airbnb
- VRBO
- Flip Key
- Booking.com

Medium-Term Rental:
- Furnished Finders
- Kopa.co
- Airbnb (with 30 day minimum stay)

 I don't think it is your only option. There are probably a handful of other options that I'm just unaware of. Definitely talk to some lenders, they obviously will have the best answers. 

But yeah, you should totally be able to refinance upon graduation and take the co-signed off the loan 👍

When our tenants notify us that they are moving out, we send them an "Acknowledgment of Notice to Vacate". It just says that we acknowledge the date they are moving out, and it provides move-out instructions. So perhaps sending something like this or having them sign and send a "Notice to Vacate" would be a good idea to make things official.