@Will Stewart in general, you will get more rent if you rent by the room than if you rent the entire house. For instance, in my area, a 4 br / 3 ba house might gross around 2,900 if you rent it by the room, but the same house would only rent for about 2,000 if you rent the entire house as one place. Having said that, renting by the room usually is more work for you than renting the entire house. Obviously, a single room in a house will usually rent for much less than a 1 br apartment.
If you do rent by the room, you'll need to develop systems for preventing and managing housemate disputes, keeping the common areas clean (a cleaner might be worthwhile), screening tenants to find people who will be good housemates, etc....there are just more moving pieces to sort out if you rent by the room (but, as a result, you usually make more money).
@Kenisha B. gave you a solid strategy for how to estimate rents. Other factors to consider are: square footage of the room, whether the room has a private bathroom (and if not, how many housemates does the person occupying that room share their bathroom with...I'd recommend avoiding properties where more than two housemates have to share a bathroom), special amenities of the room (for instance, a skylight, vaulted ceilings, a separate entrance to the room, a walk-in closet, a location that is separated from the rest of the house, etc. are all amenities that can make a room more valuable).
With a rent by the room property, three of your biggest concerns are: tenant screening, tenant-created noise, and tenant-created messiness in the house.
Screening and selecting high quality tenants is ESPECIALLY CRITICAL when renting individual rooms. These people will have to share a house together, and you don't want tenants who are messy, loud, inconsiderate of others, or immature--these types of tenants will just cause you endless headaches (and liability) in a rent by the room property. Because of this, you need to have an excellent screening process--get references from prior roommates/housemates, prior landlords, and anyone else who can verify whether the applicant is clean, quiet, and considerate. Ask screening questions like "tell me about a time you had a disagreement with a housemate", and "you'd be living here with housemates--how do you plan to avoid disagreements and disputes with those housemates?", etc.
Many rent by the room properties are aimed at college undergraduates--which, I think is often a terrible idea, because these inexperienced tenants tend to be the messiest, loudest, most inconsiderate, and most immature. Yes, there are plenty of college students who are not messy at all, and are highly considerate and mature...but, we're speaking in generalities here....The simple reality is that most college undergraduates have minimal or no experience living with housemates, and just like anything else, people are better at doing things that they have experience doing. A person who has 8 years of experience living with housemates may be better at co-existing with housemates than a person who has never had housemates. In order to attract those more experienced tenants, you'll need to have a higher quality property than the type of property that undergraduate students would usually rent (a new medical doctor doing their residency will probably require a higher standard of living than a college kid)...but trust me: paying a bit more for a higher end property so that you get higher end tenants is often well worth the investment.
Preventing problems with housemate noise and messiness is also critical in a rent-by-the-room house. Here are some tips:
Especially if you're doing rent by the room, you want a property where the bedrooms are separated from each other, and separated from common areas as much as possible to provide as much privacy for each housemate as possible. For instance, a bedroom that is at the end of a hallway, and which doesn't share walls with any other bedrooms or common areas provides a lot more privacy than a room that shares a wall with a common bathroom, a second wall with another bedroom, and a third wall with a common area...a house that has 3 stories with only 1 bedroom on each story might provide more privacy than a house where all 3 bedrooms are on the same floor ....extra privacy usually results in less likelihood of disputes between housemates about issues like noise, messiness, etc....If you plan to rehab the property, sometimes, it's possible to re-configure the floorplan of a house in ways that create more privacy for each bedroom, add bathrooms, add separate entrances, and generally make the property more appealing for rent-by-the-room tenants. Therefore, it's worthwhile to learn how to assess the potential "traffic patterns" of a house, and assess the ways in which a property's floorplan could be reconfigured (this involves understanding issues like load-bearing walls, routing of plumbing, electricity & HVAC, code restrictions, etc.)--but once you learn those things, it's a valuable toolkit.
To prevent problems with messiness, you can try to screen tenants to find the ones who are very clean. You can have policies in the lease that state what the standards are for cleanliness, and who is responsible for cleaning. You could hire a professional cleaner to come to the property periodically (you could either pay for this yourself, or potentially pass the cost on to the tenants). The layout of the house also has a big effect on how messy or clean the house stays--for instance, a bathroom shared by 4 housemates is inevitably going to be messier than a bathroom shared by 2 housemates (as I mentioned, I strongly suggest avoiding properties where more than 2 people have to share a bathroom...and ideally, if 2 people ARE sharing a bathroom, you want it to be a large, double-sink bathroom). You can also "set the tone" for the standard of living by furnishing the common areas nicely, and using mature, high-quality interior design in the common areas (i.e.; matching furniture, stylish rugs and throw pillows on the couch, no Star Wars or Pulp Fiction posters on the walls, etc.). In other words, if you create a home for a mature, responsible adult (not an immature irresponsible party animal), the tenants will often follow your lead.
Good luck out there!
