It's set up to be accessible and appealing to your audience.

Specifically, I’d love to hear about best practices for managing shared spaces, screening tenants, and setting up house rules.Additionally, I plan to split the utilities among the tenants—any advice on how to handle this efficiently would be greatly appreciated!

If your tenants aren't looped in early, it could make access for inspections tough.

Like you said, probably not so easy here in MA but you did give me an idea about alternative uses...I typically focus on properties that I can make buildable by solving zoning issues, access issues or minor wetland issues.  

But we invested several years of blood sweat and tears to get things stabilized and learn the space before we turned them over to property managers. 

Hello, I currently have an empty space (about 12 feet from the property to the sidewalk and 8+ feet wide).

Thing is…most of them wait for marriage - need more space, want a two-bedroom etc…

Welcome to the world of real estate investing, and congratulations on taking the first steps toward learning about this exciting space!

Allows you to keep your current portfolio with the ability to access $ to fund projects. 

Those types of properties can bring in good returns, but the management can be intensive, and finding reliable tenants for both residential and commercial spaces might take some work.