My tenant asked for a roommate and I agreed to allow it.

You can have roommates all you want.

It simply is not worth the effort to collect a month of one roommate's rent.The poster of this very post you're posting in has a tenant who didn't pay rent for 4 months, and then on top of that they broke the lease. 

My college room mate was from there!

Not good for roommates or family rentals.Industries that were priced out by the tech people will come back and push the demand back up. 

When I was househacking with roommates, I did this mainly renting to friends and it was fun. 

ROOMMATESA fall back is to go with roommates of course, that would cover the rent and given its furnished I might make back my investment capital in 2-3 years. 

they were both on the lease so there is no 'one paid their portion'.ultimately, the person that you can get ahold of is just as responsible for the full payment of rent. you've pretty much botched this up by only collecting 'their portion' and being sympathetic. lesson learned.if i have 2 tenants on a lease and tenant 1 runs out, tenant 2 still needs to pay 100% of the rent. they got themselves into the situation by having a loser as a roommate. you shouldn't have to pay for that.

I've currently got a roommate and as such I'm looking into claiming 50% as a rental for tax benefits.

I have a question about the approval process for multiple tenants in one unit (husband and wife, boyfriend and girlfriend, or roommates).I'm definitely going to run a background check on each adult that lives in the unit, but what about income requirements?