Average tenancy went from 7 months to 19. It nearly cost me six weeks.

The guest rule is the interesting part to me. In a lot of cities the boarding house license itself carries conditions on overnight occupancy, and a resident with a long term guest can put you over the approved head count without you noticing. So your enforcement may have been protecting the license as much as the peace. Worth pulling your conditions of approval and seeing whether the guest limit in your house agreement matches the number in the file, because those two documents drift apart fast and the city version is the one that binds you. Varies by jurisdiction, so read your own.

What happens to that 3,200 if the manager wants 27 an hour next year instead of 23?

How did a lender look at year one when you were sitting on 15.6 percent loss to vacancy? I am still learning how anyone underwrites a property where the rent roll is ten separate people on short agreements. Did you have to show two years before anyone would talk, or did the debt come from somewhere that priced the operating history differently.

At the rents I look at, 380 to 450 a room in small towns, a 23,900 manager line eats the entire spread. Ten rooms at 420 is 50,400 gross before anything. I don't see how the front door discipline you describe survives at that price point unless the owner is doing all twenty hours themselves. Did you ever price a version where the manager is ten hours instead of twenty, or does the whole result collapse below some threshold of presence in the building?

Nineteen months still reads short to me, though I know I am comparing against apartment tenancies that aren't the same product. Room rentals serve people mid-transition by design, so some of your turnover is the market working as intended. The question I'd ask is whether the 19 is a real plateau or whether it keeps climbing as the house builds a reputation. Three years of move-out data would tell you which.

Average tenancy at move-out is biased and it flatters you. Everyone still living there is excluded, and in year one your sample was dominated by short stayers who cycled fast, while year two only counts six departures. If the four people who left in your bad month are in the year two sample, your 19 could be masking a bimodal distribution, a handful of long stays plus a churn floor you haven't fixed. I'd rerun it as occupied room-days per room per year. That number is harder to argue with and it maps straight onto the collections line.

Can you break the 20 hours down? I am trying to understand what a room rental manager actually does with the week, because from outside it looks like cleaning plus showings plus arguments about the fridge. If it is really eight hours of common area work and twelve hours of being visible in the building, that is a different job to hire for than a cleaning contract with a phone number attached.

windlass has a point about the measurement, and it matters for more than bragging rights. If you ever apply to renew or expand, some licensing offices ask for turnover and complaint history, and a metric you can defend in a hearing beats one a neighbor's attorney can pick apart in two minutes. Occupied room-days is also what an operator buyer will rebuild from your ledger anyway.

Sorry for the basic one, when three people left at once, did you refund anything or was it just empty rooms?

I want to separate the two changes. You added screening and you added labor in the same year. If the second reference call did most of the work, someone buying their first house could get a chunk of your result for the cost of a few phone calls and a slower fill. Do you have any sense of which one moved the needle, even a rough split? I am trying to budget the first year and a 10,000 labor line is the difference between doing this and not.

Seventeen turns in a year on ten doors would have killed me. My eight units did six turns last year total and I thought that was bad.

The six week stretch at 60 percent is the number I keep looking at. What did that do to debt service coverage in that quarter, and did you have to feed the account from outside? A house that runs fine at ten and breaks at six has a very narrow band, and if your lender tests coverage annually you got away with it because the year averaged out. Someone with tighter terms might not have.

This is the post that told me boarding houses are a job, not income. Twenty hours a week of somebody's labor and a rule fight that cost 9,400 is not the thing I am looking for, though I respect that you stuck with it.

On the two reference calls, are you asking both landlords the same set of questions every time and writing the answers down? The thing I keep reading is that screening criteria have to be applied the same way to everyone who applies, and a second call that only happens when something feels off is exactly where that goes wrong. Rules on this vary by state and by city, and it is worth having an attorney look at your written criteria once. Did you set yours down on paper before you started using them, or after the first year taught you what to ask?

What I keep coming back to is what you would change at 14 rooms instead of 10. The manager hours presumably don't scale linearly, and the guest rule fight was survivable because four rooms filled from referrals inside a small resident network. At 14 the front door discipline seems like it either has to get more systematic or it stops being one person's judgment. Have you looked at whether you would take a bigger house on now, and what number of rooms would make you say no.