I cleared 6,200 dollars per door net last year across nine rooms and I want to know if anyone here is doing better than that.

@jenn_mcallister isn't tagged here yet but 11 days vacancy across nine rooms for a full year is the number that stops me cold.

Every boarding house operator I've watched try to hit that assumes the tenant mix stays stable, and then one bad actor in month four poisons two other rooms inside six weeks.

What's your screening process actually look like?

55,800 net on nine rooms with 11 total vacancy days is a clean result. The assumption doing the most work in that number is the deferred maintenance catch-up being a one-time event. If the property is now current, your forward-looking expense ratio should compress, and the per-door figure improves. If the building is still working through a backlog, the 6,200 is a floor with more compression ahead before it stabilizes.

The risk you did not raise: resident concentration. Nine rooms is a small pool, and your 11-day vacancy number reflects that you held high occupancy, but a property at this scale has limited statistical cushion. Two simultaneous turnovers in the same month, especially if one stretches past 30 days, can move your annual vacancy drag from 1.3% to something closer to 10 to 15% in a single quarter. Single-family is operationally noisier per call, as you noted, but a vacancy there does not cascade the way it can in a shared-facility environment where departing residents sometimes accelerate each other.

On the ceiling question: the operators I see getting above 7,000 per door in comparable Texas markets are doing it through two levers, tighter room turnover protocols that cut average vacancy to under seven days, and utility-inclusive pricing structured so the pass-through is baked into the rent rather than absorbed as an operating line. The second one is the sharper instrument. Utilities in a nine-room shared-bath house can swing materially with resident behavior, and if you are holding that exposure on your operating statement, you are absorbing variance that the pricing structure could shift.

Dallas County licensing complexity is real and the compliance cost is not linear if you try to scale to a second property, so confirm with your attorney how transferable your current operating structure is before you treat the model as directly replicable.

What does your current lease structure look like on utilities, inclusive or metered back to residents?

The number worth stress-testing is what happens to that 6,200 per door when you hit a licensing renewal cycle with a code complaint attached, because in Texas a single occupancy use permit challenge can freeze new leases on every room simultaneously while the unit next door keeps collecting. That is a vacancy risk that does not show up in turnover math and does not scale the way a single-family problem does. Your 11-day drag looks clean, but it assumes you can re-let freely, and a municipal hold on the certificate of occupancy changes that assumption for all nine doors at once, not one at a time. The comparison to your single-family door at 4,100 is the honest benchmark and it already makes the case, so I would be more interested in how you are thinking about the renewal cycle on the licensing and whether you have a reserve sized to carry all nine rooms dark for 60 to 90 days if you need to cure something structural before the inspector signs off. What does your current reserve look like as a ratio to gross annual rent?