Gerald is the data point most boarding house operators never get to see run long enough to mean something. Eleven years, one maintenance call, $4,680 a year, and a resident who turned down family relocation because the room suited him. That last part is the variable worth isolating.
The assumption doing the most work in your "more Geralds" framing is that long tenure is a resident quality you can screen for. It is partly that, but it is more a property quality. Gerald stayed because the room suited him and his routine was embedded. That combination, physical fit plus social rootedness, tends to cluster around residents who have already proven it somewhere else before they arrive at your door. Older long-term renters, people with fixed income and stable local ties, residents whose social infrastructure is within walking distance. You cannot manufacture that profile, but you can weight for it at intake.
The risk you did not mention is the other side of Gerald's stability. A 74-year-old resident on a fixed income at $390 a month is also a resident whose situation can change fast, through health, through a daughter who asks again, through a fall. The room that costs you almost nothing to operate can become a vacancy with almost no transition time, and $390 is a rate that will be hard to defend at market if you need to re-let quickly. You may already carry some succession risk you have not priced.
On the 60-day churn side, the boarding house guide content on the Rena strategy page covers the regulatory and licensing layer that shapes which resident populations you can even attract in a given jurisdiction. That is worth pulling up if you have not worked through it, because some of the "more Gerald" sourcing runs through housing authority and social services pipelines that require licensing status you may or may not already hold.
What does your current intake process actually screen for, and do you ask about prior tenure at previous addresses?
