I read the HOA summary sheet. The declaration says one lease per dwelling.

The document trail is where this happened. I nearly did the same thing on a small multifamily last year, no HOA involved, but my city requires a rental license per dwelling and the license application has an occupancy line based on bedroom square footage. Two of my bedrooms are 78 and 81 square feet and the minimum for a second occupant would have mattered if I'd tried to double up. Nobody at the title company mentions any of that. You have to go find it.

The part that stings is that the amendment was recorded. It was sitting there for anyone who ordered it.

I'd put the cause one step earlier than the document. Your whole plan had exactly one permission holding it up and no fallback that penciled. If the whole house lease at $2,275 had been your base case and the room rents were the upside, the board letter costs you $9,600 of furniture and locks and a bad quarter, and you shrug.

Instead the $905 a month was in your carry math for the land, which means the land plan moved when the house plan moved. That's the expensive part, not the knobs.

Also, and this is the renovation guy talking, you can usually sell furniture better than 36 cents on the dollar if you aren't in a hurry. You were in a hurry because you'd already given notice.

This is the reason I keep not doing this one. The premium was $905 a month, so about $10,900 a year, and the unwind cost you most of a year of it plus the ongoing gap. That's a thin margin for a strategy where a document you didn't read can turn the model off entirely. I'd rather take the $2,275 and go do something else on a Saturday.

What did you tell the two tenants when you leased to them? I'm about to sign my first tenants and I've been reading about disclosure for a month. If I put someone in a room and then have to move them out because of a covenant, I want to know what I should have said at signing rather than at the 60 day notice.

@wren the way I'd put it is you say it before they sign, in the lease, and you keep the number small enough that you can afford to make them whole.

@arbor the thing I'd look at is whether the house was the right carry at all. A subdivision house in a covenanted neighborhood is the worst possible container for a use that neighbors dislike. An older place on a bigger lot outside any association, built before anyone wrote a declaration, rents rooms fine and nobody sends letters. It costs more in maintenance and less in permission. I've carried land on rents for eleven years and every property I use for it is deliberately ugly and deliberately unassociated.