Modeling a sixth room in a 5 bed near a hospital. My vacancy number worries me.

Twice a month cleaning on a six person house is going to fail by month four. I clean for a living and shared kitchens in high headcount houses need weekly at minimum, and 260 a month won't buy weekly in most markets. Budget 400 to 500 and build the cadence into the lease so nobody argues about whose pan it is.

What's your plan when a room sits empty in month two and the other five tenants find out you dropped the price to fill it? Genuine question, I have never worked out how people handle that without the whole house asking for a reduction.

My first shared house didn't break on vacancy. It broke on one tenant who made the other four leave over nine weeks. Your 8% covers ordinary turn. It does not cover a cascade.

Write the lease so you can end one tenancy without the rest, and screen for the person who is going to be difficult about the shared spaces. Credit score alone won't tell you that. Also: 14 year old HVAC serving six people who are home at all hours will not last two years.

Before you price the den, find out if it has a legal egress window and the ceiling height the building code wants for a sleeping room. That's a permit and inspection question in most places and it varies by jurisdiction. If it doesn't qualify, you can still rent it, but your insurance and any future appraisal will treat the house as a 5 bed and a lender might too.

Ask yourself who buys a house configured as six rentable rooms in eight years. The buyer pool for that is investors, and investors pay off the numbers, not the fixtures.

Hospital adjacency is the whole thesis here. I look at low price point rural stuff and the room-rental math looks great on a spreadsheet right up until you realize there are forty renters in the county who want a room and thirty of them want a whole house instead. You have a real tenant pool, which puts you ahead of most of the by-room posts I read. I'd still call four of those listings and ask what they actually signed at last month rather than what they're asking.

I own small multifamily and looked hard at by-room before deciding against it. The honest comparison isn't 5,100 versus a 2,600 whole-house lease, it's 5,100 versus what a duplex at the same price does with two leases and two sets of utilities you don't pay.

Every unit I own taught me something and the lesson from the shared-kitchen one was that my time per dollar was worse than any other property. You're self-managing. Put a real hourly cost on yourself, even 25 an hour, and see what six leases does to the number.

Your 8% is doing a lot of work and it's the wrong shape for this asset.

Model it per room instead. Six rooms, average tenancy of 9 months on a travel-nurse pool, 3 weeks of downtime per turn including the clean and the listing. That's 8 turns a year across the house and about 24 weeks of empty room-time out of 312 room-weeks, so roughly 8% if every turn goes smoothly and you never get a gap longer than three weeks. Any friction and you're at 12 to 15.

Run the deal at 15% vacancy and see if it still clears. If it only works at 8, you're buying an assumption, not a house. Also your repairs at 8% of gross is low for six people sharing two bathrooms. I'd carry 12.

Six leases, six move-ins, a cleaner to manage, and a den to permit. That's a job. I say that as someone actively looking for income that isn't one.

Screening is where I've been living lately. Per-room, you're screening for two things at once, whether they pay and whether the existing tenants can stand them. Use the same written criteria for every applicant and apply it identically, because fair housing rules apply to your shared house the same as anywhere and roommate preference talk gets people in trouble fast. Income multiple on a room is usually stated as 2.5 to 3x the room rent, and for travel nurses you'll be reading contracts rather than pay stubs.

The den conversion is exactly the job that starts at 2,800 for a window and closet and ends at 11,000 because the header needs work, the electrical panel is full, and now the inspector wants a smoke detector interconnect through the whole house. I do renovations and I have never once seen a bedroom add-on come in at the first number. If you do it, do it while the house is empty.

Add one item to @quill's before-closing list: pull the plat and any recorded covenants for the subdivision. Older 1970s neighborhoods often have covenants restricting the property to single family residential use, and those run with the land whether or not an association still exists to enforce them. Whether room rental violates that language is a question for an attorney in your state, but you want to have read it yourself before you wire money.