Rent is fine. People are the problem, so I'm rewriting the house agreement.

The rent side of this is working. Three houses, 14 rooms total, occupancy has held around 90% room-nights for the last year, and collections are fine.

What's eating me is conflict. Last quarter I had two rooms turn early because of disputes between tenants, one that started over parking and one over a partner staying five nights a week. Both times I was the arbitrator and both times I lost a paying tenant who had done nothing wrong.

My current setup: individual room leases, 9 month minimum, common areas covered by a one page house rules addendum that says be considerate and clean up. That addendum is clearly useless.

I'm rewriting it and the questions I can't settle:

Guests. Do I write a hard cap (say, 3 nights per week, 10 per month) and enforce it, or does that make the house feel like a dorm and cost me the tenants I actually want? A hard cap is enforceable only if I'm willing to enforce it, and enforcement means terminating someone over a boyfriend.

House manager. Discounting one room 250 a month in exchange for a resident who handles supplies and first-line disputes costs me 3,000 a year per house. Across three houses that's 9,000, which is roughly one and a half turns avoided. Does that math actually hold or am I just buying a tenant who now thinks they work for me?

Whether any of this belongs in the lease itself rather than an addendum, since an addendum I don't enforce is worse than nothing.

I ask the questions I'd be embarrassed to ask in a room of people, so: how do experienced by-room operators actually handle the guest thing without it becoming the whole job?

Answer

1mitchell_ray4 Get yoursPRO6

The parking one you can solve with paint and a sign. Assign a numbered space per room in the lease and the argument stops being about fairness. Costs you a weekend.

5 replies

1carlos_nunezActive

Write the guest cap in. Put it in the lease body, not an addendum, and make the number generous enough that a normal person never trips it.

I use 4 consecutive nights and 12 nights a month, and the point isn't to catch people at night 13. The point is that when a partner has effectively moved in and the other three tenants are furious, you have a written standard to point at instead of a conversation about whether someone is being unreasonable. In my experience you invoke it maybe once a year, and when you do you send a written notice citing the clause and the person moves out or the guest stops. Nobody argues with a number they signed.

The soft version costs you more than the hard version. Be considerate means you're the judge every time, and you're going to rule against a tenant who's paying you.

On the house manager, the 250 discount is roughly right and the math holds only if you scope the role narrowly. Supplies, common area condition, reporting maintenance, telling you when something's brewing. The moment they're mediating disputes you've created a supervisor problem and a possible employment question depending on your state, so keep it to a rent concession for defined tasks and confirm with an attorney how that reads where you are.

One more thing your addendum probably doesn't cover: what happens to the deposit when common area damage can't be attributed to a specific room. Decide now and write it in, because you'll face it.

1tonyv88SO4CPRO6

I manage these for owners and the single change that reduced conflict most was moving to a written quiet hours window plus a standing monthly house check where the manager walks through with a checklist. Tenants complain to the checklist instead of to each other. Also, every rule you write has to apply identically to everyone, because selective enforcement in a shared house is how fair housing complaints start.

1mikeoconnell7SP2APRO6

The house manager idea works better when you hire it as a role rather than discount a tenant into it. Whether a rent concession creates an employment relationship depends on your state, so that's an attorney hour.

1chriswalton8CC1CPRO8

Reading this from the outside, the thing that stands out is your 90% room-nights figure. If two conflict-driven turns only cost you a point or two of occupancy, the conflicts might be cheaper than the rules you're about to write. Have you actually priced what the two early turns cost you in downtime and turn labor? If it's 1,800 and the house manager program is 9,000, @quarry's guest clause is the cheap fix and the manager is the expensive one.