Third year on a five room house, never cleaned it myself. Real net numbers.

$610 a month on $71k is about 10% cash on cash if I'm doing that right. In my rural markets a whole-house lease on a $268k house wouldn't clear half that, but I also couldn't fill five rooms at $700. Who are your tenants, and would the house still work at $550 a room?

The repairs line at $215 a month is what I keep staring at. Five adults sharing three bathrooms and one kitchen, I'd have guessed double that. Is that number real or is it just what you've spent so far?

Six moves in a year across five rooms. Does your manager screen each one the same way you would, or did you write the criteria down and hand it over?

This is closer to the boring outcome I want than most co-living posts I read, mostly because you priced the manager in from day one instead of discovering them in year two. Did you consider whole-house leasing at any point and what number would have made you take it?

What did the den conversion cost you and did the appraiser ever count it as a bedroom?

Seven weeks on one room in November is the whole story here. I've had that same hole in a three room house and it eats a quarter. Marlow, was it price, was it season, or was it your manager sitting on the listing?

12% of collected on a five lease house is cheap, and I'd want to know what your manager is not doing at that rate. When a room goes empty they do a showing, a screen, a lease, a key handoff, and a move-in walkthrough for $175 plus their percentage on one room's rent. That math works for them at scale and stops working the minute the house needs real attention. Ask them straight what their per-house labor hours look like, because a manager who is underwater on your property tends to solve it by not answering the phone.

I've been reading room rental threads for about a year and the thing I never see is the second and third year of the same house, so thank you for the year three version. Two questions. Did your insurance carrier price this differently once you told them five separate leases, and did anything in your loan documents care?

My portfolio is small and everything I own breaks in a pattern, so I'll ask the pattern question. Water heater, HVAC, washer, dryer. Five adults use those the way a family of five does, but the dryer runs constantly because nobody is coordinating. Have you replaced any of that yet, and is it in the $215?

Following up on my own question, if your repairs number is really running $215 and the appliances are original, then the $610 cash flow is borrowing from a replacement you haven't made yet. That doesn't kill the deal, it just means the honest year-three number is maybe $450 once you fund it properly.

I hold land and wait, so this is the opposite of my strategy, and I still think the interesting line is the placement fee. You paid for behavior instead of paying for a title. Most management problems I hear about are pay structure problems wearing a costume.

Marlow never answered whether $550 rooms work. That's the number that decides if this travels to cheaper markets or stays a metro strategy.

I run small multifamily and every unit teaches me something, and what your post taught me is that five leases in one house is roughly the management load of a fourplex without the four separate meters. My fourplex tenants never argue about whose milk it is. Do you have any written house agreement your manager enforces, or does the manager just handle it in the moment? The interpersonal stuff is what I'd expect to burn hours nobody bills for.

Underwriting this backward from your numbers. Gross $3,470, operating before debt about $1,970, so NOI around $18,000 a year, debt service $16,920, coverage around 1.06. That is thin. Move the manager from 12% to 15% and you lose $125 a month. Take vacancy from 4.1 room-months to 8 and you lose about $470 a month. Either one alone leaves you near breakeven, and both together put you in the hole. So the deal isn't income density, it's a bet that occupancy stays where it's been and your manager stays cheap. Marlow, what's your re-lease trigger? If a room sits 21 days do you cut price automatically or wait it out? An automatic cut at day 21 would have turned that seven week hole into three weeks and cost you maybe $60 a month in rent. That's the cheapest fix in your whole spreadsheet.