Managing the rent by room house hack

[Trystan Fuglseth]

Hey REI world! Im planning on doing a rent by room house hack as traditional house hacks with working numbers in my area are hard to come by. I am somewhat concerned about vacancy. My city Grand Forks ND has a large college population and from what I gathered from my coworkers shared housing booms in mid to late summer when students are getting housing for the school year lined up. My question is how do you or would you market and manage a rent by room in a rather feast or famine market to keep vacancy as low as possible. Some people have reccomended undercutting the market by a hundred bucks and I want to know what you guys reccomend or do, Thanks!

[Nicole Heasley Beitenman]

My experience has been the same as @Daniel Haberkost. House hacked a SFH in Cleveland for 3 years near several colleges and was worried I'd get nothing but student applicants. While I got some, they were certainly not the majority of applicants either when I house hacked or after I turned it into a pure rental. I found tenants through roomiematch.com, Craigslist, and one roommate found her own replacement for me before moving out. Never had more than 2 weeks between tenants.