How to set Rent for rent by rooms for furnished house.

[Leeling Chew]

Hi all,
We renovated our south Austin house after evicting a tenant 3 years ago in 2022. Then we experimented doing AirBnb for 1.5 years. Due to high interest rate and almost $10k of property tax, we negative cash flow over $10k in 2023. My current AirBnb tenant will be moving out June 5th, 2024. We want to experiment with renting by rooms.

Here are the pricing we set:

Master 150 sq ft (private bathroom) $1100
Room 2 120 sq ft (shared bathroom) $1000
Room 3 100 sq ft (shared bathroom, 2 walk-in closets) $950

Here are the pictures of the house:
https://austin.craigslist.org/roo/d/austin-spacious-newly-re...

We listed the house on Zillow, Craigslist, FB Marketplace, Roomster, Roomies, TurnoTenant (which broadcasted to over 10 other platforms), Avail, FB groups, etc. It was around early May, and though there are traffic, no lease has been signed. It's close to a month now. I struggled with pricing the rent because my house is furnished and newly renovated with all new appliances, but it's shared space.

Since this is the first time we are experimenting renting by rooms, we are not familiar with the market. Is it a disadvantage to have shared space? Should we have lower rents compared to empty apartments?

We also struggled with the issue of allowing pets. When we were renting out the whole house, pets were allowed with no issues. But now with multiple tenants, is allowing pets a good idea? What if the pets of different tenants don't get along?

Looking forward to any advice for my situation!

[Drew Sygit]

@Leeling Chew if it was easy, every landlord would be doing it!

Try Padsplit.com, SpareRoom.com, Roomster.com, etc.