All Forum Posts by: Miller McSwain

Rent by room has been amazing for us! Our 5 bedroom home would likley rent for ~$2k as a traditional long term rental, but we get $3750/month by renting by the room!

In our case, we are in a market with lots of young professionals and military (engineers, accountants, service members). They have mostly been young guys (in their 20's) looking to save money.

To determine what to list at, we checked the listing sites we used and looked for similar offerings (Roomies.com, Facebook Marketplace, Roomster.com, etc). We ended up setting our first room a bit higher than we expected, then just lowered the rent every week until we started getting a lot of bites. Now we know the right rate ($750/month in our city)!

There are lots of property management softwares. I'm a single-family investor, and I recently looked through the most popular softwares and selected one. The products I investigated were:

1. Tenant Cloud

2. Apartments.com

3. Innago

4. Avail

5. RentRedi

I was looking for a software that met the following criteria:

1. Online payments from tenants

2. Automatic late fees

3. Maintenance request portal

4. Free for the landlord

5. Online applications

6. Tenant screening (background checks, etc)

7. Lease signing

8. Ability to post vacancies in the software

I found that Innago was the only one to meet all these requirements. It does charge a $2 fee for each rent payment, but that is charged to the tenant by default. I haven't had any complaints from tenants about this charge.

The other softwares were pretty good, but here are the deal breakers for each.

Tenant Cloud: Tenants cannot setup autopay unless we have the paid version

Apartments.com: You cannot upload your own lease, you can only make modifications to their lease

Avail: You cannot upload your own lease, you can only make modifications to their lease

RentRedi: No free version AT THE TIME

***I investigated these softwares 8-12 months ago, so some things could have changed. For example, RentRedi is free now if you are a BP Pro member that could potentially make it a contender with Innago for my use. I did try it out recently, and the only thing holding me back is their lease signing feature. It doesn't prefill any of the lease for you. With Innago, for example, I uploaded my lease and indicated where my name, the tenant's name, checkboxes, etc need to be automatically filled. RentRedi doesn't prefill anything, which is a timesuck and a killer for me :(

What type of strategy are you considering for your house hack? Rent by room? Short term rental? Medium term rental?

I'm also in an expensive market, and we purchased our single family home and are rent by rooming it. We are under contract on our 2nd right now. In this case, we get good cash flow with this strategy. We are almost reaching the 1% rule in fact! The purchase price was $460k, the rooms bring in $4500/month and the mortgage is $2700/month.

Also, my lender was able to use our RbR leases to help qualify us for our 2nd property. He was able to use 75% of our gross lease income!

We rent by room and use the following sites for listing our rentals!
- FB Marketplace
- FB Groups
- Zillow
- Roomies.com
- Roomiapp.com
- Roomster.com (paid)

I've also been advised to not worry about putting my House hack into an LLC. If you ever decide to refinance, then you will likely get a loan with less favorable terms.

Also, I've been told that a lawsuit can easily "pierce the corporate veil" because you lived in the property. So this defeats the purpose of the LLC.

Instead, we purchased Umbrella Insurance that will help pay for a lawsuit if we ever get sued. It costs only $200/year for a $1 million policy (we currently have 2 properties and believe that $1 million is sufficient).

We are using the rent by room strategy, and we use these sites for listing:
- FB Marketplace
- FB Groups
- Zillow
- Roomies.com
- Roomiapp.com
- Roomster.com

ALSO, we are furnishing the shared spaces but not the bedrooms. I went onto one of these listing sites and found that, on average, unfurnished rooms rented for the same amount as furnished rooms in my area. So we decided to not purchase furnishings and just leave them unfurnished. This has worked for us so far!

Check on meetup.com! That's where I found all of the local meetups I attend. I attend physically, but I've seen some virtual events on there as well!

YES! I am currently under contract on my 2nd house hack, and my lender is using my current RbR house hack income to help qualify.

I was told that the leases must be at least 12 months long. In that case, my lender is using 75% of the gross rents to assist my DTI. I believe if we have been operating the HH and reporting the income for 2 years, then my lender said they could use 100% of the income that shows on my tax returns, but until then they can only use 75%.

I'm also a Social Media noob. I understand that consistently posting is very important, so my number 1 priority is building out a pipeline of posts/stories that are ready to publish. This way, as long as I have 10 or so posts in the pipeline, I don't have to rush to prepare a new post on a day where I'm not feeling up to it.

To help with this, I'm using Meta Business Manager (totally free). This lets you post to Instagram and Facebook on a schedule. 

I hope this helps!

My wife and I live in the basement of our SFH House-Hack. We separated the levels so that it is similar to a duplex; HOWEVER, we didn't have a kitchen in the basement.
We ended up getting a tabletop stove and oven that just plug into 110V outlets, and we added some countertops. 
The utility room in the basement was very large, so we put the countertops and temporary appliances in there.

Perhaps a similar approach could help your situation.