About Sylvia Bergthold Expertise I can answer questions dealing with roommate situations including compatability, leases, placing roommate wanted ads, what you have to offer to a roommate, sharing of utilities and other services, interviewing techniques and questions, some legal aspects of housesharing, clearance information, etc.
Experience I have had roommates in my home for over 32 years and am the author of:
"SORRY, THE BOA HAS GOTTA GO!" A Roommate Survival Guide
Publications The Los Angeles Times, The HB-FV Independent, The Arizona Tribune, Lansing Michigan Rental Guide, Roommate Locator Newsletter, The Plain Dealer,, Las Vegas Sun, Apartment Lifestyles Magazine, Instyle Magazine, The Whiz.com, Cosmopolitan, Under 25, The Portsmouth Herald
Question We are renting a 4 bedroom vacation home with a sleep sofa. There originally were 5 women and 3 teenagers sharing the house. One teenager belonging to each of 3 women. Now one woman wants to bring her college age daughter and her friend. The other original renters said fine but they get the sleep sofa. She thinks we should all rotate a night on the sofa. Also, how do we share the rent equitably? One woman is single and has no children.
Answer Hi Linda
I will try to answer this but I haven't a clue as to how you would divide rent and utilities with so many people. But since all the people are technically adults (teenagers take up as much space, eat as much food....more actually....use as much of the utilities as the adults) you should count this now as TEN adults living in a four bedroom house (with a sleep sofa counting as a partial bedroom).
The one rule I would be adamant about is the sleep sofa. No way would I allow rotation use of it. The new people now have the sleep sofa...thats it. If they are unhappy about it, they can find another place to bunk down.
RENT is divided by BEDROOMS....it doesn't matter how many people share the bedroom, the rent is still the same. One person or ten, it doesn't matter.
UTILITIES are divided by how many people live in the place. In this case, ten. All the utilities are added up for the month. That total is divided by ten. It doesn't matter if an individual doesn't use it(watch TV for instance) they are still divided up evenly between everybody in the house. The parent would probably pay their teens share.
Now as for HOW much rent to charge there is a formula for it. I am going to attach it to this letter. If you follow it (it is a little complicated), you shouldn't have world war three over rent.
There is a formula for it on line (hard to find), and sometimes landlords also can tell you what previous tenants paid (per person). However, I will go ahead and outline the formula here. Please print this for reference.
1. Get the entire square footage of the house (the landlord should be able to provide this for you).
2. Divide the entire sq ft by the amount of your monthly rent to get the dollar figure for one square foot.
3. Then measure each of your bedrooms, including closet space and private bathroom. You should have four separate amounts due to the different sizes of these rooms.
4. Multiply the sq ft of each bedroom (with the closet and bath sq ft) by the dollar amount of the one sq ft.
5. Now you should have the bigger bedrooms coming up with a bigger dollar figure than the smaller bedrooms. Write down these four separate totals.
6. Add together the Dollar total of ALL bedrooms (which includes the closets and bathroom).
7. Subtract that dollar figure from the total rent.
8. The remaining balance is divided by four (this is the common space in the house such as the living room, bathrooms,laundry rooms,kitchen and any other common space).
9. Each bedroom gets 1/4 of the common space dollar figure added to its rent.
10. The dollar figures you each will now pay should come pretty close to the total amount of the rent. You might have to adjust it by a few bucks for it to balance.
11. Now because you have two people sleeping in the common room, you might want to subtract from the four bedroom dollar figures a given amount so that the couple have to pay a share also of the rent.
I am leaving it up to you how to handle that. But as far as the rent division by bedroom and common space goes, that is the general rule on how to assess it.
I would also make sure that there is a WRITTEN agreement between everybody here. It will outline who pays what, when, how much and to who. It will state there will be late charges applied it not paid on time. The rent will be paid on the first, the utility check payments paid on the 15th (as an example). ONE person will be in charge of everything, otherwise you will have utter chaos. There has to be someone in charge.
The roommate agreement will also have a set of rules such as no smoking, no parties, no drugs, etc. You can find roommate agreements on line, there is a very good one in my Roommate Survival Guide and there are some in the library.
