Professional house shares – a tenant’s view.
I consider myself to be something of an expert when it comes to living in house shares. Having lived in nice places, awful places, with great housemates and,
frankly, a few nightmare ones along the way, I’m pretty well versed when it comes to waiting in line for the toilet and cleaning up other peoples mess. So if you’re going to let out your property as a house share, there are a few things that you’ll have to think about.
Yes, you can make more rent than you would out of letting it as a whole, but it can also cause you more trouble. Some people will treat a house share as their own and take good care of it, but many more will look at your room as a short term solution. They know that if it isn’t working out then they can move without too much hassle – there are plenty of other rooms to rent on the market. That doesn’t mean that they’ll trash the place, but it does mean that they’ll be less likely to carry out maintenance and sharing the cleaning chores can become more of a battle than a responsibility.
There are ways around this – many shared houses are given cleaning rotas and helped to divide up the household chores, but this can also put people off. Most people will pull their weight, but it’s independence that they want, not to be treated like a child. But if one of your tenants isn’t pulling their weight, eventually the others might see you as their last resort. It’s a fine line to walk as if one of the people in your house is causing problems, be it through not pulling their weight, excess mess or, in worse cases, bullying then you may be forced to take action against them. If you ignore a problem tenant, you could end up losing your good ones. For this reason, whenever I’ve looked for a room to rent, I’ve always considered the people living there to be as important, if not more, than the property itself. You wouldn’t spend time with someone you didn’t like, so why would you want to live with them?
So my advice to a landlord wanting to keep the peace in their shared house would be to make sure that any prospective tenant has the opportunity to meet their future housemates before moving in. This gives them the chance to get to know each other beforehand and will make them feel more empowered about the house they live in, rather than only knowing that somebody is taking their spare room – ooh, I wonder what they’re like.
How would you deal with tenants in a shared house? Do cleaning rotas work for you and how do manage the balance in your shared property?
