There must be at least one hero who is responsible for making sure the house is well-managed, e.g. collecting rent and utilities payments, getting a maid, making sure house meetings happen to agree upon house rules, and before that, being on Craigslist all day (or whatever service) to find a good place. This person should plausibly be compensated for all this extra effort by paying proportionally less rent than the others.
Use a spreadsheet to flexibly determine who pays how much rent. There’s a great one we used at “Milvia House” in Berkeley; I’ll check to see whether I can share it with the world.
Okay, the spreadsheet we used at Milvia is here. The spreadsheet adjusts each room’s rent according to:
Square footage
Share of the common space (this increases if the room has multiple occupants)
The proportion of rent dedicated to paying for common space
Arbitrary adjustments to specific rooms’ rents (e.g. to reward the person doing the work of collecting rent & utilities, or to allow bidding on rooms by figuring out who is willing to pay the highest positive adjustment on a particular room)
While I agree that it might be expedient to have such a house manager figure, it hasn’t been a necessity in my experience. Perhaps as one’s house gets large enough, there’s more and more of an instinct to assume that someone else in the house knows better how to do something and then not do it as a result? Seems like this could plausibly be overcome through regular house meetings.
There must be at least one hero who is responsible for making sure the house is well-managed, e.g. collecting rent and utilities payments, getting a maid, making sure house meetings happen to agree upon house rules, and before that, being on Craigslist all day (or whatever service) to find a good place. This person should plausibly be compensated for all this extra effort by paying proportionally less rent than the others.
Use a spreadsheet to flexibly determine who pays how much rent. There’s a great one we used at “Milvia House” in Berkeley; I’ll check to see whether I can share it with the world.
Okay, the spreadsheet we used at Milvia is here. The spreadsheet adjusts each room’s rent according to:
Square footage
Share of the common space (this increases if the room has multiple occupants)
The proportion of rent dedicated to paying for common space
Arbitrary adjustments to specific rooms’ rents (e.g. to reward the person doing the work of collecting rent & utilities, or to allow bidding on rooms by figuring out who is willing to pay the highest positive adjustment on a particular room)
While I agree that it might be expedient to have such a house manager figure, it hasn’t been a necessity in my experience. Perhaps as one’s house gets large enough, there’s more and more of an instinct to assume that someone else in the house knows better how to do something and then not do it as a result? Seems like this could plausibly be overcome through regular house meetings.
alternately whoever pays the most rent should do these things because they have the most equity in making the house work and be awesome.