Propsocial property benefits of renting out extra room 1
Logo3 small

Buying a big house or condominium with preferably a minimum of 3 bedrooms is always advantageous investment-wise, as prices of larger properties tend to appreciate in value quicker. But what if you are from outstation, and are alone in the city? Or perhaps if your children have flown from the nest and you are staying alone in a big house with all those empty rooms? Perhaps an option you can consider is to rent all those unused bedrooms out, rather than leave them unattended.


The Benefits of Renting Out

Side Income

If your home is still under loan, renting out the extra bedrooms is an amazing way of reducing the burden of your loan repayment. If you are not too particular about which room you are staying in, you can choose to stay in the smallest bedroom and rent out the Master bedroom and the other larger rooms. The reason behind this is because the Master bedroom and the larger bedrooms fetch far higher prices.

Take for example the condominium Kelana D’ Putera. A Master bedroom fetches approximately RM900 per month in the year 2016, while a medium sized bedroom fetches approximately RM550 to RM600 per month and the smallest bedroom approximately RM450 per month.

Hence if you were to stay in the smallest and hence cheapest room, you will be able to collect a rental of approximately RM1,500 per month to offset your monthly loan repayment.


Cost Effective

Aside from lightening your monthly loan repayment, you also get to share the cost of utilities! It is common nowadays for owners to install metres outside each bedroom, so that each tenant pays for the air-cond usage of their own room only. But if you are planning to sell off the unit in future, hacking the walls and installing all those unsightly wires might not be such a good idea.

So the next best thing to do is that you can share the cost of the internet, cabled TV and even the gas for cooking. But these criteria will have to be set from the beginning to avoid disputes in future, such as, “I did not use the air-conditioner this month, so why do I need to pay my usual large chunk of the electricity bill??”

Another great plus point of sharing utility bills is that you can even share the cost of hiring a monthly cleaner with your tenants! Imagine having to pay RM80 each time the cleaner comes, and now divide that with 4 people. It breaks down to only RM20 per person, a much lesser painful amount of money to fork out!


Easing Up on the Quiet

And sometimes it just gets downright depressing coming home to an empty unit everyday if you are not the type that likes absolute silence. Getting a few tenants in to help with your loan repayments and monthly utility bills are not the only perks of letting your unit out, you may also get a new friend! In fact, you may even get to know quite a number of interesting people.

Some real life scenarios include having a Japanese white collar worker as a housemate teaching the house owner the Japanese language and even Japanese recipes, an accountant who helped her tenant with some tax and accounting issues, and even a make-up artist who voluntarily gave free make-up application lessons!

So if you like meeting interesting people, lease your empty rooms out. You may not always get lucky, but you’re definitely bound to meet some interesting people!


Taking the Next Step Forward

So what do you do next if you decide to rent your unused rooms out?

1. Take Nice Photos

The first thing you need to do is to pretty up your home. Open those curtains, put some pretty potted plants on the table, tidy up the sofas and start snapping some pictures! Make sure the natural lighting is great and don’t be afraid of showing off all the great aspects of your home. Take detailed photos of the rooms you wish to rent out too.


2. Post Ads

The next step to take is to start posting ads accompanied by those photos! There are several websites to consider when renting your room out, such as iBilik and Airbnb. But some of the latest popular local options include roomz.asia, which takes the safety of landlords very seriously.

At roomz.asia, landlords are able to choose their preferred gender and race of tenant when they post their rooms up for rent. So if you are a single female staying alone, you have the option of allowing only females to apply for your room and keep your mind at ease in terms of safety.

Very importantly, the website also keeps the tenant’s ID record on the e-tenancy agreement in their system. So if any dispute arises in future and the hard copy of the record is lost, no problem. Just pull it out from the system again.


3. Keep your Tenancy Agreement Short

This term is to give you, the landlord, peace of mind. At the very least, keep the tenancy period for at least 1 year. The first reason behind this is to ensure that your tenant doesn’t move out in just one or two months which will in turn force you to go through the trouble of hunting for another new tenant.

The second reason is to give yourself time to see whether you are comfortable living with relative strangers in your house. This is not everyone’s cup of tea, and if it’s not yours you may want to end their tenancy at the end of the year’s period.

The third and most important reason is to give yourself a time limit in the event that you do not like your tenant. More than one landlord has found their tenant too troublesome - in perhaps bringing friends home late night, cooking in the kitchen and not tidying up later, messing up the house, spoiling the electronic devices and perhaps even eating food in the refrigerator that does not belong to them.


A Win-Win Bargain

At the end of the day you need to remember that no matter what, the house belongs to you and you have full rights over what goes on within it. But most likely, you may end up gaining great friends in renting out your extra rooms while lightening up your repayment load; and perhaps earn just a bit of side income in the process.

So if you are looking to renting out your extra rooms, Good Luck and don’t forget to check out roomz.asia!

SHARE THIS TOPIC

Chinese ad 4621 326x150 01

Signature 28 logo  custom  small

How about using as short term stay through Airbnb? no long commitments, can also meet lots of people from all around world.

Img 5409 small

Good to rent out room to earn extra income to cover some bills :) with good tenants for sure. 

Screen shot 2016 01 21 at 8.27.17 pm small

Difficult to find good tenants, afterall "good" is defined by landlords' own preferences/living styles.

Img thing small

This is a good piece of article.

But if you are staying with the tenant together under the same roof, better screen through thoroughly the background of the tenant for security reasons. Even better if it's a friend's friend or family's friend. Someone you know or reliable. You don't want to be staying with someone dodgy.

As for short term rental, it's even harder to screen through coming in from Airbnb. I heard a lot of not so good things about doing short term rental. You will be spending so much time shorting out the check in and check out process and not to mention the cleaning up after they leave. And you might not get that room rented out consistently, perhaps only weekend. What if weekend I am out with my family?

65648440 2406793556070448 9165628430648082432 o small

@admin_ps thanks for sharing