traditional  vs.  non-traditional  roommates

Across the US & Canada lately, most roommate groups are either traditional or non-traditional.

Who's best for you?   Who's paying more rent?

Here is a bird's-eye view of roommate dollars.

Until recently, our one-and-only index of average roommate rent and how much you could save compared to a 1BR was the average cost of a 2BR ÷ 2. Just like smartasset.com.

And until a few years ago, this traditional index would have been close to average for both categories, or almost everyone. We've always heard from non-traditional roommate groups as well. However, since they were previously in the minority but similarly priced, they didn't skew the numbers that much. Before.

But the roommate landscape shifted. Rising rents and an affordable housing shortage in most cities gradually multiplied the differences between the two. Then, pandemic.

Traditional roommate rents went up, but so did the number of homeowners renting rooms, along with working from home. The disparity between traditional and non-traditional roommate groups is now large enough that it no longer makes sense to average them, then declare that the whole story.

Real estate companies are able to monitor rentals of entire units, or the purchase of real estate, because those numbers are reported to the government and the census. If you're renting a room in an owner-occupied property, these same agencies can't "see" you or exactly how much you've paid in the same publicly-accessible way.

Hence, non-traditional roommate groups fly under most real estate radar.

affordable housing shortage

Now, the "depth of the housing shortage and the suddenness of Covid-19 and inflation have tipped smaller cities into an affordability crisis."

While spending >= 30% of income on rent means "rent-burdened" due to likely difficulty affording other life necessities, it's the "new normal" in many US metros.

"The US is now rent-burdened nationwide for the first time."

Economists say "the fundamental issue is that the country does not have enough homes where people want them. ... The shortage has driven up costs for buyers and renters alike—most spectacularly in megacities such as Los Angeles and New York, but pretty much everywhere at this point."

remote equity rentals

"Amid a national housing crisis, giant private equity firms have been buying up apartment buildings en masse to squeeze them for profit ... snapping up rentals by the thousands," along with "tens of thousands of single-family homes lost to foreclosure." This means more remote landlords in major American cities, according to ProPublica’s analysis.

This puts upward pressure on rent prices for everyone, pushing up the cost of renting and driving down affordable housing stock. Meanwhile, many so-called mom-and-pop landlords have been displaced by corporate players. All tenants pay more, while the only ones benefiting from soaring rents are out-of-town investors.

"What the real estate industry won't tell you" is that as the ratio of investor-owned houses to live-in buyers rises, the investors get more tax deductions but prices skyrocket for everyone else." Housing is getting less affordable for everyone at every level," says Daryl Fairweather, chief economist for Redfin.

"Such firms use economies of scale to more aggressively squeeze profits from their buildings" than live-in or even local landlords usually do, tenant advocates say. "The firms’ tactics can include sharply increasing rent or fees and neglecting upkeep."

"In contrast, so-called mom-and-pops usually look for steady streams of rental income over time while their buildings grow in value."

Meanwhile, living with roommates to whom you rent rooms can be reasonably profitable, but only reasonably. So if you own a property good enough for roommates, you can rent part of it out. That's reasonably profitable, and reasonable property owners and reasonable roommates could be happy together.

But investors demand high yields, not reasonable places to live. Investors always want to push past reasonable. Since investment property tends to change hands, each time with someone new taking another cut, ultimately it inflates well past property taxes alone.

robot landlords

And now it's not just remote! It's robot!

Robot landlords are essential.

Charging rent remotely wouldn't be comfortable without automation overlay for all the tasks local landlords previously handled. If robot repair requests are actually honored, they're outsourced to local contractors, who may take their time. Many tenants have been disappointed in their robots' lack of responsiveness. Every attempted complaint sent them down a rabbithole of absolutely no one willing to take responsibility for anything other than charging rent.

The robot landlords control you and their properties using apps developed to assist Wall Street investment firms and real estate developers. So that's a huge help to anyone looking to charge from afar without showing up.

But it's a lot less helpful to anyone looking for affordable housing. The apps allow real estate developers to charge all the fees, but now with next to none of the employees.

Housing advocates say long distance real estate run remotely from afar pushes "lower and middle-income Americans out of homeownership by buying up the kind of older, 1,000-square-foot-ish houses once affordable to first-time homeowners and inflating the market with investors."

Or once affordable for roommates. Because many of those might have been purchased by someone with enough for a down payment, but would prefer help with upcoming monthlies. That person could charge roommates less while still paying all their own bills.

But when multiple absentee landlords take their cut from a roommate situation, it becomes more difficult for most to live there.

owner-occupied roommate groups

Q: So, are roommates really that different than inflation in general? Or to the extent they are, won't the market still correct itself at some point, even if the inflation is driven by away investors?

A: Sure, roommate rents rise with general inflation. And roommate rents can fall when inflation does as well. But remote real estate speculators could extract a lot of value from you and your roommates before that happens.

If investors think they can extract more value from you in the future, they'll try again. Out-of-state investors are pushing for "rent hikes that outpace wages and inflation," say a tenants' rights movement pushing for rent control.


Q: So, is supporting a live-in landlord really that different than supporting several remote ones? Homeowners are extracting value from roommates too, right?

A: Sure, homeowners are extracting value. But they're usually putting a good bit of it back into where you collectively live, as conditions there affect them too.

For your larger roommate community, support of owner-occupied housing keeps a higher percentage of housing affordable for everyone. Assisting someone who owns their home or is working on a mortgage but still living locally is more clever for you both than donating money to away investors.

On the strictly selfish front, when landlords are live-in or even local to the roommates they charge, it puts the brakes on a lot of bad behavior.

Certainly not all.

But a lot.

northeast roommate rent

southeast roommate rent

midwest roommate rent

northwest roommate rent

southwest roommate rent

Canadian roommate rent

Notes

1.   The non-traditional roommate rent average for this city we've experienced over the last 3 years. We can't predict future rental availability, because we're neither in control of any rental market nor psychic, sorry!

But in most cities most of the time, the recent and relatively recent past are the best predictors.


2.   This idea came from smartasset.com's ranking of what a roommate saves you in 50 cities. They ranked where roommates will save you the most money, based on the average cost of a 1BR as opposed to a 2BR ÷ 2. Unsurprisingly, the more expensive the city, the more you can save, but the savings are significant in all larger metros. So we got the data for the rest of our cities from Zumper too.

This is really the minimum you could save, as you could live with more than one roommate, split more services, share food or other supplies, etc. More sharing tends to lead to more savings too, as per our roommate roadmap.

As per the rest of the description at the top of this page, we're calling this "traditional" roommate rent.


3.   From zumper.com.


4.   Directly quoted from the Trust for Public Land's parkland rating system.

"The ParkScore index awards each city up to 100 points for acreage based on the average of two equally weighted measures: median park size and parkland as a percentage of city area. Factoring park acreage into each city’s ParkScore rating helps account for the importance of larger “destination parks” that serve many users who live farther than ten minutes’ walking distance."

While each city's rundown already includes their individual ParkScore, nature lovers might like to see all roommate cities ranked for parkland.


5.   Directly quoted from Walk Score's Cities and Neighborhoods Ranking. They've ranked "more than 2,800 cities and over 10,000 neighborhoods so you can find a walkable home or apartment."

While each city's rundown already includes their individual Walk Score, dedicated pedestrians might like to see all roommate cities ranked for walkability.


6.   From various lists here on our own best roommate cities.


7.   From hoodmaps.com: a collaborative map where residents use tags describing social situations you're likely to find. Other users can thumb up or down, so the largest tags have been thumbed up the most.