Actually, one of the rooms actually goes for $280 believe it or not! Oh, and we pay the utilities too!

Before home owners caught on to how much money student rentals were making we used to be able to collect $350 / room with nothing included. Now they’ve all moved out and virtually all housing near the U is student housing now. Thanks to a great deal and cheap RE, we’re still cash flow positive on both properties, though not anywhere close to the $1000 net/mth per house we were making a couple years back.

Markets can change quickly. Now kids won’t sleep in the basement.

It’s a renters (and buyers!) market in Windsor these days.

If one of the students had been more entrepreneurial, he may have found the group was willing to pay more (e.g. they’re clearly willing to pay $1600/5 not to be personally responsible, how much more would they be willing to pay for wireless internet, a cleaning service every two weeks, cable tv, etc). One student might have been able to put together a “package deal” that would have let him take care of the details and get a bit of a rent discount in exchange.

Actually, your (personal) plan isn’t a bad one and not illegal if you’re upfront about it with the landlord although I’m not sure how much of a discount it would provide.

We recently rented out our 5 bedroom house to a group of students. The rent charged was either $1600 split between the 5 of them, or $1500 if we received one cheque. They chose to give us 5 cheques and pay $1600. Why? Because no one wanted to be responsible for collecting rent from the others. As a landlord, I can’t say I blame them.

One thing you might want to talk to your landlord about is if they would be interested in cutting you a deal if you agreed to take care of property maintenance (i.e. mowing the lawn, shovelling the snow). If you’re cheaper than a maintenance service, they may likely be interested in striking a deal and could result in a discount of ~$25-50 / mth. We’ve done this in the past.

I wouldn’t condone doing anything illegal, but if you were to sublet the apartment for a few extra dollars, I think the odds of getting caught are pretty close to zero. Kind of like speeding by a couple of kilometres per hour…

You’re right 3a) seems to forbid one part of what I’m suggesting.

Anyway, if you go to ontariotenants dot ca
then on the left is a link for residential tenancies act, then on there look for “illegal additional charges”.

The other idea (finding a house and getting roommates, and charging them more rent) is much more doable. You’d have to be careful you didn’t wind up losing money on the deal if you had to cover an empty room for any amount of time!

I know someone in the SF area who has been in his apt for 10 years – it’s well below market rate now, but he charges himself the least and charges new roommates much closer to the market rate. It seems fair to me that he should benefit from his 10 years’ tenancy more than the newcomer.