Room Splitting (Rent by the Room)

A rental unit can be rented whole — the default — or split into individually-leased rooms, PadSplit-style. Renting by the room can earn more than renting the whole unit, and TIDY tracks each room as its own tenancy while keeping the shared parts of the property in view.

How a Split Unit Works

Room Setup

Every property is a whole-unit rental until you convert it. From the unit detail page, choose Split into Rooms (or Edit rooms if the unit is already split) to open Room Setup. Room Setup is structure-only — you define what spaces exist, not what they cost; pricing lives on each room’s listings and leases.

1. Occupancy classification — Standard tenancy or Rooming house. This drives which compliance items apply.
2. Rooms — pre-filled from the property’s bedroom count. Name each one, add rooms, or remove them.
3. Common areas — name the shared spaces (kitchen, living room, laundry).

Then Convert to By-The-Room. If you’re editing an existing split, the button reads Save Rooms and existing occupancy is preserved.

Converting back: Convert back to entire unit is available but guarded — you can’t revert a unit that still has active room leases.

Once a Unit Is Split

On the Leasing list, a split unit shows a rolled-up state — for example “Partially occupied” — with an occupancy count and a by-room indicator. Status filters match a split unit if any of its rooms is in that state.

On the unit detail page, each room then behaves like its own small tenancy:

• An occupancy and yield header — how many rooms are occupied out of the total, the combined monthly rent across all rooms, and how that compares to the whole-unit market rent, so you can see which way earns more.
• A card per room — its state, tenant, rent, days vacant, its own waitlist, and links to that room’s lease ledger or applications, plus per-room List This Room and Share Room Application Link actions. Common spaces are listed separately.
• Independent leases — every room has its own lease, with its own terms (see below).
• A screening policy banner — the unit’s household screening rule (see below).
• A rooming-house compliance checklist — the extra requirements that come with renting rooms are tracked in one place.

Per-Room Leases

Room leases carry three extra fields that whole-unit leases don’t need. These appear on the rent roll, the ledger, the receivables list, and payment detail, so a weekly room lease reads correctly everywhere.

Screening Policy

Each split unit declares how screening works for the household. The policy is shown as a banner on the unit and on applications for that unit, so whoever reviews an application knows which rule applies:

Compliance Checklist

Rooming houses carry regulatory obligations that whole-unit rentals don’t. Each split unit has a checklist — rooming house license, fire inspection, and so on — with a status per item:

• Complete
• Pending
• Action needed — with a due date, highlighted so it doesn’t slip

Room Operations

Room Operations (linked from the unit detail page) covers the day-to-day of a shared house:

• Shared expenses — utilities and other shared costs, with the allocation broken out per room and tenant, plus each share’s amount and status.
• An applicant waitlist — prospects beyond the formal applicants, with their desired move-in date and room preference. Use Add prospect to grow it.
• Upkeep — recurring tasks split between rooms and common areas, each with a frequency, next due date, and who it’s assigned to, plus a Log turnover clean action to record turnovers.

Nightly (Short-Term) Room-by-Room Rentals

Room splitting isn’t limited to weekly or monthly leases. The same setup works for hosts who rent each bedroom as its own nightly listing on Airbnb — for example, a 5-bedroom house where every bedroom is booked separately and guests share the common areas. TIDY tracks each bedroom as its own listing and calendar while keeping the shared spaces (kitchen, living room, etc.) visible and covered by turnover cleaning, the same way it does for by-the-room leases.

Listing Rooms

Each room can be listed individually on by-the-room and mid-term channels like PadSplit and Furnished Finder, so a vacant room fills on its own without touching the rest of the unit. List This Room opens the Add Listing flow with a room step, so the listing is attached to a specific room rather than the whole property, and each room card shows chips for the platforms it’s listed on and their status (listed, paused, or syndicating). You can see split units such as “Palmetto House” and “Ferncreek Rooming House” in Leasing.