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The huge problem with dividing rent this way is that it's effectively saying that a house is only as good as its bedroom. It puts the price of the kitchen, bathrooms, common spaces, yard, etc. at exactly $0. Meanwhile, those rooms are what most people use most of the day!

E.g., if one bedroom is a tiny 70 sqft and the other a whopping 210 sqft, your algorithm would have the smaller pay only 25% of the rent! Is their home life really 66% worse/cheaper just because their bedroom is small? They have equal access to the TV, couch, oven, fridge, laundry, etc. etc. etc.



The way we did it was to evenly split the common spaces among the renters, while accounting for room size.

individual_rent = total_rent * (room_size + common_share)/house_size)

Utilities are split evenly among roommates.

It works, although I probably would have prefered to use something like the system here were I to do it over. Things like "has a master bathroom so you don't have to share with everyone else" tend to be worth more per square foot than regular bedroom space.




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