How to Rent Rooms in My House on CoRent, Start to Finish

If you have been asking "how do I rent rooms in my house without handing a chunk of every payment to a platform," here is the short answer: on CoRent you list each room for free, review ID-verified applicants in the app, and keep 95% of the rent. The platform fee is a flat 5% of rent collected. There is no booking fee when a new tenant moves in and no management fee.

This post walks through the whole process, from creating a host account to collecting rent, so you know what happens at each step and what it costs. Every fact here comes from the host page and the fees page.

Step 1: Create a free host account and list each room

Listing is free. You create a host account, add the house, and list each bedroom as its own room with its own rent. Renters search by city and move-in date, so each room shows up on its own with the house details and photos.

Two things to know about what renters see:

• Listings show the area only: the city and ZIP code. The street address is shared after a booking is confirmed, not before.
• Some hosts list move-in amounts alongside rent. Whatever you list, the renter sees it before they pay.

Already have rooms listed somewhere else? The CoRent team imports your listings for you, so you do not retype them.

Step 2: Applications come from ID-verified renters

Every renter on CoRent verifies their ID once, with a government ID and a selfie match, before they can apply to any room. You never see the ID or the selfie. Renters pick a move-in date when they search and apply.

You review each application in the app and decide who to approve. The decision is yours, and so is the responsibility to make it fairly. Fair housing law applies to rooms in a shared home the same way it applies to a whole house. Virginia's Fair Housing Office explains the protected classes and what a housing provider can and cannot consider. Read it before you write your first listing, and screen every applicant the same way.

Step 3: Confirm the booking

When you approve an application, you confirm the booking in the app. That is the point where the renter receives the street address. The move-in date is the one the renter chose when they applied.

From here on, the renter is one of the people living in your house, and the rest of the relationship runs in the app: rent, maintenance requests and messages.

Step 4: Rent comes in weekly or monthly

Renters choose weekly or monthly rent when they book, and autopay collects it on the same day each week or month. They can pay by card or by bank account.

Here is who pays what, from the fees page:

• You keep 95% of rent collected. CoRent's platform fee is 5%.
• Booking fee on new tenants: none. A new move-in does not cost you anything extra.
• Management fee: none. You run your houses in the app.
• Processing fees are paid by the renter. Each rent payment carries a processing fee, shown to the renter at checkout before they pay. Card payments are based on 2.9% plus 30 cents; bank payments are based on 0.8%, up to $5.
• The one case where you cover a bank cost. When a renter pays a full month by bank account, their fee is waived and you cover the bank cost: 0.8%, up to $5 per room per month.

On the host calculator's example house, that last line works out to $35 a month if every renter pays a full month by bank, against $4,550 in rent. The example assumes seven rooms at $650 each; enter your own numbers to see yours.

Shared utilities: your choice per house

In a shared home the utility bills are usually in your name. CoRent gives you a switch for that. Turn on shared utilities for a house, and each tenant pays their share of electricity, water, gas and internet in the app, on top of rent. Your utility bill stops coming out of your income.

Some hosts include utilities in the rent instead. Either way, say which applies in the listing, because renters are told to ask.

Step 5: Run the house from the app

Applications, payments and maintenance requests all run in the CoRent app, which is why there is no management fee. When a tenant needs something fixed, the request comes to you there. When a tenant has a question, you answer there. When a room opens up, you list it there and the next ID-verified applicant finds it.

Support for hosts works the same way: messages in the app, or email support@corent.ai.

The rules of the house are yours to set

The app handles the mechanics. The lease terms, the house rules and the notice periods are yours to set, and in Virginia they sit inside the Virginia Residential Landlord and Tenant Act. The full text is on the General Assembly's site: Code of Virginia, Title 55.1, Chapter 12. It is dense, and it is worth a conversation with an attorney before your first tenancy, especially on security deposits, notice and what happens when a tenant stops paying.

A few practical habits that keep a shared home calm, none of which are legal advice:

1. Put the house rules in writing before anyone moves in, and give them to every applicant at the same stage.
2. Use the same screening steps for every applicant, in the same order.
3. Decide the utility arrangement once, per house, and state it in the listing.
4. Keep every message about rent, repairs and rules in the app, so there is a record.

What it costs to rent rooms in my house

The host earnings calculator compares one example house three ways: as a traditional whole-house rental, on PadSplit and on CoRent. In that example, the same rooms net $652 more a month on CoRent than on PadSplit, and $2,012 more than the whole-house lease. Those are example assumptions as of October 2026, not a forecast, and you should change every one of them to match your house. If you want the side-by-side on its own page, it is at CoRent vs. PadSplit.

If you are ready to rent rooms in your house, create your free host account. Listing is free, you keep 95%, and the first applicant you see will already have verified their ID.