Splitting a 6 Bedroom House Columbus Students Actually Rent

Six students, one house, one rent number split six ways. It is the cheapest way to live near Ohio State and the fastest way to end a friendship. A 6 bedroom house Columbus landlords rent to students is usually an old double or a converted single-family place in the University District, a few blocks off High Street, and the math on it only works if everyone understands what they are signing before anybody puts down a deposit. This post runs the numbers using four real listings currently sourced on the Ohio State off-campus housing page, then scales them honestly to six.

Begin your search at Off-Campus Universe, where you can browse current listings near Columbus, sort by bedroom count and see what each address costs once you divide it. Every price below is quoted exactly as it is recorded on the listing.

One thing to be straight about first: none of the four listings sourced below is itself a six-bedroom house. The set tops out at four bedrooms this week. What it does give you is real current Columbus pricing at one, two, three and four bedrooms, and the shape of a six-way split reads straight off that. Six-bedroom layouts are the floor plan Ohio State students name more often than any other when they post about housing, so the demand is real even in a week when the listing set does not happen to contain one. Rather than invent a house to compare against, this page works from what is actually on offer.

Start at the bottom of the range. Penthouse is a 1bd/1ba house listed as a sublease at $750/month, under five minutes from Ohio State. One person, one rent, and it lands exactly on the $750 per person per month that students in Columbus housing groups report paying. That makes it a useful control: $750 is roughly what a single bedroom near campus costs when nobody is sharing the overhead. Apartment, a 2bd/2ba condo at $2,000/month and also under five minutes out, splits to $1,000 per person, $250 a month above the median, which is roughly the premium a two-person condo carries over a shared house. Well maintain Victorian Walking Distance is the closest thing here to a real comparison: a 4bd/2ba house at $2,950/month, under five minutes from campus, or $737.50 per person across four. That is $12.50 under the median, and it is the number to hold on to for the rest of this post.

One listing needs care before you compare it to anything. Reynolds Rentals professional housing is recorded as a 3bd/2ba condo with a private room, five to ten minutes from Ohio State, at $1,795/month, and those two details pull in opposite directions. Read that figure as the whole condo and it is $598.33 per person across three, $152 under the median and the best value in the set. Read it as the price of one private room and it is $1,795 for a single bedroom, more than twice the median, which would be an outlier in this market. A Columbus listing can legitimately be either; the room tag and the price simply disagree here. Get the answer from the landlord in writing before you budget around it, and ask the same question about the paperwork: one agreement covering three people, or three separate agreements?

The Columbus Blocks Where Big Student Houses Actually Sit

Almost all of the large student houses near Ohio State are packed into the University District, the grid east of High Street between about 11th and Lane Avenue. East 13th Avenue, Chittenden Avenue, East 15th, Indianola Avenue, Summit Street and North Fourth Street are where the six- and seven-bedroom conversions cluster, mostly century-old doubles that were cut into bedrooms decades ago. Rent falls as you move east off High Street and rises as you move back toward it, and the blocks closest to High buy you a walk to class and a walk home at night rather than square footage. North of Lane Avenue, Old North Columbus around Arcadia and Hudson runs quieter and a little cheaper, with more genuine single-family houses and more street parking. Weinland Park, south and east, has the biggest price spread of any of these, block by block. West of the river, Harrison West and Victorian Village offer nicer housing stock at a price that rarely makes sense split six ways, and Clintonville, north up High Street, is where the students who want a real neighborhood and a bus ride end up. The COTA 2 line runs the whole High Street spine and is the reason a Clintonville address is workable without a car.

6 Bedroom House Columbus Students Rent: Running the Split

A 6 bedroom house Columbus students rent is priced as a whole house, not per bedroom, so the only number that matters to you is the total divided by six, and then adjusted for the fact that six bedrooms in a converted double are never equal. Use the 4bd/2ba Victorian above as the anchor: $2,950/month across four bedrooms is $737.50 a head, right on the $750 median. Hold that rate at six bedrooms and you are looking at a house asking roughly $4,425 a month; at a flat $750 each it is $4,500. If a six-bedroom listing a block off High Street is asking meaningfully more than that, the extra is buying something specific, usually off-street parking, a second full bathroom, or a genuine renovation, and you should be able to name which one it is before you agree to pay for it. Then split it honestly rather than evenly. The back bedroom with no closet and a radiator should not pay what the front room with two windows pays, and the time to settle that is before anyone signs, in a written roommate agreement that also says who covers a share if someone leaves mid-year.

Four Questions Before Six People Sign One Lease

• Is it one joint lease or six individual ones? On a joint lease every signer is liable for the whole rent, so one person moving out in December is everyone's problem. Individual leases cost a little more per bedroom and are worth it for a group that is not already tight.

• Who is on the utility accounts, and what do they run in January? A six-bedroom Columbus double from the 1910s can be expensive to heat. Ask the landlord for last winter's gas and electric figures before you treat the rent as the whole cost.

• How many parking spots come with the house, and how are they assigned? On the 13th and Chittenden blocks, street parking is permit-restricted and genuinely scarce, and six people rarely means six spots.

• What is the condition of the bathrooms, and how many are there? Six people on two bathrooms is the detail that decides whether the house is livable, and it is the one nobody asks about on the tour.

Ready to find your place? Browse all listings at Off-Campus Universe.

This article is provided by an independent housing resource and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by The Ohio State University.