We were honestly looking for advice here. I appreciate your interest, and would like to speak with my mentors before responding on the price.

The first year we only operated half of the space for the first two months. The second half was delayed by construction and opened in March. The uncertainty of construction meant we could not line up bookings ahead of time, and this impacted our Q1 and Q2 earnings for 2016. We also had the costs of opening the location, loan payments and opening a 2nd location.

In 2017 we finished paying off all of our loans, and have not opened any locations. While the year is not complete yet, we are ahead of where we were this time last year.

Daily operation of the place has a few major components. There are a number of contractors to coordinate, most notably our completely awesome cleaners and the repair contractor. The repair contractor requires coordination with the landlord and often subcontracts, so you occasionally need to be a little hands on with the subcontractors to make sure everything is done to the completeness which you intended.

The items with inflexible hours are checkins and reset. New residents require a welcome, an orientation, and supplies like sheets and towels. These hours are restricted to 5PM-7PM. Checkins happen 7 days a week but there aren’t checkins every day. Some residents have flight delays or weird circumstances which require other checkin hours.

House reset is currently on Mondays at 7:30PM. House reset is when all clutter is brought to the main area of the house, returned to its owner, or sent to goodwill. Residents also help roll out upgrades, like assembling IKEA furniture.

Mostly, cleanup functions as a way to get the residents oriented with the house and set behavior expectations. Residents frequently come off 6 to 20+ hour flights into their checkin. It is not reasonable to expect them to remember everything you tell them at that time. Residents learn a lot more during reset, particularly where all the bathrooms are and where they can find more toilet paper. They do not clean things aside from getting the kitchen sink and counters under control but reset is extremely important for house cleanliness. The data is extremely clear that residents who participate in cleanup make way way less of a mess in the house in general.

Reset is timeboxed strictly to one hour, and after that we serve snacks and drinks. That is the time when most residents get to know each other and we get to know them.

Chores are minimal, though you will wash a lot of laundry on season changes and you do buy a lot of toilet paper. Costco delivers.

We have never had a house head not live on their campus, though every house head runs their house differently. I’m not sure you need to live in the apartment, but you probably want some sort of community leader nearby and accessible. Some residents stay for multiple years, so promoting one of them might be an option. Having somebody accessible is important when residents lock themselves out, but also for setting house culture.

Honestly though, the opportunity to be positive part of people’s lives and a first community in a strange new place was a big upside for me. The residents eat at Thanksgiving with us, I’ve taught some of the younger kids how to cook, and on a few occasions I’ve held a resident’s hand in the hospital when their family was thousands of miles away. I like singing happy birthday to them, and they often come back to visit us. Also, we run the coolest trick-or-treat house on Halloween.

The residents honestly can be pretty awesome too. I feel guilty in that I probably get a lot more from them than I give them. Grad students are fascinating, and they come for every reason from research at NASA to the reading Stanford historical archives to working in Google Brain. I’ve gotten to try food from a lot of countries, and learned to cook a few of the recipes. I’ve learned a lot about a lot of cultures and picked up lots of fun slang and idioms (a favourite, from German, is “shooting sparrows with a cannon.”) Also my professional network has grown substantially including access to a lot of new fields. The cash is good, but I think you’d miss out on a lot of intangible upside if you weren't there.

As for the three of us running the place: I’m pretty sure one person can do it. Our schedule works like this right now: one long day a week of running the house, three days a week of building whatever startup we’re trying, and one day a week of studying. Because coordination is hard we think it is less work for just one person.