Renting a house I can't sell

@ATN_Pilot and I have heavily debated some things but I appreciate your input in this thread as you are obviously more experienced in real estate than me... which brings me to a scenario/question.

Person I know has been renting for awhile and living with his roomate's. He moves out of town for a new gig, but still rents out the home. Basically, he rents out each room individually, there's a set up between tenants to pay the utilities. Since he's gone the agreement falls through and the gas bill is no longer paid, the tenants buy they're own electric heaters for the winter. Then a deep freeze comes in and the pipes burst doing a tremendous amount of damage and costs a fortune. The house in this scenario is not a crash pad, I don't know all of the minor details although the tenants were all on a lease.

The owner (I was told this second hand) after fixing this expensive problem is now adamant that he pays the gas and utility bill himself upfront to X dollars. That X amount of dollars is then folded into the rent and the tenant pays anything extra... I assume this is all in the lease. That way he can be confident the heat stays on, and avoiding significant damage to the house. Do you find any flaws in this logic?

I'm looking at renting out at least one room in my house.
 
The flaw in his logic is simply the complexity of the whole scheme, and the difficulty of enforcing it, in my opinion. First, if the tenant isn't directly paying the utilities, then they have little reason to not waste them. Say hello to $300 water bills. He attempts to solve that problem by saying that they pay the extra, but my experience has always been that tenants will pay the rent but not pay the extras like utilities. And sometimes it's difficult to find a judge who will evict a tenant who is paying the rent but behind on utilities or other additional payments. For example, we have a number of property owners who want us to accept security deposits in installments, because it's easier to find tenants quickly that way. But no judge will ever enforce it, even though it's in the lease. The simpler the terms of a lease, the better.

My recommendation would be for the owner to do what I do with my rental house in Ohio: make the tenant pay for the utilities, but have the utility company send a copy of the bill to him. They're used to doing this, so it shouldn't be a problem with most utility companies. I have it setup where I only get a copy of the bill if it's behind, which is even better. That may not be an option for him from his utility company, but they should at least be willing to send him a duplicate bill so he knows if it's behind.
 
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