Best RUBS to use

I am looking for people’s input on what is the best RUBS system to use. The park in consideration is in all age Park with mostly two and three-bedroom homes. It seems trying to do a RUBS based on the number of the people in the household would really hard to keep on top of. Has anybody found it best to use number of bedrooms, square footage?Thanks in advance for your feedback - Tim

It is an awful system.  I know a few operators that use it, but unless you have a very large park in warm weather I would not recommend it.  I have tried it once when we purchased a park with broken or old meters.  The biggest issue to me is that you have a complete inability to manage the expense of water.  We had a bill in a smaller park that just kept growing.  Using the RUBS system we had no idea where the problem was.  Installed meters, in one week we found a lazy tenants who’s toilet was broken and was using 35,000 gallons of water per week.  Not to mention that the tenants hate it because their neighbor is washing their car while they shower 3 times a week.  I think unless you have a very clean park in terms of water usage, it is really a flawed system.  Just my opinion though.

Call your state MH or apartment association. Some states are picky about RUBS and how closely the RUBS needs to hew to your incurred utility costs.Usually the local housing office will provide a “utility allowance” that represents the average cost of utilities for a given family size. You might find that they have it neatly summarized on their website if you’d like to look at ball park figures. When I was running apartments, we always ran a utility audit. We would look for leaks, replace valves and flappers, install water saving features, that kind of thing. The idea was that we would clamp down on water loss and show that we were doing something before passing on the cost. Makes things a little more palatable when presenting to residents. 

Install meters.  Don’t do RUBS.  Meters only cost about $200/home installed and encourage water conservation.  RUBS does not really encourage conservation.  We’ve typically seen a $200 meter encourage about $15/month in conservation.  This means the meter pays for itself in about 1 year.  Think of it as real estate you are buying at a 100% cap rate.  Not bad.-jl-