Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania is a small town carrying a large student rental market, and the housing serving it is mostly older homes subdivided into apartments by individual owners. Those subdivisions almost never came with separate water meters, so the building gets one bill and the landlord pays it. Water submetering closes the gap between how the units are rented and how the water is measured. Students here lease by the academic year and clear out, with no reason to notice a running toilet or a long shower they are not paying for. True Submeter installs an individual water meter on each unit and invoices tenants automatically for exactly what they used, so you recover the water bill instead of carrying it. Usage drops once it costs something, arguments over a shared bill go away, and net operating income rises. A market this seasonal should not be running its water through a single meter.
