Few college rental markets are as dense as New Brunswick, New Jersey, where Rutgers packs tens of thousands of students into the old multi-tenant houses of the wards around College Avenue, nearly all of them held by individual landlords. In a house rented by the room, water is the cost nobody owns: it vanishes into the rent, and the owner covers whatever the roommates run. Water submetering assigns that cost to the people creating it. Each unit gets an individual water meter, and True Submeter bills every tenant automatically for exactly what they used, so the full water bill lands back on the owner instead of the bottom line. Once water has a name attached, consumption drops, the standoffs over who ran up the bill end, and net operating income climbs, with the hardware usually paying for itself within six months. In a market where the houses are packed and leases turn over fast, metered water is how you stop subsidizing your own tenants.
