Much of West Chester, Pennsylvania’s rental housing started as single-family homes and ended up as three- and four-unit conversions serving West Chester University students, which means the plumbing was never designed to bill anyone separately. One meter covers the building, and the owner covers the bill. Water submetering corrects that without touching the rent. The borough’s rentals belong largely to individual landlords, and the tenants are students who sign for nine or twelve months and leave, with no stake in a bill they never receive. A dripping fixture in a converted third-floor unit can run most of a year unnoticed. True Submeter installs an individual water meter on each unit and invoices tenants automatically for their own usage, so you recover the water bill rather than absorbing it. Consumption drops once it carries a cost, arguments over splitting the bill disappear, and net operating income improves. The conversions made the units separate. Metering makes the bills separate too.
