A hostel is let differently from a flat: two, four or six students share a room, each on their own agreement, each paying their own fee. Rentor calls each of those a bed, and a bed works exactly like any other unit — its own tenant, its own invoice, its own deposit, its own receipt.

This page is about setting that up. For how the money falls due, see Term & semester billing.

Turn on hostel mode

Adding a new hostel? Pick Hostel as the property type in the add-property wizard. The last button reads Create hostel, and the property opens straight onto its Hostel tab. For a property you already have:

1. Open the property and go to the Hostel tab.
2. Press Set up hostel billing.
3. Choose how you charge — Monthly, By term, or Every few months. Most student hostels pick By term.
4. If you picked By term, add your terms with real dates. They are your dates: no two universities share a calendar, so Rentor never assumes one.
5. Save.

Everything else about the property — its photos, its verification, its location, its maintenance — is unchanged. Only the billing clock and the way you add rooms are different.

Add rooms, and Rentor adds the beds

In Rooms & beds, press + Add room and give it:

• a name (the number on the door, like B4),
• a room type,
• how many beds it holds,
• the price per bed, per term,
• the deposit per bed,
• and who the room is for — mixed, women only, or men only.

Pressing Create room and beds creates the room and one unit per bed, named B4-1, B4-2 and so on. You never add beds one at a time.

Beds count towards your plan. Each bed is a unit you can let, so a 4-bed room uses 4 of your plan's units. A large hostel needs a plan sized for it — the Hostel 250 and Hostel 600 plans exist for exactly that, see Plans, billing & add-ons. The form tells you before you create anything, and nothing is created if you are over the limit.

Prices are set once, on the room

You type the term price. Rentor works out the monthly equivalent itself and shows it underneath (≈ KES 4,932/mo).

That monthly figure is not decoration. It is what the marketplace's budget filter compares, so a bed at KES 18,000 a semester still appears when a student searches "under KES 10,000" — because per month, it is about KES 4,900. If Rentor filtered on the term price instead, the cheapest beds would vanish from exactly the searches meant to find them.

Change a room's price and every bed in it follows. Invoices already issued are never re-priced — a bill you have sent stands.

A term that costs less than the others

A short third semester is often cheaper. Edit the room and set a price for that term — it applies to everyone in that room for that term, including students already living there. It cannot rewrite a bill that has already gone out.

Resizing and removing rooms

• Growing a room adds beds and continues the numbering.
• Shrinking a room removes only empty beds, highest number first. If you try to shrink past the beds that are let, Rentor refuses and tells you how many you would have to empty first — it will not delete a bed somebody is living in.
• Removing a room is refused while any of its beds is let.

Who may take a bed

If a room is women-only or men-only, Rentor asks for the tenant's gender when you assign a bed and refuses a mismatch. It records that gender only for rooms with a rule — a mixed room never asks, and nothing else on Rentor reads it.

You can also ask every student for their institution and admission number (House → Ask tenants for their institution and admission number). That is what produces an occupancy list a university will accept.

When a bed comes free

If you keep a waiting list, the students at the front of it are notified the moment a bed frees — whether the tenancy ended because you closed it or because the notice period ran out. A hostel empties by the calendar, and the students you turned away in September are usually still looking.

Where the beds appear

• Rooms & beds on the Hostel tab is where you manage them.
• The Units tab shows only doors you let one at a time; it links across to the Hostel tab rather than listing two hundred identical beds.
• On the public listing, students see rooms with how many beds are free — not a wall of near-identical units.
• Reports → Hostel occupancy shows beds let and empty room by room, and what each term has billed and collected.

On the phone app: open the property and tap Student housing. The same three parts are there — Billing (the rent cycle, your terms and what happens between terms), Rooms & beds (add a room, see bed by bed who is in it) and the Waiting list, where + Add a walk-in records the student standing at your gate.