Tony, I feel your pain. When I was renting in grad school, I had an automatic (Quicken CheckFree) payment mailed to my landlord every month and I didn't worry about it. Then, two years ago when I was renting a place while on sabbatical, my landlord insisted that I deposit a check at her bank directly. She wouldn't take a check in the mail. At the time, I couldn't find any automatic way of doing the payments. (Grumble. You'd think a landlord with so many properties would have some sort of service to manage automated payments, but no.)

If I was in your situation, where BofA allows for these sorts of instant transfers, I'd have the roommate get a BofA account for the sole purpose of being a landing pad for the money which would then allow for the automated transfer. Then the roommate arranges for a chunk of their paycheck to go directly to BofA (or, alternately, keeps a bigger chunk of cash in the BofA account and writes occasional checks). The #1 downside is having a second minimum balance for your roommate to deal with. This requires keeping the cash around, and then it's also earning less interest than you might prefer. A variant on the situation is to have some of the paycheck money go directly into the house shared account without the personal BofA account in the middle. This would work well for fixed/repeating costs (rent) but would complicate life for variable expenses (power, water), requiring more complex bookkeeping and the house occasionally either asking for money or giving a rebate.

If your roommate cannot split the paycheck, then you need to sort out whether the bank can do it (no doubt, with obnoxious fees). A brokerage trading account might also be willing to receive a direct deposit and route it multiple ways, possibly with lower fees. Never looked into that myself. I will point out that my broker does do free electronic bank transfers in and out of my core trading account. I use this as an easy way to route money between two different bank accounts (my relatively unused credit union account and my main bank).