Find a roommate to move into or someone to move in to you

2006-08-28 | By: A. Lundgren | Comment on this article

Roommate, roomie, flatmate or housemate. Regardless of what you decide to call it, there are several different services available for finding someone to share a living with. There are also several services to find a roommate to come and live with you.

Many of the roommate services cost some money. Sometimes both parts have to pay (both the one searching for a place and the one looking for a roommate to come to him/her) but most of the time it's free to search through the ads but it cost to send in an ad. There are some services that are totally free to use and are paid for by ads.

All search terms we relate to in this article will be shown like this:

search term

You should be able to use that search term in any search engine. But if you want to be sure that it will work we recommend one of the following: Google, Yahoo! search or MSN search.

Find a roommate service

Since the fees are fairly small the most important thing is the number of ads they got from the place you want to move to. You could start by doing a search for:

"find a roommate" location or only
roommate location

And replace location with the country or even better: the city where you want to find a roommate. You don't have to specify if you got a place for rent or if you are looking for a place to rent as most site's, if not all, provide you with both services.

When you have done the search mentioned above you'll get a lot of search results. All will offer you different functionality. You should go through the search results until you find a site with the functionality you are searching for. If you never searched for a roommate before it could be hard to know of what functions you should look for so we'll go through some of them below.

Profile matching - This function is very common and can be extremely useful, especially in larger cities. The first thing you should do is fill out a profile about yourself. The profile contain questions like what you are willing to pay in rent, how long you want to rent the room, where in the city you want to rent, a few personal questions like your age and gender and a couple of personal questions about what kind of a roommate you are looking for. If you have a room for rent the questions are the other way around.

The site will then find other persons that match your profile and present them for you. You could call it an advanced search. Some sites will also offer to send you emails when someone adds a profile that matches yours.

Look through the ads directly - This function may seem very basic but there are several sites that don't offer you this service. They require you to fill out a profile before you can look trough the ads. If you are sure that you want to find a roommate and going to spend some time on finding one it's definitely worth filling out a profile. But if you want to see how the market for roommates is near you it may be too much work for the little time you'll spend looking through the ads.

Find a roommate for free

If you really don't want to pay there are several services that are totally free of charge. Many sites offers their services free but charges for extra functions such as getting mail when someone adds an ad that match your profile. To find free services just add the word free to your search:

roommate free location

Just be sure to read through the term of service as a few couple of sites claims to be free but in reality you have to pay to use them. It could be free to write ads and read other ads, but it will cost you money to read your answers or cost you money to answer other ads

Other ways and specific kind of roommates

Sometimes you may want to find a roommate for something specific such as a college roommate. You could find college roommates in many of the sites that offer regular roommates but there are some sites devoted to college roommates. Those sites are often free to use and could be quite helpful. But make sure that the site you find are updated recently. Try a search like this:

roommates college or
roommates college_name

In the other search mentioned above you should change college_name to the college that you want to find a roommate at. The first search will help you find sites with roommates to all colleges and the other search will find sites devoted to the specific college.

There could also be some sites that helps people with the same interest find each other. Although there are many roommates services that offers you to search for roommates with the same interest as you it could be worth to see if there are any roommate services devoted to your interest or way of life. Do a search like this:

roommate interest

And change the word interest to your interest. For example: roommate christian will find services to match up Christian people.

If you don't want to go through a roommate service you could do a search in any search engine. If you use Google you could even specify a price range for the rent. Do a search like this:

roommate location $0..$1500

And change location to where you want to live and change $0 and $1500 to what you are willing to pay. You could also add other information like pets to narrow down the search.

Roommate contract and other things to think about

When you have found a roommate it is a good idea to establish a contract. A contract could come in handy if you and your roommate disagree of anything, it's used to establish rules like rent, time limits, space limits, cleaning and other common rules of behaviors. There are several examples of roommate contracts available on the internet. Try:

roommate contract

Some of the roommate sites offer some guidelines on what to think about before you move in together with a roommate. We really recommend you to read through those guidelines to prevent you from getting deceived. You could do a search like this for more info:

roommate "think about"