Posts under ‘Finding Good Housemates’

Here is a References Worksheet. Use it as a guide when you call references for your (possible) future housemate.
Also here is longer discussion on how to check references.

Housemate Heaven is a website that presents 16 “lifestyle types”. The reader is asked to pick the type that best describes themselves.  The 16 types are based on four basic categories: how personal property is shared, cleanliness of the house, the level of sociability between housemates and the attitude towards guests.  It’s an attempt to [...]

Your goal in the initial phone call is to determine if there is enough of a match to spend time showing and looking at the space.
You should have a clear idea of what you MUST have in a housemate and living situation. What you must have is very different from what you would like to [...]

One of the first hurdles in deciding to share the home you live in is figuring out what to charge your future housemates.
Renting
When you are all renting the space, this is somewhat easy as generally people simply divide the rent by the number of persons. Occasionally a room will be significantly better or worse than [...]

The housemate is definitely leaving and you are going to have an empty  room in your house.  You had a sense that this was going to happen. Your  housemate is moving on to a new part of life. She/he is moving in with his boyfriend or girlfriend, has taken a job in a different city, [...]

The ad you write needs to have six types of information:

Location
Features of the room and house
Something about who you are
What you are looking for
The financial informaton
Contact information

The location is in the subject line or headline of a paper ad. The headline should also describe the basics. It is a house, apartment, and how many people [...]

Here’s an article in the NY Times about sharing housing.
This is about a program run by the NY Foundation for Senior Citizens in New York City that help seniors connect with one another. What a great idea!

A good roommate ad has five types of information. It should list the location and the rent. It should also include a description of the room for rent and the larger house,  something about yourself as a housemate, and a description of what you are looking for in a housemate.
The location and the rent should [...]

To thine own self be true
The absolute most important part of finding housemates that you want to keep is being really, really honest with yourself and others about who you are and what you can and want to live with.
This is NOT the time to wish you were different. Do not believe you can make [...]

Roommates.com
This website offers free registration to post either “room offered” or “room wanted.” With pages and pages of testimonials, the company clearly seeks to establish itself as credible and helpful.  J. Bennet reviewing the service at Reviewstream, comments “Perhaps the best feature of roommates.com is that the service personally matches you with other site users [...]