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Furthermore, if you discover within the first two months that a roommate found through the site is not working out, Rainbow Roommates will give you a one-month free membership so you can find a more suitable situation.
If those fees seem steep, it might be worth it if you need to find a new home quickly, something the site claims to do (in as little as two weeks on average). There are three types of memberships ranging in price from $30 for a 15-day account to $93 for 90 days. Apartment listers can do so for free, while apartment hunters must sign up for a subscription that’s designed to protect the privacy of the participants. Rainbow RoommatesĪs its name proudly proclaims, Rainbow Roommates intentionally caters to the LGBTQ+ and gay-friendly community in and around NYC, for a truly localized and specialized experience. If all the above isn’t incentive enough to sign up, get this: Every month SpareRoom awards a different “Live Rent Free” contest winner a free month’s rent and matches that amount in a charitable donation to Breaking Ground, an organization which fights homelessness in NYC. The staff also vets all postings to make sure they are legit. You can even screen out any for-fee apartments and agent listings.
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SpareRoom lets you search by zip code or area right from the home page or to go to its advanced search function with the usual (no smoking, pets considered) and not-so-usual (vegetarians preferred, utilities included) filters. If you would prefer to pair up with someone in searching for a new home, Diggz can do that too. There’s also Diggz Premium Membership if you want to communicate with potential roommates quicker, get unlimited “likes,” and get extra filters if you’re extra picky. Then it’s up to you to “like” any of those people and, if they “like” you back (a la Tinder or Bumble), to chat with your “matches” through the application before sharing any personal contact information. Once you are all signed up, Diggz’s proprietary algorithm ranks your potential roommates so the most promising ones are at the top of the list, which you can further refine with search filters (no poring over dead-end profiles). Registering your profile involves completing a lengthy Q and A that probes into your usual sleep pattern, cleaning habits, and other lifestyle matters. Since it was founded in 2014, NYC-based Diggz has expanded into 22 other cities across the U.S. Need help finding a rental that allows temporary walls-or a landlord who will accept multiple guarantors? The rental experts at Triplemint, a Brick Underground partner, know exactly where to look. If you sign up here, you can also take advantage of Triplemint's corporate relocation rate-where you'll pay a broker's fee of 10 percent of a year's rent instead of the usual 12 to 15 percent on open listings. Bonus: The agents at Triplemint are a delight to deal with. Two more lessons to live by when perusing any site or profile: Go with your gut and have an open mind. And remember: For every scam story you hear there are hundreds of roomie-turned-bestie (or even romantic partner) tales.
Pose these 21 questions to prospective roommate candidates, be on the lookout for tell tale signs of potentially problematic roommates, and keep your radar tuned to common roommate scams.
Ask your friends and colleagues for their favorite roommate-finding sites and check for reviews on Yelp and other sites. Regardless of which route you take-be it combing through ads on Craigslist (my own go-to) or leveraging a roommate-finder service to do the screening for you (one out of three fails on my own scorecard)-the takeaways are the same: Always do your due diligence. Which just goes to show that modern-day algorithms can indeed trump old-fashioned analog methods (aka word of mouth), though each method has its pros and cons. My first “matchmaker roomie” quickly became my BFF (and still is to this day), not so my second or third turns out I had the same success rates when bunking with friends of friends or alumni connections. So when I landed a lease for a one bedroom flex on the Upper West Side with Central Park views-from the bathroom, and only when standing on tiptoe-I set out to do what countless other recent grads and thrifty thirty-somethings have done: Search for a stranger to share my habitat, an unfamiliar proposition in a pre-Airbnb era.īack then, there just weren’t as many roommate-finding options as there are today. Looking for a roommate you can count on to pay their share of the rent in order to afford living in New York City? Financially that plan makes a lot of sense, but despite being a well-traveled path there’s still the potential for many pitfalls-I should know.įresh out of law school and new to NYC, I was determined to find a reasonable apartment without compromising safety and living standards (in other words, no bathtub in the middle of the kitchen).