Some of you may wonder what the Roomster service www.roomster.com is all about. Roomster has been around since 2003 and it has been helping people find housemates and room-mates as this is often a difficult task. Yes there are many of these websites around, but I think Roomster is the best one that I have used and surpasses them all and I'll tell you why. I'm typically not a big blogger but I do believe that such an amazing service does warrant some raves.
My Experience with Roomster Part 1
Throughout college and my early work career I have had to share my apartment and houses with a room-mates and housemates given that the very cities I lived in Boston and Toronto are among the priciest in the world.
I have had a few sour experiences with various room-mates and housemates with common issues that most people have such as cleaniness, unreasonable noise level during late hours, and all the usual problems that one can think of. There are a very incidents that I could still recall vividly where I had to even invole the local authorities. So I will go through my whole experience with Roomster in this blog.
How Does Roomster Help?
Where shall we get started? Similiar to the online dating website these days, it allows one to create a profile with some of the common questions that room-mates, house mates, or landlords would like to know regardless of which category you fall in. It is very similiar to catalog shopping for a room-mate or housemate, or landlord but at the same time you can't afford not to. A lot of times when we decide to lease out or rent a place from people both parties is playing a craps game to see if luck is on their side. You have no idea how the parties look like in person, their habits, and whether they will affect your living style or not. This is where Roomster really helps.
Once can filter the attributes that they want from a room-mate or housemate, down to granular details like profession and sleeping hours. This helps as sometimes having someone who works opposite shifts (day vs night) would really affect your ability to rest and well being. Without a doubt the price of rent, ammenities, pets, number of rooms etc is also included in your search.
Roomster is really well thought out and it makes it soooo convenient for you given the price and having a basic profile is free. Have a look at the common questions already built in when you are sending someone a message.
This is something that takes only a few minutes and you only have to do it once. Questions include whether you are a smoker, time you retire to bed, go to work, cleanliness habits, affordability, whether you have pets and etc. Below is an illustration of how the questionaire look like.
As you can see very straight forward, a few questions to answer but they are important questions.
The Inferface
The interface is very simple to use. It's almost identical to MLS, Facebook, Lavalife, and other similiar online websites. In fact it's much more simple as you can see below.
Search For A Property
Post A Property
Once again a pretty straight forward and easy process.
My Experience with Roomster Part 2
So back to my experience. The first time when I moved to Toronto back in 2004, I was trying to find a place to rent. Being busy and all I went through the conventional online medias to find places to rent with a room-mate. I met with the room-mate paid my first and last month's rent. During the brief half an hour conversation exchange I tried to guage whether he's a party person and if he cleaned up after his own mess (pretty much impossible). I learnt the hard way and as this dude cranks his music up into the wee hours of the night and always has different people coming into our shared space.
Second experience that I had, my housemate flat out lied about not having pets. For a whole month I was wondering why my nose was running and why my Ashma was flaring up. I later found out that she had a cat which she tried hiding upstairs. Being an animal lover I was just more upset at the fact that she didn't tell me otherwise I could have taken Reactin sooner to get rid of my symptoms.
The cool thing about Roomster is that any members on there whether they are a lessor or a tenant will receive ratings and testimonials from other members whom they have interacted with before. Should they be deceitful if their profile has any unresonabily false representation it then becomes public knowledge.
So shortly after those experiences I signed up for an account with Roomster (best thing I have done in my life). I ran a search for a room-mate that is best matched with my lifestyle (quiet, occasional guests, over, in bed by 12:00am, etc.) and I have contacted and chatted with a couple of members from Roomster before we met in person. The fact that we were exchanging conversations online made one feel a lot less akward to ask any unanswererd questions. However, I had very few questions to ask as the search filters did all the work for me. I lived in harmony with this room-mate that I have found from Roomster for a little over a year till I had to move to Boston. The whole process all in all took me 3 days (3 hours) in total including account sign, conversation exchange and seeing the apartments.
I moved to Boston in 2008 and used Roomster again prior to even moving there. I was once again in touch with my room-mate through Roomster, got moved in and settled down. We became really great friends and she was also kind enough to show me around the city and how the Metro routes worked etc. Given that fact that I was still in Toronto when I ran search for Boston, MA the process was even faster, everything was taken care of online (contact, picture review, first and last month's rent). Ths process took 2 hours all in all this time.
Overall Thoughts Of This Service
All in all, I would say that Roomster is a good service whether you are using the paid of the basic subscription. Even with the paid subscription the value is well worth it as we all know that having a good room-mate is necessary. I hope this review was helpful, visit www.roomster.com and sign up for an account, browse around and see if it works for you.
The only thing that I would like to see improvement on is the interface, however we don't have to be computer savy to navigate on it regardless.
Best of luck in your search for a good room-mate!
Regards,
Brad Howells
