Roommate finding/matching services?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’ve been looking for a place to live and have seen a few roomate finding/matching services online. These seem to be rather more effective than simply scanning through the classified ads in the newspaper, since you can specify location, rent, particulars about gender/smoking habits/pets/whathaveyou.

However, the two I’ve found so far, EasyRoommate and Roommate Access both charge for their service–you can browse the listings for free but have to pay to get the contact information.

Does anyone have any experience with either of these services, and is it worth paying money for? Are there other services, either paid or free, that anyone has experience with? Also, if anyone has any info specifically for the DC area, that would be most helpful.

2

I have never heard anything about the services, good or bad or knew anyone who has used them so I dunno. I noticed that in my city, there are a lot of “ads” in the bulletin boards at the supermarkets for people looking to rent a room or share a place. The ads never stay up very long so I assume that it works fairly well. We would be open to renting a room in our house but would never advertise, so maybe try that route. Worth a shot anyways and its free to put up a store ad, at least here anyway. And being in the DC area, I’m sure there are a lot of people who would be willing to lower their own housing cost witha roomate.

3

Maybe I shoulda put “tits” in the title or something, just to get people to open it.

4

Are you talking D.C. proper or the suburbs? If D.C. proper then try the Washington City Paper’s Housing To Share section. It’s not as searchable or customizable as a roommate finding service but it’s the Reader’s sister paper in the nation’s capitol so I’m plugging it. It’s online at least so you can do some primitive searching via your browser.

Jerry

5

I will probably be working in the Northern Va. suburbs, so that’s where I’m looking primarily.

6

Still looking…anyone?

7

You’ll definitely get more responses to a roommate ad if you put ‘tits’ in the title. :slight_smile:

Just not the kind you’re looking for.

8

I was talking about the thread title, not the ad title. :stuck_out_tongue:

9

I like sharerent.com You’ll have to fill out a profile, but there’s no charge that I can remember, and it seems to be a really decent tool for finding people in your specific area that are looking for one of three things.

A person with a room to rent.

A person looking for a room to rent, or

A person who would like to look for a place to rent once they find a roommate.

It’s a standard pass-thru email service. When you email a person who piques your interest, your return address would say geobabe@sharerent.com rather than your real email address (for the security conscious room-mate shoppers among us) Hope it works for you!

Brad