Here's What Women Are Looking For In A Roommate

There are matchmaking apps for everything from dating to short-term rentals, like Airbnb. And there are even roommate matchmaking services, too. For instance, if you need to find a roommate in New York City, The Room Ring takes roommate matchmaking to a whole new level. It’s not cheap to live in NYC, so finding the best roommate — and one you actually like — is key. Recently, The Ring Room collected data from over 10,000 users and made several fascinating discoveries. But first, what is the app all about?

With the app, you can list your room today and find a new roommate ASAP, because sometimes you need one STAT. You can set roommate preferences — like living habits (i.e., if you’re an early riser) and if you’ll be sharing a bathroom — and your profile is linked to Facebook, so you know if someone’s legit. Then, when you’re matched with someone in your “ring,” you can chat back-and-forth with potential candidates and be well on your way to finding your future roommate. Pretty cool, right? Not to mention efficient and easy. And, yes, similar to dating apps and finding a compatible match.

“We are a free social roommate-matching platform for medium-to-long-term room rentals, providing a secure, efficient, and transparent marketplace for room and roommate seekers,” Josie Hubschman, COO of The Room Ring, tells Bustle. “After posting a room or searching for one on the free website and/or iOS app, users can communicate safely within the platform, view mutual friends, and search based on various compatibility metrics. We are currently working on several new product features to be released in the spring that will enhance safety even more so.”

Recently, The Room Ring discovered some interesting data about who females and males prefer to live with. Any guesses? Yep, females prefer living with other females — and males have no preference.

“It was clear from our research (and no surprise!) that most females would prefer to live with females (especially at a young age),” Lia Wayman, CEO of The Room Ring, tells Bustle. “However, as a user’s age increases, the preference to continue to live with females diminishes. There are, of course, many things that could be attributable to this, but we assume that, most widely, people start to value a good tenant (who pays the bills, is respectful,etc.) over a bad one, regardless of his or her gender!”

Yep — agreed!

“Based on focus groups, we found that most twenty-somethings assumed that females cared more about the apartment search and were more diligent in the process,” Hubschman says. “Not surprisingly, we found that most of our younger users were mainly female, but that the breakdown then quickly evens out. For all users from 18-to-40, the total breakdown of females to males was 64 percent to 34 percent, respectively.”

The Ring Room was launched in the summer of 2016 and has had over 15,000 mobile downloads. Plus, it continues to grow. With everything else seemingly happening via mobile apps these days, why not find a roommate there, too?