Cohabitas versus spareroom?

House sharing website Cohabitas launched in late 2016 to meet the needs of mature private renters. We have often been compared to spareroom by our users and we also use spareroom.co.uk as a measure.

It is a useful comparison point for us because spareroom is the UK’s biggest house share and flat share website and they have amassed a vast amount of online experience that we can benchmark our services against.

We try to match them in terms of usability and technical efficiency, whilst at the same time maintaining our focus on mature house sharing in order to provide value to our users.

Cohabitas is different to spareroom in one key aspect of course, which is the basis of our offer. We are specifically for and about the over 40s house sharer (and landlord), so whilst Spareroom is a very efficient and well-designed website for house sharing and they have even started to recognise the needs of more mature house sharers, they cannot focus exclusively on the needs of older users.

With the second version of the Cohabitas website launched in 2020 we not only had the opportunity to improve our technical performance in line with spare room and other larger sites, but we also started to introduce housemate sharing preferences specifically relevant to our audience; preferences that go well beyond age. Landlord gender, COVID-19 practices, acceptance of children, reasons to share and possibility of performing chores in return for rent reduction are just some examples.

Cohabitas may be much smaller overall than spare room but we can offer something they cannot; a community of like-minded mature sharers. Depending on what you are looking for, we have our place. As one user recently said:

“It is very reassuring to know that Cohabitas is there. It has given me confidence to share.”

As one gets a little older and more experienced in both house sharing and life, one realises what is important at home. A higher degree of mutual respect for the space you share and the chance to exchange little asides that only people of a certain age would understand add so much to the sharing experience. These are just as important as the features of the property and the size of your own personal space.

These are things we have now built into the site housemate and room to rent listing templates, making the search for like-minded housemates easier, but they are also the focus of the stories of inspiration that we include in our regular housemate and landlord newsletters.

Also, because a large share of landlords listed on Cohabitas are live-in landlords, and because both they and the mature housemates they seek as lodgers value these things, we include these preferences in our user account profiles and listings.

If you have any ideas for additional mature housemate preferences that would be useful for Cohabitas housemates and landlords please do let us know, we’d love to hear from you.

https://cohabitas.com/housemate-profile/