SpareRoom/House Share

[mumtoucher]

Hello,

I'm looking at using a house share site like spareroom.co.uk to move out of parents house and I haven't used it before. Anyone had any good or bad experiences with this?

I like your help.

I use it to get lodgers. Sometimes I'll browse profiles and send direct messages, or if I'm having no luck I'll put an ad up.

No problems so far.

Make sure you know the difference between tenancy types.

Lodger - you rent a room in a house where the owner also lives. You have limited access to the rest of the property - you should have access to the kitchen and bathroom but not necessarily the rest of the property. You have very very few rights as a lodger - you can be asked to leave with almost no notice.

Assured short hold tenancies have two types and you have a lot more rights than a lodger and the landlord would need to follow a legal process to end your tenancy.
The two types are:
Individual tenancy - you have your own tenancy for a room in a shared house. Major downside is you have no say in who else lives there, the landlord could rent the other rooms to anyone.

Joint tenancy - you and the other tenants are jointly liable for the rent on the entire property. If the other tenant leaves, you would be responsible for the entire rent. Upside is, you can take control of finding a new tenant and choose them.

I think spareroom is the most popular site for house shares. My 2 children have used it many times for either looking for a place to share and for finding new house mates and it serves its purpose well. If you have not shared before, think carefully about how you want to live. In some house shares people very much keep to themselves staying mostly in their own room just coming out to cook. Others can be much more sociable treating the whole house more as a home sharing the lounge, watching TV together etc and becoming friends. So it's worth finding out how other housemates live and the level of tidyness that suits you.

In one house share my daughter was in, the other person wouldn't do any cleaning of shared spaces such as hoovering stairs and just stayed in her own room. Another was a mature PHD student who complained about the TV being on in the evening as she could hear it in her room when she was studying. Be prepared to ask lots of questions when viewing .
It is a two way process and both sides need to make sure it is a good fit.

Ensure that you always view the property in person, not via the Internet

Do not pay lots of money in advance

There are lots of scammers, be aware

I use them all the time. The easiest way is to write a nice advert of yourself and wait for people to contact you. I used to contact landlords via their individual ads but found it rather ineffective.
There are some wierd requests with private labdlord. A guy asked me to send over the CV

I used spareroom when I was living in London in my twenties. It was great. I made an ad, but I had much more sucess with doing searches for what I wanted and contacting people directly. Market yourself as an ideal housemate. You sometimes do have to be really quick so keep an eye on it regularly so you can send a message as soon as something good comes up! We also used spareroom to advertise a room or the flat when one housemate left, and it was great from that perspective as well.

My friend used it for her lodgers and it was great! I think you need to know what you want though and the people you want to live with.