Assuredly – Live with People You Trust | Hacker News Reader

Assuredly – Live with People You Trust

assuredly.us

33 pointsllcoolray40 comments

How the hell did we end up with a world where companies run background checks on rooomates? Fuck this. I'm out.

OK, but this is going on your permanent record.

Yeah, this is just plain creepy.

Yeah, this just seems sad to me. Symptom of a sheltered life.

I was thinking the same thing. I didn't realize that finding a roommate was such a formal process these days. What happened to just sitting down with someone over a cup of coffee?

To be clear, we’re offering reference checks, rather than background checks, for roommates.

Many leasers already perform reference checks. Take a look at any article about finding a good roommate and you’ll see that almost every one recommends this step. We just know that it’s a pain, so we’d like to make it easier for those who don’t have the time to do it themselves.

This strikes me as odd: is it cultural?

In my experience, people choose to live with friends. If they can't do that, they ask their friends for recommendations. And if they can't do that, they try very hard to live alone, in a closet if necessary, until they can make some friends.

The ways somebody can be a good or bad apartment-mate go much further than anything that I imagine can be discovered by a third party making a few phone calls according to a script. Can Assuredly knock out the most egregiously unpleasant people? Probably.

But it couldn't tell you that while I paid my rent on time and made no loud noises, I would be essentially absent from the apartment I shared one year because I all-but-moved-in with my girlfriend. And I didn't renew the lease because I did move in with her the next year. Was I a bad apartment-mate? That depends on what you wanted from me. I'm certain that I wasn't what was wanted in that case.

Plenty of people here in Lisbon - particularly university students, but not only - seek to share apartments because they can't afford anything else; if you make minimum wage, the rent of a reasonable house in the city will easily eat 3/5 of your salary.

We rent rooms in a couple of 3-bedroom houses and, as far as I know, our renters aren't friend, though they're usually friendly, they don't really socialize. I think you'd be a great apartment-mate for most of them.

maybe you misused the words, but are you talking about renting whole HOUSE in largest city & capital of a western europe country? Places like that I've been, normal people (not on minimal wage, rather average salaries) cannot afford renting a proper house in the city even if they give out full single salary. Edge if the city yes, but anything usable in the city - nope.

Depends which Western European country you mean. In lots of countries you can rent a "whole house" (whole appartment I mean) quite easily in the city if you're employeed and not on minimum wage.

In Berlin, for example, rents have been notoriously low (something like €500 would get you an appartment: http://berlin.en.craigslist.de/search/apa ), but also in many other cities.

Also in some cities the "city center" or parts of it has low rent because of many immigrants or things like that, and more wealthy people live for other parts/suburbs.

I believe the poster above is simply confused about the usage of the word "house". At least in the US, my experience has been that "house" is usually synonymous with "detached single family home." Pretty typical American example:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bc/Small_Si...

The next step down is a townhouse:

http://media.point2.com/p2a/htmltext/a2c4/c0e3/62d9/4e6d5930...

These are all but nonexistent outside of cities in the US, though.

Yeah, here it's still possible to find 1-bedroom apartments inside the city for ~400€/m (our average salary is ~900€/m, by the way). Rarely in the centre, but still inside the city proper. If you're willing to commute 20km or more, you can get something decent for <300€/m.

Of course, this is just the rent, not utilities & etc.

EDIT: Yes, by "house" I mean "apartment".

A "house" in many (older) european cities is often just a small slice of the buildings on a road - more or less the size of a flat, just a vertical slice instead of horizontal. So renting a full house is not exactly uncommon and does not necessarily indicate a large and spacious accomodation.

Not all capitals western europe countries are the same.

In Madrid I'm paying less rent for a studio in the center than what I was paying for a room in a shared flat in London Zone 3.

>In my experience, people choose to live with friends. If they can't do that, they ask their friends for recommendations. And if they can't do that, they try very hard to live alone, in a closet if necessary, until they can make some friends.

Not sure were you're getting that. People live with unknown (before) roomates etc all the time.

I know it for a fact all over Europe, especially for younger people and Europe, but from the media, interviews, biographies and such I know it happens in the US too, to share the rent, etc.

Heck, weren't even a couple episodes of Friends were they were trying to find a new roomate?

I think its a particularly American affliction: to know ones roommates in advance. Perhaps its an artifact from the formative years, where the shock of living with a stranger is learned for the first time, and subsequent entrance into society is predicated with a desire to not have "a roommate experience which sucked".

In Europe, the roommate experience just sucks - from the get-go - because nobody wants a roommate, really. Americans, unwilling to fess up to this fact, seem to have created machinations designed to facilitate this ease.

I'm In Boston and most folks I know who live with roommates found them through posts online. People who knew their roommates before living with them are definitely the exception, not the norm.

We agree. Sharing an apartment with roommates is very common in major cities and university areas and that is where roommate problems are most prevalent.

Landlords commonly perform reference checks but individual owners or students looking to fill a room in their current apartment typically don’t have the resources to. Don’t they deserve to know more about their potential roommates before they’re sharing a living room with them?

So...if you're a person from Wichita Falls moving to NYC knowing basically zero people, what exactly do you do?

When I was in university, I got some awful roomates in my dorm - and now that I can pick my roomates, I'd love to be able to check if these people have caused problems in the past.

How did the "hacking" world go from "Let's organize and make accessible all of the world's information." to "Let's make a couple of phone calls to people you don't know" ?

Didn't it start from ""Let's make a couple of phone calls to people you don't know" (and/or "people you know")?

Back when it was still called "phreaking".

"Let's organize and make accessible all of the world's information" sounds like Xanadu's, Google's or a librarian's goal, not the "hacking worlds" in general...

Good point. :)

I've meant "hacking" in the (yet again) bastardized sense - the tech start-up scene.

It just seems to me that the scale, or the grand vision of new tech start ups has been incredibly mundane lately. I often imagine myself listening to a pitch presentation that goes something like this:

Hi, everybody, I'm Clarc McSugarHill <me: vaguely paying attention> and we are going to disrupt the market <me: interested, but annoyed by the buzz word> of buying fedoras online. <me: angry and asleep>

Nice project, but after sharing flat for 15 years with people from all over the world I've learned that the flatmate that doesn't click with you, can perfectly click with another roomie. So I doubt the tool will be accurate, it's highly relative.

Personally I'd prefer a site for meeting potential flatmates that are techie/startuppers? In the valley chances are that 70% of potential flatmates are somewhat involved in the industry, but here in EU is much difficult. For instance I'd like to move to London or Berlin for some months but finding techies for sharing a flat is not easy...

Does anyone know of a tool/website for this?

Boooo. No fun. Do what I did. End up living with the other two people who ended up in front of a door you've never walked through in Alphabet City, NYC in response to a Craigslist advert. Did one of those two people stop paying rent without letting us know, and did we have to find out three months later by way of threat of eviction from management? Yes. But, he went by the name "Cash" and the guy who eventually replaced him was insanely good people. And, I got that story.

Besides, "Cash" did have his references checked by the management company. And we all three signed separate leases along with co-signers (I didn't need one, but the management company insisted per policy, and I really wanted to rent this place). It all came down to communication. Not reference checks.

And,,, "Trust". I think there is a misunderstanding shown in the use of that word in this context.

Assuming there is an actual need here, the biggest problem with this business is there's probably going to be very little repeat business.

Customer acquisition costs vs lifetime value will kill em.

That's the same reason why it's so hard for online dating apps to get VC funding. If it's actually effective at finding long-term matches for people, then it will have to keep churning through new customers.

Is this site for people who don't want to make a phone call?

Could they legally gather any information about you from an employer? It feels like a massive legal liability waiting to happen.

Hey HN, this is the Assuredly team. Thanks for all of the feedback, this was exciting to wake up to this morning.

We’re certainly not trying to be creepy or move us all toward a bleak authoritarian future.

Reference checks, though time-consuming, are already performed by many leasers looking to fill a room. Our goal is to simplify the process to the point where it becomes feasible for anyone wishing to learn more than what can be uncovered in 15 minutes over coffee. All checks that we perform are done strictly with the permission of the applicant; we’re not doing any sneaking around.

Many of us have had bad roommate situations unfold after seemingly smooth interviews - from financial disagreements to apartments nearly burning down. We’d like to help you avoid those situations.

We’re in the experimentation phase. The first round of checks are being performed this week and we hope to learn more about the underlying needs and what we can do to help.

Was your last landlord a jerk hellbent on ruining your life? Good luck being anyone's roommate. - The Future

How are you expecting your staff will understand the priorities of your clients as well as the clients themselves? In other words, how do you know what questions to ask, and whether they're important to the client?

If this process requires extra guidance from the client up front, isn't it just easier to just make the phone calls yourself (like nickthemagicman suggested)?

I'll quote myself from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10195090 "Yet another industry with an already solved problem"

As someone with a life-long obsession with bathroom neatness (I've been driven to violence by roommates who don't respect my toilet paper roll orientation rules) it's comforting to know I can find a sane person to live with.

Sheldons should live alone!

Disrespecting toilet paper roll orientation conventions can be a form of micro-aggression.

Does the person have to (legally) accept that you ask questions about them ?

I know I would not feel comfortable about someone asking questions about me to my previous roommates and I wouldn't give information about them to a third party.

I hope so, and I would probably rule out any future roommates who ask me to do this in addition to checks that landlords already run.

On what planet is there a market for this? I can't even imagine this EVER working in roommate-centric New York City.

We are taking steps, one at a time, towards total authoritarianism.

And site, or 'product', this is one of the steps along the way.

The day we stop trusting random strangers is the day we allow ourselves to become a small part of an authoritarian zeitgeist.

In the US anyway, landlords already run reference and credit checks.

So now, in addition to the intrusive questions with gobs of personal data that the landlords give us, we will have to give more data to this service and have future roommates run credit checks on each other? No thanks.

This creep of "services" into what should be a part of normal social interactions and analysis is slightly worrying; to say nothing of the commercialization of personal relations ("You read the reviews before buying a toaster on Amazon, why wouldn't you want to learn more about the person you're about to share a bathroom with?"). And I say this despite having had a 'bad roommate' situation last year which this service would have probably prevented (in fact, in that case, the landlord's checks did flag the guy, but we let him live with us anyway).

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