A lettings platform that operates for female tenants has announced enhancements to its service.
Her Roomies differentiates itself by being a female-focused rental accommodation platform and by offering what it calls “a community of women a rental ecosystem.”
Now it will have a widget embedded on its website from the information supplier Crystal Roof – this will offer users a “digital property verification process” called HomecheckHER.
This will involve local information on neighbourhoods, initially focussed on London boroughs, to help tenants select locations to live in.
Her Roomies was set up 18 months ago and now claims over 100,000 users worldwide.
A statement from the platform says: “Letting agents are increasingly using new technologies such as online listing, video and e-signing. Covid has certainly driven the adoption of PropTech. However, that is really where the [agents’] use of technology ends.”
It says that traditional residential property rental platforms are non-segmented and are focused on transactional rentals, whereas Her Roomies offers a segmented market that will help landlords target their properties to female tenants, and is building a community to build loyalty and lifetime value rather than a one-off transaction.
The platform offers all types of properties from rooms to whole flats to co-living to student residences, offers users a flatmate compatibility tool and claims to have safety-first property verification services.
Her Roomies was founded in October 2020 by daughter and father team Chiara Fraser and Nick Fraser.
The founders of Crystal Roof, Uladzimir Sukharukau and Viktoryia Varzinava, claim to know firsthand how hard it can be to find the right home in a city like London, which is why they developed their app.
The husband-and-wife team say that “If we had access to the information we needed, we would have been able to save nearly 30 hours of wasted time viewing unsuitable properties. And if that wasn’t enough, we had to face the excessive moving costs and, on occasions, had to pay the rent for both the old and new property due to minimal tenancy restrictions.”
Chiara Fraser, co-founder of Her Roomies, says: “Your home should be your sanctuary. The place where you feel safe, comfortable and can decompress after the stresses of daily life. Women face more challenges than men when seeking rentals, partly due to the gender pay gap and because they have certain safety requirements and wants like neighbourhoods and proximity to facilities. At Her Roomies, we have always been committed to helping women find their ideal home and this partnership only increases our capacity to do so.”
