While Ireland goes through a housing crisis and shortage of rentals, there's one startup that is trying to make the process of finding and selecting a dwelling a little less stressful by connection like-minded tenants.
Roomigo founder Ed Burke had spent many years travelling and working after getting his business and law degree in 2007 before eventually landing in Singapore for a couple of years.
During this time he was in many different house shares and encountered a similar problem every time: bad housemates.
It’s a problem that most people sharing rentals have probably come across at some stage, particularly when moving in with strangers.
“If you don’t get on with your flat mates, it’s going to diminish your standard of living,” Burke says.
He figured there must be a better way of finding decent tenants to share accommodation with.
“Because I wanted to be an entrepreneur and I was from a legal and commercial background, I was thinking to myself one way to become an entrepreneur would be if I’m hanging around and living with entrepreneurial people more.”
He got lucky and ended up living with a group of people who were all working on their own businesses.
Burke had been itching to do his own startup and that experience was the spark for what would become Roomigo.
“It struck me at that stage: it should be really easy to find the type of person you want to live with.”
“If I wanted to live with entrepreneurs I should have been able to go on to a website and just look for a house share that had entrepreneurs or people who liked entrepreneurship. If I was a fitness fanatic, maybe I want to live with people who are fitness fanatics.”
Upon returning to Ireland, Burke set up Roomigo in 2016 and participated in entrepreneur support programmes at NDRC and Enterprise Ireland’s New Frontiers.
Roomigo is part of a growing trend in the tech space dubbed property tech, or prop-tech, that’s trying to find more efficient ways to rent or buy property.
Read more here
Join us in Bangkok the 19th to the 21st of March for the Property Portal Watch Conference.
