Jeffrey C.

The positives: great idea, good site design (lots of features, easy to navigate, etc.)

The negatives: the fake profiles, poorly conceived monetization model

I have been a paying member for a few months. I don't fault the company for wanting to get paid for offering a service, and if I end up finding a good roommate, then paying the subscription will have been worth it. I should also add that I'm not extremely desperate to move immediately, so I wouldn't say it is the company's fault that I haven't yet found a roommate (maybe? More on that later). I have had conversations with definitely real people, and I am sure that I would have found a roommate by now if I had been motivated enough.

The above being said, I must admit that it did take me a while before I realized that the attractive people with cheap, nice rooms being offered are fake profiles and this probably lengthened the amount of time I have spent on the site. Sad to say, if a room/roommate opportunity being offered looks too good to be true, then it probably is. After a while, it becomes easy to spot them because you see the same pictures being recycled. As a person looking for a room, these fake profiles REALLY make a given area look WAY more affordable than reality, which is deeply frustrating when you gradually have to come to the realization that they have created an unrealistic expectation in your mind of what is possible. By the time you realize this, you've spent weeks chasing (unbeknownst to you) fantastical impossibilities.

Also, I have no idea why these fake profiles are on there. Is it an effort by 3rd parties to collect people's personal info? Or is it, as some other reviewers have guessed, an internal effort by roommates.com to get you to subscribe and to lengthen the time you stay subscribed? I'm honestly not totally sure. Before I realized they were fake, I messaged a few of these fake profiles, and I never got a response. I don't appear to have had an uptick in spam either, so I have no idea what's going on with the fake profiles. Here's what I do know, roommates.com REALLY needs to fix this issue for the customer experience to be greatly improved.

Furthermore, while I wouldn't consider this next idea an absolute necessity for them to get a 5-star review (unlike the issues I described above), I do think this next idea would take them from good to great. When you are talking to a potential match, there's a bit of a lack of understanding on both people's part of just exactly how to go from interested to moving in. For example, you make a match, and then you say a few words back and forth, but then what? Roommates.com as it is currently implemented is super focused on matching people but that's pretty much where it views its job as being completed. If the site could work more on helping users navigate the stretch between matching and sealing the deal, I would think that would significantly improve the value they would be providing to users.

Finally, I strongly encourage the company to consider moving away from a subscription model, to a commission-based model where they only get paid when and if they find a match for the "seller" of the room. The monthly subscription creates a really perverse incentive for the company. I'm not saying that the company absolutely IS being motivated by this incentive, but literally no customer is on here loving each additional month it is taking to find a match. So the company wants longer subscriptions, but each additional month is one in which the users are becoming more and more unsatisfied. If instead the company moved to something like a $150 commission paid by the person with the room once a contract is signed, then it really would highly align the incentives of the company with those of its users. Some might object and say that there are some logistical hurdles that make this monetization model unrealistic, and to them I just say that those are hurdles that result from a lack of imagination. In fact, if, as I described earlier, the company moved more towards helping its users all the way to completing the transaction, then I would say these logistical hurdles would mostly be solved.