As the busy summer rental season approaches in Bushwick, apartments, rooms, and roommates will all be shuffled around. LiveWith a new app promising the only “end-to-end rental app/solution for roommates” hopes to simplify matters for people looking for their next pad.
Steven Abd El Hamid, CEO and one of the founders of LiveWith, felt that the system for finding apartments and finding roommates was too truncated. It’s true that people have to use multiple platforms, or multiple listings on Craigslist—at least—to find an affordable place to live and people to fill it with.
LiveWith has you create a profile in the app, match with potential roommates, start chatting, and then the app provides a list of curated apartments which fit both of your criteria.
When I tried it out, the app offered roommate matches revealing a picture, a name, an age, and an occupation, along with some basic information about budget and needs.
As far as I could tell, I was not yet able to specify which neighborhoods I would prefer. Instead, I was only able to choose Brooklyn as a whole. It is possible that neighborhood options will expand as the number of listings and users does, or that neighborhood choices don’t appear until you match with a roommate.
El Hamid says that “the full extent of the applying and renting features are under development.” The dream, though, of a centralized place to handle all the steps in the rental process is a noble one. Hopefully, they will soon expand their app to include those who do not own iPhones.
And as they move out of their beta phase, the team at LiveWith may be hiring people “who have shared our roommate struggles, and are looking to make a difference in people’s lives.” Keep your eyes peeled, Bushwick!
Featured image by Magdalena Waz for Bushwick Daily.