Collaborative roommate and apartment finder app…

Problem: Most roommate opportunities are short-term sublets of additional rooms. This can lead to unstable situations with people with whom one might not be the right fit — fitting a circumstance instead of the perfect match, bad for renters and landlords alike. What if one could connect with someone on their same wavelength on one’s search — together. Real roommate collaboration. The demands exists and is resonating so well, there is a surge of early adopters and brand partners.

Steven Abd El Hamid, Co-Founder and CEO of LiveWith (a roommate and apartment finder app like no other, which makes it easy to find ideal roommate matches, chat, schedule and collaboratively rent an apartment together – all within one app) joins Thomas Kutzman and Scott Pollack in the MouthMedia Network studios powered by Sennheiser. Presented by Prevu.

In this episode:

• Abd El Hamid reveals how 88% of Millennials are living with roommates, and have 4% less wealth than preceding generations, not as just a matter of choice or preference, but a necessity in most urban areas in the US and in Europe
• How those Millennials require a mechanism to find a stable and desirable roommate situations as a matter of importance
• The traditional process of finding roommates for many was relying on other agents talking to people like the person seeking a roommate situation, hoping that he/she was looking in same location, same budget, and same interests
• Abd El Hamid shares how he was co-owner of a real estate brokerage which matched roommates from Craigslist into situations, how they decided how to automate that process, and how they were looking at the most efficient ways to do that in the midst of carrying out a rental
• How LiveWith is like date-matching tech mixed with the trend for everything to be available and transacted online, with the added impact of being able to consummate the entire rental through the product without having to leave the product
• Why more companies don’t take this path – the technology exists but some of the powers that be have not had an incentive to build it out
• Prospective roommates can chat via the LiveWith app and search all properties that fit preferences
• How LiveWith uses general first-tier compatibility matching questions along with machine learning
• The way LiveWith is referring business to various apartment providers, at a cost-per-click
• What drove people to adopt LiveWith early on, and how most options are sublet-based
• Societal and macro economic changes are driving symbiotic micro economic trends
• Co-living situations, and “dorms for adults”
• Sweden vs. USA, Abd El Hamid’s difficulty in transitioning from on Visa to another
• How Abd El Hamid found his co-founder through an acquaintance
• How vision plus effort can lead to success, and reaching for the sky as a an entrepreneur

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