Yes it is.
You’ve googled “find a flatmate,” stumbled across flatmate.com, and thought wait, is this site still up? Did you double check the URL. What about the copyright date in the footer. Did accidentally loaded a website from the era of dial-up and frosted tips.
Fair enough.
flatmate.com has been around since 1998. Yep. 1998. While people were still figuring out email, flatmate.com was already connecting Australians who needed someone to share the rent with. Google was just kicking off.
For over 25 years there has always been a site. Always visitors. Always people signing up, posting listings, messaging strangers to ask if bills are included, or this room available. The thing never died. It just waited. Patiently. Like a good flatmate who does their dishes and doesn’t touch your stuff in the fridge (yeh right!?).
Some people would call that stubbornness. We call it knowing what you’re on about.
The Longest Start-up in History.
Most start-ups are told to move fast and break things. flatmate.com looked at that, nodded, and chose a different path entirely.
Twenty five years.
Bootstrapped. Independent. No pivot to crypto. No rebrand to something with a lowercase z at the end.
Just a genuinely useful idea held together by the belief that Australians will always need somewhere to live and they will often need a person to live with.
That’s not a weakness. That’s the whole point.
The Renaissance Bit
So what’s actually happening now.
John Stericker and Jayen Ashar have been at work. Building, testing, rethinking what a share accommodation platform should actually do when rent is late and finding the right flatmate can feel like a part time job you didn’t apply for.
New features are coming. Features that, if we’re being straight about it, don’t exist anywhere else in this space. (sshhhh!)
What features exactly? It’s called a pipeline, and the tap is turning on.
John’s excited. Genuinely. Jayen, we’re assuming you’re excited too, because the alternative is that you’ve been grinding away on this purely out of obligation and nobody wants that energy in a share house let alone a start-up.
Why Now
Because the timing has finally caught up with the idea.
The rental market is not relaxed right now. Vacancy rates are brutal. More people than ever are living in share accommodation not as a fallback but as an actual choice, a lifestyle, a way to stay in the suburb they want to be in without spending their entire income on it.
flatmate.com was built for exactly this. It was just a bit early. For about 25 years.
Some ideas are ahead of their time. This one was right all along. The world just took a while to arrive.
Still here. Watch this space.
flatmate.com. Since 1998.
