atharva's internet place

After having spent over a decade in Marathahalli, I decided I wanted to live in Bangalore¹. So I found myself a 3BHK flat in central Bangalore² a couple of months ago. Of my two flatmates, one of them got a new job that required them to move cities. This meant that two months into my stay, we had to find a new flatmate to replace him.

This was an interesting situation because I happened to be on both sides of the hunt in a short period. I will thus split this into two parts. The first is my experience in finding a new flat with flatmates and the next is finding a flatmate when you have your own flat already³.

Finding a flat that needs flatmates

A lot has already been written about this side. I found this guide by Neerja to be the most comprehensive. What I'll write here is a bit more opinionated and specific to my situation.

I was probably lucky; I found and finalised a flat in two weeks. I seriously looked at only two places and the second place was the one.

I can strongly recommend searching for existing flat setups where you'd be a flatmate to replace another outgoing flatmate—especially if you are solo-hunting like I was. It has some merits:

• You will inherit a fully working furnished and appliance'd setup, often with hired house help as well. The rental agreements are already sorted out too. The only thing you have to do is figure out how you will share the common stuff in the flat. And then you get your bags and move in. So easy.
• Skin in the game—if your flatmates are already well settled at the place, you know the house is good, or at least reasonably livable.
• You have better leverage here compared to finding a flat from scratch—your to-be flatmates' main incentive is to find someone to move in before they have to pay extra rent for the missing person. Unlike a landlord, they won't try to extract the maximum rent out of you. You'll likely pay whatever rent and deposit they are paying already, so there's no negotiating to be done for that.

Of course, there are some risks to doing this. You might not get along with your flatmates. Make sure you talk to them—in person if you can—and read the vibe of the house. Also, check why their current flatmate is leaving.

I started my flat hunt sometime after the 20th of February. My goal was to move in mid-March or April. My criteria for a house was that it needs to be in relatively central parts of the city with access to the best third places while having great metro/public transport connectivity. This means either in Indiranagar or somewhere near the Central Business District, with a preference for the latter as that would put me closer to my office.

I tried the broker route and the existing-flat-setups route simultaneously. While I saw a lot of good places with the former method, it was a lot more cutthroat—you had to negotiate on rents and close extremely fast (think sub-3 hour timescales) in the areas I was looking for. Then there would be the problem of hunting flatmates. So a week later I decided to commit to the second approach fully. I got leads mostly from twitter (some popular accounts always get tagged by people looking for flatmates) and kept an eye on the BangaloreRoomi Discord group every day.

Through twitter-scanning, I got a lead for a place in Indiranagar, and I actually met the people living there, who seemed like solid chaps who'd make for good roommates. The flat was good (but not a 10/10 for my tastes) and the location was solid. But the move-in date was two days from when I met them. Given that I had time on my side, I somewhat boldly decided to let go of this lead and find something that's closer to my office and perhaps better suited to what I like in a house.

By far, my favourite way to look for flats needing flatmates was this janky website called findmyroom.in. Shout out to whoever's side hustle this is. It's a fully free site that you can use without any signups. The main UI is this map interface. You can zoom into any spot to find markers that point to people's listings. The left pane updates based on the area you are looking at on the map. For me, this is better than any fancy filter or sophisticated algorithm—I can save a lot of time knowing up front that the flat meets my criteria for the niceness of the area and neighbourhood, while also not needing to click on every random marker to see the actual listing details. You only need to sign up to reveal the number of the person who put up the listing and you can then contact them directly.

Here's the catch though—this website doesn't seem to prune old listings. I hadn't looked at the dates of the listings and nicely shot out lots of messages to people. Just as I realised my goof-up, this happened.

Turns out this listing I responded to was so old that they were looking for a replacement for their replacement flatmate. Within a week I met them, saw the place, and confirmed really fast—because this flat slaps. It met all my criteria and then some. This quality of my flat being simply immaculate ended up being rather helpful when it was my turn to find a flatmate.

In Summary

• It took me about 20 days from the start of my flat hunt to close in on a place in a prime area in Bangalore.
• Looking for existing tenants wanting a new flatmate is a great strategy.
• I only looked at two such places seriously, and the second one was it.
• findmyroom.in was fun to use, but probably bad only—that said I lucked into my awesome flat with it.

Finding a flatmate when you have your own flat

Not even two months later, I had to find a replacement for my flatmate who was moving out at the beginning of June. This was much harder than finding a flat. We started our search around the second week of May. We didn't have a lot of time on our side or any leads in our immediate network. So I did the only thing I knew—optimise for fun by putting a lot of unreasonable effort into something no one asked for.

I created an ad using Figma. Unnecessarily bougie this classified is, I know⁴.

Then I posted it on twitter first. The thinking behind prioritising twitter is that any leads are likely to be mutuals with people I know, which makes the new flatmate compatibility a little less of a gamble.

It's my most popular tweet, as of the time of this article. Over 5000 people saw it. Of those, a whopping 8 people reached out to me. Of those 8 people, 3 people saw the flat in person. The rest of the leads went cold.

At that point, I realised that twitter wasn't as effective as I hoped. Only two people from there were people I knew or had a mutual with—in practice, you mostly get random people and with a few exceptions, most of them didn't seem extremely serious. My impression was that they were mostly looking opportunistically—when I asked for a date to make any decision or even see the place, most leads went cold.

So I ended up posting on the BangaloreRoomi discord group. I got only two leads from there (and a person complimenting the place :), and these leads were much higher quality. Both were very communicative, serious and quick to close on a decision. One of them promptly told me they didn't like the place and the other one liked the place—we figured out the living arrangements and he's now my incoming flatmate.

This wasn't easy. I would have thought that having a nice-looking flat in one of the most prime areas of Bangalore that is close to offices, Metros and major community spaces of the city while simultaneously somehow situated in a tree-studded quiet road going for a not-exorbitant price (with a private garden having lots of chirpy birds and cat visitors) would be a no-brainer instant done deal for anyone who is flat-hunting (like it was for me). But it was not so. My best hypothesis is that plenty of other factors are stronger for other people (proximity to their office, room sizes, wanting gated societies etc) that make this flat not necessarily interesting to them.

Juggling a lot of leads and scheduling house visits, knowing that most people would likely go cold was mildly taxing. At the end of the flat search, I didn't feel like talking to people in general. Too much blabla. But it was done.

In Summary

• Start searching for flatmates as early as possible, unlike us.
• Make your ad stand out and give it your personality.
• Be prepared to juggle a lot of messages and negotiations with strangers. Keep a script/copypasta ready.
• Twitter/X was high-noise, low signal.
• BangaloreRoomi's Discord was high-signal low-noise.

Footnotes

¹ Joke explanation: for those who are new to Bangalore or have moved any place east of HAL zones, I am putting one jab by not considering these places as a part of Bangalore. It sadly is Really Bangalore, despite my gatekeeping.

² If you want to understand why I am drawn to central parts of Bangalore over places like Marathahalli, my views on cities and architecture are approximately like those of Chris Alex who wrote A Pattern Language, among other works.

³ Why did I not live solo or in a 1BHK? I've felt that flatmates are high-risk and high-reward. It's great when you get along, but quite awful when it doesn't work out. I can afford the risk because I have a backup place to stay in Bangalore if things don't work out. Anyways, flatmates have paid off for me. And my flat goes hard.

⁴ Funny thing is that I actually got the rent figure wrong in this ad. The single most important number was wrong. But my ad looked cool, I guess.