Why it pays to find your flatmates first, and then the place

Anyone who has looked for a room in a new city knows the sequence. You open the listings, message twenty landlords, go and see a room on Saturday morning, decide within an hour because there’s a queue behind you. Then you sign. And only afterwards, with your bags in the hallway, do you find out who’s in the other rooms.

Sometimes it goes brilliantly. Often it doesn’t. It’s almost never a choice.

You can change the flat, the people change your year

A room smaller than expected, you can live with. An old kitchen too. What makes a year hard is people: hours opposite to yours, a different idea of what «tidy» means, guests staying over three nights a week, no quiet exactly when you have an exam.

These are small things, but they add up every day. And they aren’t fixed by a better contract or a brighter flat.

The opposite is true too. The right flatmates are the ones who wait for you for dinner when you’re back from the library, who go over your notes the night before, who become the friends you’ll remember those years with. No listing can promise you that.

What changes when you flip the order

If you find the people first, three things happen.

You already know where you agree. Hours, tidiness, parties, guests, smoking, pets, quiet for studying: you talk about them before, not after an argument. You don’t need to be the same on everything. You need to know where you differ, and whether that’s a problem for you.

You look for a place together. Two or three of you can also look at whole flats, split the viewings, decide with more calm. And you move into a home where you already know who’s waiting.

If you already have a room, you choose who moves in. Whoever has a free room usually takes the first person who answers the listing. Choosing by compatibility, not by order of arrival, also protects the people who already live there.

Why now more than before

In the 2024/25 academic year more than half of university students in Italy, 52.9%, studied in a different province from the one where they finished school. Counting those who finished school abroad too, it’s 78% of students in Bologna and 72% in Milan. It means that every September a great many people arrive in the same city at the same time, look for the same thing, and hardly anyone knows the others.

That’s exactly the situation where finding the right people before the place makes the biggest difference.

How to do it, in practice

Without an app, you can do it like this: ask in your university’s groups who is looking in the same area, have a chat with the right questions (you’ll find them in another of our articles), and move together.

With Uniflat your phone takes the first step: you answer seven questions about how you live, say how much each one matters, and see the most compatible people in your city, with the number and the reasons written next to it. Then you decide.

Sources

1. Students enrolled «In Sede/Fuori Sede», 2010/11 to 2024/25 (file 14c)Italian Ministry of University and Research, Statistics Office, accessed on 29 September 2026