Hey! Are you a multi-hyphenate? A writer-ceramicist-DJ-bartender-politics student who also dabbles in bouldering and spends their days off reading and vintage shopping?
Are you social? Do you love spending time with people at home, but also recognise the importance of personal space?
Is $310 a week a good price for the shittiest bedroom at the back of a terrace that spans one sagging double bed and an Ikea cube bookshelf, if you’re lucky? Where you can tell that whoever used to sleep there ‘bagsed’ the balcony room and jumped ship when the sharehouse couple moved to Brunswick? It gets the best natural light, though!
They have a moss-green velvet couch, a pothos plant spilling artfully out of a wine bottle on the mantle, and a sticker with Greens member Jenny Leong adorning their mailbox. They must be alright to live with, right?
This is Sydney Inner West Housemates: the Facebook page matching sharehouses to housemate hopefuls.
I’m in my fifth sharehouse after 5 years living in Sydney, and I’d say I have the housemate pitch down. I’ve been on both sides of the couch, and if you peruse my notes app, you’ll find a graveyard of pitches. The plots are still fresh for some of them.
Embellished with a self-deprecating “don’t mind the spiel,” I cast the net out wide. I’m prepared for the vulnerability of being left on read and the effort of traipsing around the Inner West. I’m ready to be the sacrificial lamb, perched on a stool while the presiding housemates lounge on the sofa, unified, making mental notes while I audition for the role of ‘Ideal Housemate.’
Why did I think that drinking tea was a personality trait? Why hide my nana’s birthday messages from my profile, thinking it made me seem more nonchalant?
Do I even want to live here, or am I just desperate?
The next time, I’m on the other side of the couch. Sifting through forty messages vying for one room in our sharehouse, I ruthlessly cull people whose pitch fell flat, only organising an interview with those who sold themselves best. I tally up their hobbies in a pros and cons list. I rank them on who I have mutual friends with. In a strange way, I feel complicit — a foot soldier of the rental crisis. Even in an overarching situation of precarity, sheltered under my own name on the lease, I sit back while people compete for a place to live.
The reality is that you have to sell yourself online to find somewhere to call home. To stand out in an oversaturated market, in a rental crisis, you need a personal brand. A defined and distilled identity, a hook, an image of what could be. How easily you’d slot in, barely a splash made in the house equilibrium. Will you fill the gap made by the last housemate, or make it your own? What’s your niche?
You’re selling your world, your way of living, your value as a life in the house. It’s an intimacy and vulnerability condensed in a sufficiently light direct message, self-packaging wrapped in tissue paper, the semi-transparency of ‘please pick me.’
A good profile picture (35mm film to be precise) is a foot in the door. Working at an Inner-West watering hole becomes a distinguishing characteristic. You climb up the list. This is the currency, the cultural capital, of Sydney Inner West Housemates.
The page exists on Zuckerberg’s turf – even our search for a home is spiked by the logic of personal brand and target audience. The language of cross-platform identities seeps into how you sell yourself on Inner West Housemates. Housemate hopefuls link their Instagram profile in their pitch, because their own words don’t represent them: a curated patchwork of photos speak louder.
Is there any other option?
You might evacuate the Facebook page and apply for Stucco, the student housing cooperative, if you’re eligible. Maybe you’ll win the sharehouse lottery, be the lucky one whose friend has a spare room. You could go back to the drawing board, polishing your pitch and concocting a new, esoteric pastime, ensuring your profile is just right. Not a stray birthday message in sight.
But really, there are no tips, no personal solutions.
Even if you have the pitch down to an exact formula, even if your interview takes place in the certain, not the conditional – in the language of ‘when’ you move in, rather than ‘if’ – you can never be sure. It’s all up to the internal house politics.
‘Home’ hangs in the balance of the debates that spark when the front door shuts. When they confirm that they’ll be in touch.
You polish your pitch and try again. Maybe next time, you’ll be on the other side of the couch.
Housing, tenancy advice and emergency accommodation Sydney
- STUCCO Student Housing Cooperative, Newtown https://www.stucco.org.au/
- Inner West Tenants Advice and Advocacy Service (IWTAAS), https://www.tenants.org.au/taas/iwtaas
- University of Sydney Short Term and Emergency Accommodation, https://www.sydney.edu.au/study/accommodation/off-campus/short-term.html, [email protected]
- USYD SRC (Student Representative Council) Caseworkers, https://srcusyd.net.au/contact/
- NSW Government ‘Link 2 Home’, homelessness information and referral telephone service, 1800 152 152
- Ask Izzy Crisis Services, https://askizzy.org.au/
