The stories people tell about bad roommates are usually about noise at the wrong hour, a kitchen occupied when they needed it, or a shared bathroom on the one morning it mattered. Almost none of them are about someone being a bad person. They are about two timetables that were never going to fit.
Matched by schedule, not by whoever is next
If you apply on your own you are placed by schedule and sleeping hours, and by whether you cook. Someone on nights and someone with nine o'clock lectures do not belong in the same suite, and that is knowable before anyone moves in rather than discovered in week two.
If you already know who you want to live with, apply together and we will place you in the same suite where the rooms are free.
Three is a workable number
A suite holds three bedrooms. That is enough overlap for the place to feel lived in and few enough people that the kitchen is not a queue. Five people sharing one bathroom is a different life at a similar price.
Every room is let to one resident on one lease — no couples, no second-resident option — so the number of people in the suite cannot quietly grow after you sign.
The amenity floors are the pressure valve
This is what a purpose-built building gives you that a converted house cannot. When three people all need to work at once, somebody can go and sit in the library lounge instead of negotiating for the table. When someone wants to watch something loud, there is a theatre room and a games room.
Shared living fails when the only two options are your bedroom or the one shared table. Two floors of somewhere else is most of the fix. See the building.
What to agree in the first week
Not a contract. Four sentences, once, while everyone is still being polite:
- Quiet hours, and whether they differ at weekends.
- Whether the kitchen gets cleaned after each use or at the end of the day.
- Guests: how often, and whether overnight.
- Bathroom in the morning: who needs it when.
Bills are not on that list, and deliberately so. Hydro, heat, air conditioning, water and internet are inside the rent, so there is no shared account in one person's name and nobody chasing anyone in February. You pay your rent; that is the whole financial relationship you have with the people you live with.
