Sarah Parkins was living in her dream apartment with her best friend – a beautiful new two bedroom in the Lower East Side, in the middle of the action.

And then her roommate got a job in LA. Sarah tried to find a roommate on Facebook and Craigslist, but couldn’t find anyone she liked enough and ended up moving out at the end of the lease.

For Sarah it was frustrating, but for her landlord, it was maddening because that beautiful $4000 apartment sat empty for 3 months.

Filling apartments is the endless hustle of NYC landlords. Almost nothing besides a catastrophe costs landlords more money than empty rooms.

And the problems are only getting worse for landlords who don’t act.

The market is changing, are you ready?

Analysts at Ten-X Commercial predict that by the end of 2018, vacancy rates across the city could be as high as 11%. Even the savviest landlords will struggle to keep their apartments filled if they keep doing what they’ve been doing.

Even if the number of vacancies is only a fraction of that, the loss will be massive. Just look at today.

According to calculations by shared housing marketplace, Roomi, landlords are collectively losing $199,021,129 per month due to vacant rooms, at a citywide vacancy rate of 3.45%. If the worst case does come true, and vacancy rates rise to 11%, within 12 months landlords will lose $634,560,121 per month.

How to fill vacant rooms, fast

So what’s a landlord to do? There’s only so much you can change the rent on your listings, and there are only so many brokers you can get to fill your empty apartments. The most competitive market in the country is about to get 2-3x more competitive in a few months.

According to Roomi, the answer is to avoid having to fill empty apartments in the first place. One of the biggest issues apartments end up vacant is because one roommate moves out and the remaining roommate(s) can’t fill the apartment before their lease is up, so they end up moving.

Roomi is a platform where individuals can open list empty rooms in their apartment, to access hundreds of thousands of people looking for a room. It solves the classic roommate matching problem in a way that is safe, secure and transparent. That’s because Roomi offers background checks, social media verification, secure messaging and more to make people feel safe about who they’re renting their room to or moving in with.

For landlords, this solves the empty apartment problem in the most elegant way possible. It fills empty rooms before they can even become empty apartments. Their role in the process is minimal. All they have to do is get their tenants to list their empty rooms on Roomi, using marketing materials provided by Roomi, and Roomi takes care of the rest. For qualified landlords, Roomi even boosts their tenant listings, so they get seen ahead of the rest of the existing listings on the Roomi platform.

Here’s what you need to do…

If you’re a landlord looking to get ahead of the market, you can learn more about Roomi here.

Despite the coming changes, few landlords have found an effective way to act. For most, Roomi is the solution to one of their most significant challenges.

Learn more about how Roomi is helping landlords fill their empty rooms: