How to Start a Home Sharing Program.
From the First Commitment to the First Match.

Every few weeks, someone from a housing task force, an Area Agency on Aging, or a community organization asks us the same question: "We want to offer home sharing. Where do we start?" This fall we answered it in detail for a county housing task force, and the method works almost anywhere. Here it is, step by step.

First, what we mean by home sharing

A homeowner who lives in their home rents a private room to someone outside their family, under a written agreement, for 30 days or longer, ideally a year or more. It starts with a home that already exists and an owner who wants to stay in it. That makes it different from matching renters with other renters looking for a place, and from short-term lodging, which is for visitors. The homeowner keeps their home and their equity. The home seeker gets an affordable room near work, family, or community.

Step 1. Commit

The single most useful thing a city, county, or task force can do costs nothing: name home sharing as part of the housing strategy you already have. That one decision tells every agency, employer, and congregation that home sharing is a real option, not a side project, and it gives the program someone to answer to.

Many housing plans have room for this already. Oregon's Housing Production Strategy, for example, lets a city add a strategy of its own alongside the state's list of tools.

Step 2. Size the opportunity, and name who it is for

Before choosing a model, count what you have. Three numbers from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey tell most of the story for any county: how many households own and rent (table B25003), how many owners pay 30 percent or more of their income for housing (B25091), and how many renters do (B25070). Then estimate spare bedrooms, the number of bedrooms minus the number of people living in the home. Not every spare room is available to share, but each one is a potential unit: already built, already on the tax rolls, and already connected to roads and water.

In the county we worked with this fall, the numbers were striking: about 3,000 homeowners and 3,100 renters spending 30 percent or more of their income on housing, and about 3,200 spare bedrooms in the homes of those cost-burdened owners alone. A first program needs 50.

Then match home sharing to the groups your plan already names, and be honest about the fit. Home sharing serves older homeowners who want to stay, local workers who need an affordable room near their job, and lower-income residents on a tight budget. It is not the best answer for every group. Young families looking for a first home, for example, are better served by housing designed with them in mind.

Step 3. Choose your program model

The next question is how much of the matching your own people will do.

Case-managed. Staff do the matching. A coordinator interviews each person, visits the home, calls references, proposes a match, sits in on the first meeting, helps write the agreement, and checks in after move-in. It is the most supportive model, and the slowest and most staff-intensive. Sunshine Home Share Colorado, for example, tells applicants to expect at least eight weeks, including a two-week trial. The number of matches is set by the number of coordinators you can fund.

Self-directed. The people do the matching. A platform verifies identity, runs background checks, and helps each person describe how they live. The two people get to know each other, meet, and decide, with a written agreement to guide them. It reaches people wherever they live, at a lower cost per match, and it respects that two adults are making the decision. It asks more of the participants.

Hybrid. The platform does the groundwork, and people step in where it counts: a matching team reviewing fit, help arranging the first visit, a check-in at 30 and 90 days, and a caseworker or family member at the table when someone wants one. For most programs starting out, this is the best balance.

Step 4. Train your own staff, or work with an infrastructure partner

Once you know the model, decide who carries the work.

If you train your own staff, a coordinator will need to be ready for every part of it: structured intake, identity and background checks, compatibility interviews, home visits, fair housing rules for advertising and choosing, a written agreement adapted to your state's landlord and tenant law, conflict and mediation, ending a match well, and data collection that satisfies funders. It can be done, and some of the most respected programs in the country work this way. Plan for training time, a backup when the coordinator leaves, and a budget that lasts.

If you work with an infrastructure partner, the technology and member support come built, and your role shrinks to what only you can do: reach people and earn their trust. Here is what great home sharing infrastructure includes:

Not every program needs all ten on day one. But infrastructure that cannot handle the first five leaves participants carrying risks the system should carry for them.

What about the software you already have?

Many organizations start by asking whether a tool they already pay for, or know well, could run home sharing. Two kinds come up most often: case management software and property management software. Both do real work well. Neither was built for two people deciding to share a home, and the gaps matter.

Case management software is built around one client and the staff member who serves them. It is good at what agencies already do: intake, case notes, referrals between programs, privacy controls, and the reports funders ask for. If your program will be case-managed, it can hold the record of each person and each check-in.

What it usually lacks is the other half of the match. A home share has two participants, and each one is choosing the other. Case management tools rarely let a homeowner describe a room and a way of living, let a home seeker do the same, and compare the two. They rarely verify identity or run background checks on both people, offer a written agreement adapted to state law, or give participants a way to get to know each other safely on their own. That work falls back on staff, so the number of matches stays tied to the number of staff hours you can fund.

Property management software is built for a landlord managing rental units. It is good at tenant screening, electronic leases, rent collection, maintenance requests, and sometimes rent reporting for credit. Those are useful pieces, and some of them appear in the list above.

But it starts from the wrong picture of the home. It assumes a landlord who lives somewhere else, a unit with its own door, and screening that runs in one direction, from landlord to tenant. In a home share, the owner lives down the hall, and the person moving in deserves to know who they will live with just as much as the owner does. Standard leases are written for separate apartments, and the rules on advertising, choosing, notice, and moving out can be different for a room in an owner's own home. Compatibility, the thing that decides whether a home share lasts, is not part of it at all. And many older homeowners do not think of themselves as landlords, so a tool that treats them as one can push away the very people a program is trying to reach.

It is worth thinking this through before you commit, because the tool shapes the program. It decides who does the work, what each participant experiences from the first click, and what you will be able to measure at the end of the year. A tool that fits another kind of work can feel like a head start, and still cost more, in staff time and in matches that do not last, than one built for home sharing.

Step 5. Build one front door, and map who already reaches people

The lesson we have learned most often, running a self-directed platform in Oregon since 2021, is simple: people join when someone they trust refers them. Advertising helps. Local champions lead.

So the outreach plan is not a campaign. It is a map of the organizations that already reach the households you want, and one place they can all send people. Their only job is to refer. Nobody changes what they do; everyone gains one more resource besides a phone number and a waiting list.

• Housing help: community action agencies, the housing authority, reentry programs.
• Aging and disability: the Area Agency on Aging, senior centers, and meal sites.
• Employers: chambers of commerce, hospitals, and school districts, which need housing for their own workers.
• Community and faith: libraries, congregations, service clubs, veterans services, and, in rural areas where there are no neighborhood associations, granges.
• Every household: property tax statements, utility bills, the local paper and radio station, and the credit union.

Three more lessons shape where to look. Most home providers are older adults, often with limited incomes and a real risk of a move they did not choose, so reach them before the crisis, through the places they already turn to. Many older renters earn too little to qualify for income-restricted housing, so a room can reach people other programs cannot. And shared values make strong matches: veterans housing veterans, union retirees housing union workers, retired teachers housing new teachers. Those communities are natural places to start.

Step 6. Walk the path a participant will take

Before launch, write down every step from the participant's side, and check that someone owns each one.

1. Awareness. A trusted voice points them to the front door.
2. Sign up. They verify their identity and describe their home, or the home they are looking for, and the kind of person they would live well with.
3. Introduce. Compatible people are introduced online, safely.
4. Tour. When both are comfortable, they meet in person, complete background checks, and set house rules together.
5. Agreement. They sign a written agreement. The arrangement begins.
6. Support. Someone checks in with both of them for the whole stay.
7. Data. The program lead sees homes activated and length of stay.

We encourage people to take a month or more to get to know each other. The agreement is between the two of them, and the responsibility for the arrangement stays with them.

Step 7. Budget, and measure the return

Home sharing is inexpensive by housing standards, and the budget is short. In the county plan we prepared this fall, a year cost about $15,000 for up to 50 home providers: a little under half for the platform, matching, and member support; a third for digital and print marketing; and the rest for a stipended local worker. Two add-ons can help: homeowner incentives to encourage the first step, and covering participants' fees.

Then measure what it buys, in the terms housing programs already use:

• Cost per unit. Fifty rooms activated over up to two years for about $30,000 is about $600 per unit, counting each room as a unit.
• Cost per resident. Fifty homeowners kept in their homes and 50 home seekers housed affordably: about $300 per person.
• Thirty years, two ways. A recently opened affordable building in the same county cost about $452,000 per unit, and took about four years from funding to opening. Running home sharing for 30 years at $15,000 a year costs about the same, $450,000, and could house 150 to 250 people in 50 shared rooms over that time, with 50 homeowners kept in their homes at any one time.

A room in a shared home is not an apartment, and home sharing does not replace building. It works alongside it, and it can house people this year, including while they wait for new units to open.

Step 8. Report, learn, and grow

Report the measures you agreed in step 1, the same way every year: homes activated, people housed, length of stay, and what participants say about it. Share what is not working as readily as what is. Then use the numbers to decide what comes next: more outreach in a town that is quiet, more human support where matches need it, or a second county.

Where home sharing infrastructure is going

The three models have usually been treated as a choice: support or reach, people or technology. That is starting to change.

The next generation of home sharing infrastructure is being built to do both at once, bringing the ten components above into a single system. The aim is a foundation that lets a program begin with light support and add more as it grows, without changing systems, that keeps each community organization as the trusted front door, and that connects each community's members to a larger pool of people looking for the right match.

For the field, it also means evidence. When self-directed and supported matches run on the same system and are measured the same way, we will finally be able to say which kinds of support make matches last, and for whom.

Our own role is changing too. In 2027, our work will be to partner with any organization that wants to offer home sharing, from a state agency to a local nonprofit, and to help it choose a model that is affordable to run and builds economic and housing stability for the people who take part. We will have more to share about that soon. If you are thinking about offering home sharing in 2027, now is a good time to talk.

Read next

The Rules Behind the Spare Room. What state law and local zoning say about home sharing, state by state.

Home Sharing and Your Benefits. The question every homeowner will ask next, answered for every state.

National Platforms Have Scale. You Have Trust. Why community organizations hold the most valuable asset in home sharing.

Sources

• County figures: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2020 to 2024 5-year estimates, tables B25003, B25070 and B25091, and Public Use Microdata Sample. Spare bedrooms are bedrooms minus people in the home; spare-room counts are HomeShare estimates.
• Expected time to a match in a case-managed program, including a two-week trial: Sunshine Home Share Colorado, applicant guidance.
• Lessons learned: HomeShare Oregon program experience, 2021 to 2026.
• Oregon Housing Production Strategy: Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development, List of Tools, Actions and Policies (revised February 2022).
• Thirty-year comparison: new construction cost from public reporting on a 50-unit affordable building for residents 55 and older that opened in 2026; turnover from K. McClure, Length of Stay in Assisted Housing, HUD Office of Policy Development and Research, 2017 (about 6 years on average, about 9 for older households), applied to shared rooms. Home sharing costs held flat with no inflation, and assume the program reaches and sustains 50 active home providers.