The Ten Things Every Home Sharing Program Must Get Right.
And How to Get All Ten Without Building Any of Them.

When the National Symposium on Shared Housing, sponsored by Affordable Living for the Aging, published its report "Strategies for Scaling Shared Housing," it gave the field something it had been missing: a shared definition of what a successful home sharing program actually requires. The report names ten critical components. Read the list and you understand immediately why so many organizations that believe in home sharing have never offered it. Ten components is a lot to build. Here is the case we want to make to every Area Agency on Aging, housing nonprofit, faith community, senior center, and community organization considering home sharing: you do not have to build any of them. HomeShare Oregon already has.

HomeShare Oregon operates HomeShare Online, a nonprofit home sharing platform built for exactly this purpose: giving mission-driven organizations of any size the infrastructure to offer home sharing as part of their aging and housing initiatives. Below is the report's list, component by component, and precisely what the infrastructure provides for each one.

1. A Screening Process

The report calls screening the single most important element of a successful program, and we agree. Screening is where improvised programs fail first, because doing it well requires systems, not goodwill. On HomeShare Online, screening starts with a requirement that surprises people by how much work it does: third-party identity verification. No one joins the platform without proving they are a real person. That single gate screens out the bots, the scammers, and the ill-intentioned before anyone's spare room enters the conversation.

Every participant, home provider and home seeker alike, must also have a current background check, run through the platform via Checkr. Here is where our philosophy matters: we do not screen people out based on what a background check surfaces. We make the results available for either party to view, because we believe that decision belongs to the two adults considering the arrangement, not to a platform. Our job is to make sure both people are deciding with full information.

Partner organizations often have their own eligibility criteria, and the platform supports that screening too. If a partner offers home sharing to people of a certain age, income level, or community, that screening happens on the partner's side before individuals are invited onto the platform through that partner. We help partners design it.

From there, the matching algorithm screens for what actually determines whether two people can share a home: compatibility across schedules, habits, values, and expectations. There is no human intervention and no personality assessment by the platform. Partners who want a case manager reviewing matches after initial compatibility can add one. That choice, like so much in this model, belongs to the partner.

2. Written Home Sharing Agreements

A handshake is not a housing arrangement, and we make that case to every participant. The platform provides agreement templates tailored specifically to home sharing, covering the questions a standard lease never anticipates: shared spaces, guests, quiet hours, and the terms both people are agreeing to live by. What we do not do is mandate that an executed agreement be filed with us. Two adults are entering this arrangement, and the agreement is theirs.

Some partners do mandate it, and the platform supports that too. The City of Portland, for example, requires an executed home sharing agreement as part of its process for disbursing a homeowner incentive. The platform helps participants meet that requirement, and we work with each partner organization to understand what it needs to accomplish and design the best way to do it.

3. Trial Periods Preceding a Match

Good matches are made slowly. The platform's process is designed for deliberation rather than speed: secure messaging before any personal contact information changes hands, structured conversations before any commitment, and agreement terms that let two people define a getting-acquainted period before either one signs on for the long term. The goal is never the fastest match. It is the match that is still working a year later.

4. Ongoing Monitoring

Here we will be candid about what HomeShare Online is and is not. We do not check in with individuals after they agree to share a home. Our goal is to facilitate strong matches, not to take responsibility for the success of each one. Most case-managed home sharing programs do provide that concierge level of support, and for the people who need it, that support is exactly right. It is also staff-intensive, which is precisely why those programs stay small.

HomeShare Online exists to introduce as many people as possible to home sharing and open them to the possibility, without routing every one of them into another process or queue. That is why the model works as a companion rather than a competitor: partner organizations with the capacity to case manage serve the people who need that depth, and the platform serves the people who are simply looking for income or companionship, not caregiving. Together, the two reach a far wider population than either could alone.

5. Adequate Staffing Levels

This is the component that stops most organizations cold, and it is where shared infrastructure changes the math entirely. A program built on spreadsheets and inboxes needs staff for intake, staff for screening, staff for matching, and staff for follow-up. A program built on purpose-built technology needs far fewer people, and most of the people it does need are already on our team, not yours. Partner organizations contribute the thing they uniquely have, which is trust and reach in their community. The operational staffing burden stays with us.

6. Data Collection

Funders, boards, and public partners rightly demand evidence. The platform collects it automatically: applications received, screenings completed, matches made, and housing stability over time. Partners with co-branded referral pathways receive regular reporting on the people they referred, so the question of whether the program is delivering value to their community is answered with data rather than anecdotes. No staff member has to maintain a tracking spreadsheet for any of it.

7. Risk Management

Let us name this one plainly, because it is the single greatest barrier keeping partners from offering home sharing: liability. Organizations do not want the risk exposure of introducing two strangers who then share a home. We understand that. We do not want it either. The platform's answer is to place that responsibility where it belongs, with the adults considering the arrangement, and then to make sure they carry it with full information: a verified identity on both sides, a current background check that either party can review, agreement templates that put expectations in writing, and a deliberate match process with no pressure to commit.

The fear underneath the liability question deserves a closer look, because it is a fear of strangers, and the data points somewhere else. We all know the horror stories. What the horror stories obscure is where documented harm to older adults actually concentrates: among people they already know. Research from AARP estimates that 28.3 billion dollars is stolen from adults over 60 every year, and 72 percent of it is taken by people the victim knows, including family members, friends, and caregivers. The National Council on Aging reports that in roughly 60 percent of elder abuse and neglect incidents the perpetrator is a family member, and two thirds of those are adult children or spouses. A vetted arrangement between two verified, background-checked adults who chose each other with open eyes is not the risk profile the horror stories describe. For a partner organization, the exposure is also structural: you introduce the option, the platform runs the process, and the decision and the agreement belong to the participants. You are never underwriting the outcome.

8. Fair Housing Compliance

Fair housing practice starts with consistency, and consistency is what platforms do best. Every applicant moves through the same intake, the same screening, and the same standards, with the process documented along the way. Improvised programs make ad hoc decisions; structured programs make uniform ones. The platform's standardized process gives partner organizations confidence that the program operating under their referral is applying the same rules to everyone.

9. Complementary Alliances

The report recognizes that no home sharing program succeeds alone, and this component is not just something the infrastructure supports. It is the entire model. HomeShare Oregon exists to ally with the organizations that communities already trust. We bring the platform, the screening, the agreements, the monitoring, and the data. Partners bring the relationships that make an older homeowner willing to consider the idea in the first place. Neither half works without the other, which is why we built the infrastructure to plug into yours rather than compete with it.

10. Volunteer Support

Many of the organizations best positioned to introduce home sharing run on volunteers, and volunteers cannot be asked to perform case management. They do not have to. With the operational layer handled by the platform, a volunteer's role becomes simple and safe: know that home sharing exists, know who it might help, and know where to send them. A referral card at the front desk, a mention at coffee hour, a line in the newsletter. The platform takes it from there.

What this means for an organization of any size

Run down the list again and notice what is left for a partner organization to build: nothing. An Area Agency on Aging with case managers across multiple counties and a faith community with a weekly bulletin can both offer home sharing through the same infrastructure, at the scale that fits them. The large organization gets structured referral pathways, outcome reporting, and a program its funders can audit. The small one gets a trustworthy place to send people, with no new staff, no new technology, and no new liability for work it never performs.

The need is not in question. Across America, an aging population and a housing shortage exist side by side with roughly 44 million empty bedrooms, according to research from John Burns Research and Consulting. The field has defined what it takes to turn those bedrooms into safe, stable housing. The remaining question for any organization with an aging or housing mission is not whether home sharing meets the standard. It is whether to keep waiting for infrastructure that already exists.