The first time Anna lived with a stranger, the relationship quickly began falling apart.
Months earlier, she had split with her husband and found out she had breast cancer – a diagnosis her ex couldn’t handle.
Anna looked around at the five-bedroom house she shared with her 14-year-old son in Melbourne’s east, where she would hear creaks from the wind and habitually check her security cameras. She had a thought: “What if a guy moved in? Would it make us feel safer?”
For a while, it did. Anna found a man in his late 40s on a flatmates website and had him move into the home. Then, he began asking her on dates.
“It just got to the point that I said, ‘You’re going to have to go … I’m not looking for that sort of flatmate,’” said Anna, who asked for her surname not to be published to protect her privacy.
Years of soaring property prices and rental surges, as well as a lack of social and affordable housing, have meant the age of renters extend well beyond young adult years and into new generations.
Between 2020 and 2025, the number of flatmate seekers aged 41 and over grew by 34 per cent, according to online listings platform Flatmate Finders, while prospective housemates in the 18-to-24 and 25-to-30 age groups fell by 12 per cent over the same time frame.
According to the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, 77 per cent of Australia’s 1.2 million single parents are women – like Anna.
At the same time, women aged over 55 are among the fastest-growing groups experiencing homelessness in Australia, and more than half a million older Australian women live in precarious housing or are at serious risk of homelessness. That number is predicted to at least double over the next 25 to 30 years, according to the Housing Older Women Movement.
After her share-house experience, 51-year-old Anna became one of the more than 800 women who have signed up to Australia’s first women-only flatmate-finding platform, SheShare, which was launched in April by Melbourne woman Talika Thomas.
“You see the news, or you hear about what your friends go through, and there comes a point where you realise that there’s little to no infrastructure for women,” Thomas said.
The platform reflects the growing diversification of Australia’s share accommodation market, and unlike other flatmate platforms that use gender filters, only accepts female users from the outset, allowing them to avoid having to share their stories in unvetted social media channels (or be subjected to obscene comments from some “perverted” men).
“With social issues, there’s a lot of blaming, rather than finding a solution,” Thomas said.
“You can make the infrastructure. Everyday people can do it.”
Prospective housemates are given a compatibility score, and women are matched based on factors such as their sleeping habits, smoking status and whether they have children or pets.
Anna, who is still on the hunt for a new flatmate, is looking for a sense of community with women who support each other after they’ve had a “big rug pulled from under them”.
“There are so many of us out there,” Anna said.
