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When we talk about Australia’s housing crisis, we usually talk about house prices, rents, supply shortages and affordability. What we talk about far less is what happens after someone decides they can no longer afford to live alone. For a growing number of Australian women, shared housing is no longer a temporary phase between university and adulthood. It is becoming a long-term reality. Women are entering share housing later in life following divorce, separation, widowhood, relocation, financial hardship, or simply because the cost of housing has outpaced their income. Students, professionals, migrant women, single mothers and retirees are increasingly competing in the same rental market. Yet while the demographics of shared housing have changed dramatically, much of the infrastructure supporting it has not. Women are still expected to navigate largely unvetted online spaces, meet complete strangers and make decisions about who they will share a home with based on limited information. For many, the process can feel uncomfortable, risky and isolating. It was this gap that led me to launch SheShare, a compatibility-matched, women-only flatmate platform in April 2026. The idea wasn’t born from a desire to build a startup. It came from repeatedly seeing a problem that wasn’t being addressed. Time and time again, I heard stories from women who felt they had few options. Women dealing with inappropriate behaviour from prospective housemates. Women concerned about who they would be living with. Women trying to find people whose lifestyles, values and living habits aligned with their own. Women who weren’t just looking for a room, but for a home environment where they could feel comfortable and supported. I kept coming back to the same question: if shared housing is becoming a permanent part of life for so many women, why isn’t there better infrastructure to support it? Unlike many technology startups, SheShare wasn’t built with venture capital funding or a large team. The platform was built through a combination of my own savings, skills I had developed from building websites over the years, support from my father, countless hours of learning and problem-solving, and the emergence of AI tools that allowed me to achieve more than would have been possible as a solo founder in the past. Like many founders, I spent a lot of time figuring things out as I went. What surprised me most wasn’t how difficult building the platform would be. It was how quickly women understood why it needed to exist. The conversations that followed launch revealed something much bigger than a housing platform. They revealed a community of women navigating significant life transitions while searching for stability. Women rebuilding after divorce. Women moving cities for work. Women arriving in Australia for the first time. Women balancing rising living costs while trying to maintain their independence. Again and again, I heard the same themes emerge: compatibility, trust, community and the desire to feel at home. One of the biggest misconceptions about shared housing is that affordability is the only thing that matters. Of course affordability matters. But anyone who has lived with the wrong housemate knows that compatibility can have an enormous impact on wellbeing, mental health and quality of life. The right housemate can turn a difficult period into a positive one. The wrong housemate can make even an affordable home feel stressful and unstable. That’s why compatibility became a core part of SheShare. People aren’t just looking for a room. They’re looking for an environment where they can live comfortably alongside another person whose lifestyle, expectations and values align with their own. As SheShare has grown, I’ve become increasingly conscious of something important. This story isn’t really about me. While I happened to build the platform, the real story belongs to the women using it. It belongs to the woman rebuilding her life after separation. The student moving away from home for the first time. The migrant woman navigating a new country. The single mother trying to create stability for her family. The woman in her fifties discovering that share housing is now part of her financial reality. Their experiences are what shaped the platform.Their stories are what continue to shape its future. If there’s one lesson I’ve learned from building SheShare, it’s that many of society’s challenges persist not because nobody sees them, but because people assume someone else will solve them. Sometimes solutions don’t begin with governments, corporations or major institutions. Sometimes they begin with ordinary people recognising a gap and deciding to do something about it. The real story isn’t that a woman built a flatmate platform. The real story is that so many women needed one. Share this cost of livinghousing crisisshare housingwomen entrepreneurs by Talika Thomas 18 hours ago ## Stay Smart! Get Women's Agenda in your inbox * Email * Phone This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. Δ ## Latest news ### Refugee and migrant women know their stories best. It’s time we paid attention. ### The expert-backed cash flow tips for business owners ### An alarming 12 hours of efforts to restrict reproductive health in Australia ### My son has a feeding tube. His story deserves better than a hospital brochure. ### Basically, Pauline Hanson wants to abolish a bunch of things ### How an International Court judge thinks about hope