14 DAY TRIAL // "Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labor. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up." (The Bible) Relationship between people is most of the time a good thing. People get together to have fun, to talk, to exchange ideas, to help each other, to work? but also for less creative reasons. I'm not an optimistic person, but I like to think that bringing two or more persons together can and will lead to positive results. And I sustain my idea taking into account how the world has evolved just because people worked together, lived together and communicated with each other.
As there is nothing entirely good in this world, we also have bad things such as wars, crimes, thefts, slavery, poverty and even nature catastrophes happened when people joined their forces. But it is wrong to avoid any kind of relationship just because bad tings may happen. It is also up to any of us to change the way things are going. Besides staying with his own family, one can really find out what it is like to be part of the society when he goes for living with roommates. And this happens most of the time when he goes to college or moves in another city or even when he tries to manage on his own. In this way one may learn to take care of himself, to take into account the presence of another person, to respect him/her, all in all ?to be civilized.
To find a roommate or to search for places to rent might seem a little difficult, but I can tell you from my own experience that during this "quest" you will find different kinds of persons, weird or common, with unusual habits or strange looks. But the best part of this search is that you can select the place and person that suits you best. In order to ease this search, Pilot Group Ltd comes with a solution that I find more than acceptable.
Roommate is a software that features as a search engine that finds a match for your demands. The application targets those who wish to start their own e-business. The idea is to install this application on your server and allow persons to make accounts in order to find a roommate. The application is designed both for private persons who need or provide rentals and for real estate agencies. The owner of the application has administrator rights and therefore it can change settings, add tabs, delete users, view info about all users and many more. As User, one can create a personal account and insert information related to search criteria, own person, habits, hobbies, your house or the house you are looking for and many more.
This application is extremely wide, well designed and with a lot of features. The application is web based so it opens in the default browser. It starts with a Quick Search option where you can choose the country, region and city, if the person you're looking for needs or provides rentals and you can check the With photos box if you prefer seeing that person. You can also choose the Move date option to sort which places are currently available.
If you want to make or enter your account just click on Member login. You can either type your e-mail and password or Register. Here you are asked to fill in with your Profile details and choose if you want to be mail alerted if someone is interested in you or if your profile was visited. After completing the account, you have to make an Ad. Whether you need or provide rental the type of ad is quite similar. The only difference is that if you provide rental you are asked to fill in a few technical data such as Square meters, rental fee for 1, 2, 3 or more persons and exact address. The rental form is made of five easy steps. The first one asks for the desired location of the rented place and here you have to choose country, region and city. The second step is about the places price, type (house, room, apartment), conveniences (cable, sauna, fireplace, hot water and heating, air conditioning and so on), if there is any furniture, surroundings (near bus stop, parking lot, health club, elevator), number of rooms, rental period and availability.
The third step concerns preferences about the roommate. Here you can choose from age, gender, smoking habits, pets, party habits, sexual orientation, food preferences, material status , drinking and drugs. The forth step asks you to upload a picture of yours, and the fifth allows you to write an additional comment.
The administrator mode on the other hand is far more exciting. You can delete, edit and add different features concerning the five steps, manage Users List, Groups list (Administrator, Guest, Free Users, Paid Users), features related to Payments, Events, the Bad Words section and Site settings managements (Administrator info, Uploaded files, Languages, Countries). Because the application allows also Live chat, you can also change settings related to Chat messages, Chat rooms, Connections, Chat bans/ignores, Bots, Moderators and Chat login.
The Good
Roommate proves to be an interesting business software, but - as any business - it takes time and lots of work in order to manage this complex application. In our situation, the developer was extremely prompt with providing solutions and additional information related to the software. It has a lot of features which, in administrator mode, can be enlarged and it has extremely good looks.
The Bad
The search location is limited to United States only, but this can be fixed after purchasing the product. The application is able to search for persons only on the server where the account was created.
The Truth
A good solution for an e-business, with lots of customizable features and complete control over the application in administrator mode.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
