A ‘Young Females’ Facebook Group Where Women Find Roommates
Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photos: Facebook, Getty
“I enjoy being active and going to SoulCycle.” “I’m really extroverted and flexible.” “I love a good balance of wine nights in or TV binge sessions.” “Recently in my fitness-girl era.” “I love having deep conversations and exploring spirituality.”
These quotes could easily have come from a set of Hinge profiles, but they’re from posts on the “Young Females: New York City, NYC- Apartments, Sublets, Roommates” Facebook group. Every day, dozens of women in this nearly 120,000-member group advertise themselves to each other as potential roommates. Alongside bios detailing their jobs, hobbies, budgets, and preferred neighborhoods, they include photos of themselves at restaurants, out with friends, on hikes, attending music festivals, hoisting up marathon medals, and the like. “My photos aren’t staged, but I do content creation, so the aesthetic is there,” says Camille Barfield, a 26-year-old from Wilmington, North Carolina, who posted in the group after receiving a job offer in New York.
In an age of statistically formulated questionnaires and algorithmic matchmaking, this Facebook group feels almost archaic. Here, a post is the only way to interest your type. Intimidated at first, Camille had tried finding roommates by commenting on others’ posts or sending them direct messages, but she kept getting “ghosted,” she said. So she crafted her own. “My bio sounds basic when I say, ‘I like to thrift and go on picnics,’ but that’s genuine.” She also included photos of herself on a beach boardwalk with friends and in a bar courtyard. “I want people to know I have friends — a diverse group, not just one little pocket,” she explains. And it worked. Camille’s post got the attention of a group of women looking for a subletter. She now lives with them on a month-to-month basis.
Payton Steffensen, who moved to New York from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, used the post format to engineer her image in a different way. Her musical-theater career involves self-taping at home — often belting at full volume — and sometimes taking six-month jobs on cruises. “I’m a performer, not a nine-to-five girlie. Having roommates who are also performers is the ideal situation,” she says. Her post hints at her lifestyle enough to attract similar people while ensuring others don’t discount her. “I say that I need a blank white wall so people know I’m going to be singing. People get the vibe of what I’m saying,” she says. Payton’s post included travel photos — mostly to show she can afford it — and photos of her performances to prove that she’s employed, especially by higher-budget productions. “In one photo, I’m in full hair and makeup with a microphone. That says: This is legit.”
As with online dating, appearing authentic and proactive, but not desperate, requires careful curation. Dayna, a 22-year-old from Port Washington, Long Island, sent a draft of her post to several friends before publishing it. “I wanted to know if I came off as normal, stupid, boring, or funny. I consider myself to be on the farther end of the spectrum of non-boring. You want to be quirky but not too quirky.” She also applies this thinking to the people interested in her. “This one girl messaged me like a fan. She referenced my Instagram caption, which means she stalked me. It was a lot.” Dayna never replied.
But members don’t just agonize over their posts and DM etiquette to avoid getting ghosted. In these groups, housing opportunities close quickly, many agreements are unofficial, and it’s possible to get scammed out of thousands of dollars. That’s why Frank Karlya and his girlfriend, Kat Essery, are still dedicating hours a day to running the “Young Females” Facebook group — plus at least ten others — a decade after they founded them. For free.
In 2016, 23-year-old Frank was scraping by with a job at Applebee’s when a friend suggested he do real estate on the side. She got him a gig showing apartments around the city, which didn’t require any previous experience, but it also didn’t provide money to advertise. Frank came up with the idea of using Facebook to connect renters with rentals — he could post for free, use the Live feature when touring apartments by himself, and leave the videos up as virtual tours. “I toured three or four apartments a day for four years. That’s how I built my group. I started with one member, and after a year and a half, I had 20,000. I thought it was the coolest thing ever.”
After meeting so many apartment hunters, Frank quickly identified a critical demand no one else was meeting: People want roommates who have been vetted. “That’s my niche,” he says. “Ten years ago, no one my age could afford the apartments on StreetEasy. But if I could find four people whose budget was all $800, I could get them an apartment.” And most women didn’t want to live with male roommates. “Seven out of ten of my clients were women looking for women-only apartments — for safe spaces.” So Frank started building up housing groups on Facebook, many of them women-only. When members complained that they felt too old in the spaces dominated by 20-somethings, he created new groups exclusively for over-30-year-olds. When others demanded similar groups for Boston and Philly, he created them, too. To this day, however, the New York “Young Females” group remains one of Frank’s largest and most active groups.
But even as his groups multiplied and exploded in popularity, Frank still couldn’t make a comfortable living as a Realtor, so he took a full-time construction job. “I was never a great real-estate agent,” he admits. But he was so proud of the communities he helped build that he couldn’t bring himself to shut them down or pass them off to someone else. More than anything, he feared that as soon as he stopped moderating his groups, they would fill up with scammers, bullies, and roommate feuds.
So, for the past six years, Frank has arrived home covered in dirt, showered, and spent the rest of his evening combing through his groups. Each one has tens of requests to join each day, and Frank does a quick profile scan before letting anyone in. If something feels fishy — e.g., the Facebook account is only a week or so old — he deletes the request or sends a message to clarify. Then, he deletes any obvious scam posts — ones with clearly stolen photos or deals too good to be true — and blocks scammers from the group. If he spots harassment or anything remotely nasty, he’ll block those members too, or delete their comments and send automated warning messages.
It’s tedious and disheartening work, and after dating for a few months, his girlfriend, Kat, who also has a full-time job, offered to help him out of guilt and to free up some of his time. Nowadays, Kat is responsible for moderating all the female-only groups. Her own experience of moving from the U.K. to NYC keeps her motivated; many of her first friends here used similar Facebook groups to get settled. “With dating, you don’t need to immediately trust or rely on people,” she says. “Choosing a roommate is even more important than a boyfriend. So much has to be considered.”
Sometimes, when things really don’t work out between roommates, members ask Frank and Kat to intervene. “A big part of this ‘job’ is mediation. We get quite a few messages about spats,” says Kat. “People will ask us to remove their former bad roommates from the group.” The couple does what they can to investigate, but they can’t always help. However, when someone gets truly swindled — lied to about the conditions of an apartment and then blocked from getting their deposit back — Frank won’t just let it go.
“When there’s money involved, I take that personally,” he says. “This lady’s daughter got scammed for three thousand dollars. I reached out to the scammer and told her, ‘That’s not tolerated.’ I said I’d publicly post about it. She returned the money. A week later, that mother posted a testimonial praising us, and another girl responded that she had also been scammed. We got her money back too.” In general, Frank’s threats to remove predatory members or post about their behavior are effective. One message tends to do the trick.
Still, he says that the positive messages he receives outnumber the rest. He calls his housing empire — including a popular Instagram account he also updates daily — a labor of love. He’s always hoped that someday it would evolve into labor with income. To that end, six months ago, Frank invested his entire life savings into Frank’s Rooms, an independent roommate-matching site he developed to move away from Meta. He has yet to break even but says, “If you help people and give your best effort to build safety and community, the money will come.” For now, he has no plans to shut down “Young Females.”
