Badi: The Tinder-like app for flat-sharing isn't only swamped with millennials

Recent data by Badi claims seniors are looking for roommates instead of living alone for various reasons, including saving money on rent, supplementing their pensions, and just to stave off loneliness

She may be 71 but Visitación Gracia, otherwise known as Visi, has just started to share her apartment with strangers. For the past two months, she has rented a room in her Prosperidad home to a young Venezuelan couple she found through Badi, a smartphone app that works, as she says, “like Tinder for roommates.”

Visi has a good pension but she uses it to support one of her children. “What retired person doesn’t have a family member to help?” she asks, adding that the change is simply a sign of the times

Badi’s popularity among the older generation has taken the app’s founders by surprise. When it was launched in 2015, they were going after millennials – students or young people on low salaries. Their target market was reflected in the advertising that lined the walls of Metro stations in Madrid and Barcelona, but this has been modified for their latest campaign, which shows people of all ages using the app.

“Some people say they are too old for this while others keep abreast of developments,” says the most-recent TV ad, which shows a mature woman sticking her tongue out for a selfie with a younger boy.

The difference between Badi and other roommate apps is that Badi reveals the users’ age, a piece of data that is required on registration, making it easy to detect that sharing an apartment with strangers is no longer just a part of a young person’s lifestyle. With more than 1.5 million users registered in Europe, Badi’s big data indicates that 7.5% of those placing ads for roommates in Madrid and Barcelona are aged between 51 and 65.

“We thought that 100% of our public would be young but that clearly hasn’t been the case,” says Ignasi Giralt, Badi’s general director in Spain. “There is an increasing number over the age of 35.”

The average age of those offering rooms is 33 and the average age of those seeking rooms is 30. Around 21% of users in Madrid and Barcelona are aged between 35 and 45.

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