More Than a Room: How Finding the Right Housemates Can Help Loneliness in the UK

A guest post by COHO for Loneliness Awareness Week 2026

When our founder Vann Vogstad left university and moved into a house share, he knew absolutely nothing about the people he'd be living with. As it turned out, they were great. He made friends who are still in his life today. But he was acutely aware that it could have gone the other way, and for a lot of people, it does.

That experience became the seed of COHO. Not just a property platform, but something with a specific question at its centre: what if we could help people find not just a spare room in a house share, but also new friendships? What if shared living could reliably be the thing that makes moving to a new place feel like an opportunity, rather than a challenge?

Loneliness Awareness Week feels like exactly the right moment to talk about why that question matters so much.

The hidden impact of the wrong fit

Moving somewhere new can be one of the most lonely transitions a person can go through. You leave behind the people and places that make up your daily life, and you arrive somewhere where you know nobody and nothing. If you're starting a new job, you might be lucky as work can often be a natural way into a social circle. But since the pandemic, around 44% of UK workers are now remote or hybrid, which means that built-in social infrastructure is increasingly reduced too.

Into that gap comes the house share. For millions of people in the UK, particularly those in their twenties and thirties, and increasingly older adults too, shared living is the primary way they experience daily human contact. But here's the thing: shared living can either be the answer to loneliness or contribute to it, depending almost entirely on whether the people you're living with are the right fit for you.

Our research across more than 6,000 tenants, published in the State of Shared Living 2025, consistently points to compatibility as the single biggest factor in whether a house share works. Not the size of the rooms, not the kitchen quality, not the location. The people. When the fit is wrong, housemates can feel more alone than they would living alone, surrounded by people, but not truly connected to them.

UK Loneliness Report 2026

Earlier this year, we published the UK Loneliness Report 2026, a national study drawing on responses from 3,000 people. What it revealed about housing and loneliness was important.

Living situations play a far bigger role in feeling isolated than most people acknowledge. One of the major findings was about silence: 63% of lonely people don't talk about it. Loneliness isn't something people always share openly. It’s often invisible even to the people around them.

That invisibility is part of why we feel so strongly that living situations matter, that the design of how people live together can either create the conditions for connection or quietly deepen feelings of isolation. You can't always reach people who are lonely by asking them to raise their hands. But you can help build environments where everyday life brings them into contact with others who are like them, in ways that feel natural rather than forced.

Finding your people, not just a room

COHO's tagline is Find your people. Find your place. This isn’t just a marketing line, it reflects what we're genuinely trying to do.

The platform lets renters see who already lives in a home before they apply. Housemate profiles, lifestyles, interests. The aim is to take the lottery out of house sharing and to give people the chance to make an informed choice about who they're going to be sharing their home with. It sounds small, but the difference between living with people you click with and people you don't is, for many, the difference between a city feeling like home and home feeling a million miles away.

We write about this a lot in our articles. One piece, Finding Your Crowd in a New City, captures the experience many of our users describe: arriving somewhere alone, not knowing anyone, and finding that a well-matched house share becomes the social foundation everything else is built on. Having people you can chat to in the kitchen after work, or grab a pint with on a Saturday afternoon, these small interactions help people feel more connected. And for many people across the UK, these small interactions don’t exist when they move into shared housing.

Shared living as a genuine response to a national issue

Loneliness in the UK is real, it is serious, and it is becoming more widely recognised. It affects people of all ages. The impact on individuals, in mental health and in physical wellbeing, is well documented.

Shared living, when it's done well, is one of the most practical, everyday responses to that issue. It creates the conditions in which human connection naturally happens. We don't have all the answers. But we do think the question of who you live with deserves to sit right alongside questions of cost and location when someone is searching for a place to live. Because the right housemate isn't just a nice bonus. For a lot of people, it’s the difference between somewhere feeling like a house, and feeling like a home.

COHO

COHO is a shared living platform helping renters find compatible housemates and quality homes across the UK. Read the UK Loneliness Report 2026 and the State of Shared Living 2025 via our website