2023-2024
Domakin.nl
Finding a room in the Netherlands is the part of studying there that nobody warns you about. The market moves faster than an international student can, viewings get scheduled at a few days notice, and a lot of the people who need a place are still in another country on the day.
Domakin started in 2023, put together by students who had already been through it, several of them out of the Bulgarian Society Netherlands, which was already running across the country. I was part of co-founding it, and I worked as one of its agents.
The viewing you cannot attend
The service worth building was the one for people who are not in the country yet. You send the address, the date and time, and the questions you would have asked, and an agent goes to the viewing in your place.
What comes back is a report: photos, the answers to your questions, and a read on the place. The decision stays with you. That matters more than it sounds, because the alternative most students take is signing for a room they have only ever seen in the agency’s own photographs.
It is also the work I did myself, and it is less about the hour in the flat than it sounds. Most of it is the client: working out what they actually need to know before you go, and being the person on the other end of the phone while they decide from another country.
A catalogue, and a way out of a contract
The other half is the listings: rooms across the Dutch student cities, filtered by city and by what you can actually pay. You apply on the room itself, and an agent takes it from there.
And the case that comes just as often, which is the same problem from the other side: you are the one leaving, and the contract needs somebody to take it over. Listing the room puts it in front of the students already looking for exactly that, and you get paid when one of them takes it.
