How to make ‘Match’ with the ideal floor partner | We are joined by people | Society

It was a repeated pattern too many times that caught his attention. While working as a specialist in the care of the elderly, Natalia Cerón was surprised that most of the elderly who attended lived alone. He realized that many could spend whole weeks without more company than his for a few hours; With anyone with whom to chat, cook or comment on the news on television. She also felt indebted after each work shift. “Every time I was going, I had the feeling that they stayed thinking that there was no one else with them. I empathized a lot because I also felt that I was not in my place,” recalls this 36 -year -old Colombian who, at that time, was only 20 and had been living in Malaga for a few months.

One day, one of the women in his charge proposed to live in his house; And he accepted. “We got along very well despite the difference in age and there was very good affinity,” says Cerón. He investigated in the conditions in which other older people lived and detected that many had rooms and sufficient space available to live with more people. That was the seed that originated home, the startup That Cerón founded in 2023 with the aim of finding the ideal floor companions for those older people, a population segment in which more than two million Spaniards with more than 65 years live in solitude, of which the majority (72%) are women, according to the national Institute of Statistics.

Let’s do home, connect, through your website, to the possible floor partners following affinity criteria. “We seek to share tastes, values, because in the end it is what makes coexistence really healthy,” explains the entrepreneur. To optimize the matchCerón and his team created a compatibility system that analyzes, through a questionnaire that all users must fill in, dozens of habits and routine data of each of the interested parties. Variables as if a person smokes or not, if he brings a pet or what type of food usually cook. The objective is to score with a note that indicates the possibilities that the connection between the interested parties works.

Then, let’s do home interviews each of the candidates to profile certain basic norms for coexistence. “There we talk about things as simple as the schedule of throwing the garbage. We throw many questions of that kind and analyze whether that coexistence between both candidates can be lasting,” says Cerón. With this, the entrepreneur adds, they cannot avoid “100%” that conflicts arise on a day -to -day basis, but make sure they reduce those possible problems. In addition, this mediation work involved by the company facilitates the task to its customers. “We had an 80 -year -old person, who did not know how to handle our website very well, to which 50 applications had reached and had no idea what to do. Our advantage is that, of those 50 profiles, we knew which ones had the highest percentage of compatibility,” he explains. It is precisely that social character that caught the attention of an entity such as Fundalogy, the Unicaja Foundation Investor Society. “From our view, it is very important to help a group like the elderly. It is a solution for those people who live alone and can have problems or be in a vulnerability situation,” says Javier de Pro, general director of Fundalogy.

One of the points where more discrepancies may arise is when establishing the rental price that the lessee will pay. The important thing, says Cerón, is to act with “transparency and clarity.” To stipulate it, let’s do home, take as a reference the average price of the area where the property is located based on the market prices that appear in the main Internet portals. In turn, the conditions of that property are evaluated (from the state of the kitchen or bathroom to its luminosity), of the farm in which it is located (through the hiring of an external architect) and of the services of the area. From all this a weighting is carried out, a price is extracted and the owner is tried to reduce it, since the goal is to end that loneliness, prioritizing it over the economic factor. “We are looking for more affordable prices because this project has a lot to do with a cultural change. To gradually form the owners that it is not only about making money, you want other things. And they understand it,” says Cerón. On some occasion, the reduction has become 60% on market price.

Let’s do home he started in Malaga, but already offers coverage throughout the national territory. The current client portfolio is made up of 80 people, but in their barely two years of existence they have managed to connect more than a hundred and, although the focus is still on the highest, the business was extended a few months ago at all ages.

Mercedes Saura (Madrid, 62 years old), based in Malaga for 26 years, was encouraged to try the experience after knowing this startup on social networks. Since the middle of last February he lives with Desiderio, a natural housing of Jerez de la Frontera (Cádiz) of 24 years. “I really liked that I would have already lived alone and be a quiet boy. I have children of the same age, but I do not get into his life,” jokes Saura, who is fully satisfied with his partner. Every time the work allows it, desi, as it is affectionately called, shares with it talks and meals. They have come to develop such confidence that during the last Easter holidays, Saura spent a few days out of Malaga and left alone in her own home “with total tranquility.” And, although he acknowledges that they maintain their independence, they have developed in a short time a close relationship. “Some afternoons I go to an oratory club and if I delay I warn that I will be late; he is doing the same when it comes out. The key is that we do nothing that the other would not like,” Saura reveals about the secret of his coexistence.

A problem of 14,000 million euros

For Ricardo Pagán, founding partner of Hajamos Hogar, the main value of the startup is that he seeks a “remedy against a pressing social problem: unwanted loneliness”. In the words of the Professor in Applied Economics at the University of Malaga and an expert on the economic impact of aging, there are many studies that warn of not only of associated health problems such as heart ailments or mental illnesses, but also of the costs that the expenses in pharmacological treatments and the saturation of the health centers themselves imply for health. Problems that, according to Pagán, can be solved “from prevention”, as they did in the United Kingdom in 2017 with the establishment of the Ministry of Solitude, a pioneering measure that other countries such as Australia or Japan have followed in recent years. Especially, after the figures have increased after the pandemic. In Spain, the largest study published in 2021 by the State Observatory of unwanted loneliness encrypted its economic impact at 14,141 million euros, 1.7% of the Spanish Gross Domestic Product.

Given these magnitudes, Pagán puts in value that we do home also seek the social return of investment, that is, “what an impact we are having on the quality of life of the elderly,” he describes. Something that, he points out, seeks more and more financiers such as Fundalogy. Pagán, who is also an external advisor to the London School of Economics and entrepreneurship projects for the European Union – currently evaluating 15 initiatives – confirms it. “Europe does not give any subsidy to national, community, personal or local projects that do not include a realistic measurement and that can be seen of the social impact that your company generates; not a hard one. That is why there are better and worse investors, and it no longer works to seek only economic profitability.”