An Open Letter to Women Moving to Athens

Why I'm building RooMate — and what I've seen that made me do it

I am Greek. Athens is not where I grew up — but for the past decade, I've watched it change.

I've been visiting Athens for years, coming back again and again, and each time finding a city that had quietly become more of itself. The Athens of ten years ago is not the Athens of today. New cafés open every season. Entire neighbourhoods have transformed. Young people are arriving from all over the world the way they once arrived in Berlin — drawn by the light, the food, the cost, the energy, the sense that something is happening here. Athens is now one of the fastest-growing capital cities in Europe, and it shows.

But somewhere along the way, between all the visits and the conversations with women — Greek and international — who were trying to make this city their home, I started noticing something the transformation had not fixed.

What I started noticing

Every woman I talked to about moving to Athens had a version of the same story.

"I spent two months in an Airbnb because I couldn't find anywhere long-term I trusted."

"I went to a viewing and the landlord wouldn't leave me alone in the room."

"I lost €500 to a deposit scam on Facebook before I learned how it works here."

"I'm paying for a hotel because the place I rented turned out to be nothing like the listing."

These weren't whispers in dark corners. They were stories shared openly in Facebook groups, in WhatsApp chats among friends, in the casual conversations that happen when women find each other in a new city. Once I started listening, I couldn't stop hearing them.

And the women telling these stories weren't naïve. They were doctors, designers, PhD students, software engineers, journalists. They were exactly the kind of women you'd expect to navigate this well. And still — still — Athens was sending them through a gauntlet of scams, unsafe viewings, dishonest hosts, and Facebook groups where the only protection on offer was your own judgement.

The city was growing faster than its infrastructure for newcomers. And women were paying the price.

I kept thinking the same thing: why are we waiting until something bad happens before anyone helps?

What I'd seen in London — and why the contrast hit hard

I'm based in London now, where I work as a dentist and host on Airbnb. Hosting taught me what good housing infrastructure can look like — verification, deposit protection, a platform that takes some responsibility for what happens between strangers. None of it is perfect. But it gave me a baseline. I knew what was possible.

So when I came back to Athens — visit after visit — and watched women navigating the same problem with none of those guardrails, the gap became impossible to ignore. The problem wasn't that women in Athens didn't know what they were doing. The problem was that the infrastructure simply wasn't there — and the longer it stayed missing, the more women paid the cost of that absence.

In London, housing platforms have evolved (slowly, imperfectly) to handle trust at scale. In Athens, the trust layer was still being held together by personal networks, luck, and Facebook groups full of strangers. For women — who carry a different risk calculation in every viewing, every late-night message, every conversation with an unknown landlord — that gap had a name. It was unsafe.

And here's what made the contrast sharper: Athens was changing in every other way. New transport links, new neighbourhoods, new cultural scenes, an explosion of international residents. The city was racing forward — but the way women were expected to find a home here had stayed exactly the same as it was a decade ago.

The cost we don't talk about

There's a cost to housing trust failure that nobody puts on a spreadsheet.

It's the woman who pays for a hotel for three weeks because the Facebook listing didn't feel right. It's the student who takes the first room she can get because she's exhausted from being told "come and see, you'll see when you arrive". It's the professional who turns down a job in Athens because she can't figure out how to land safely. It's the woman who moves into a flat she doesn't love, with people she doesn't trust, because the alternative is being unhoused.

And the cost compounds. Every bad experience makes the next woman more wary, less willing to try, more likely to recommend her friends stay away. Athens is losing residents, students, and visitors to a problem that nobody has thought to solve at the platform level.

I kept asking myself: why does this keep happening, when we could prevent it?

The moment I decided to build something

The honest answer is that there wasn't a single moment. There was an accumulation.

It was the third or fourth time I read a story from a woman who'd lost money to a scam, and realised nobody was coming to help her. It was watching how much of women's safety in this city depended on personal networks — who you happened to know, who happened to vouch for whom. It was understanding that the women who did land safely in Athens weren't lucky. They had a sister, a cousin, a colleague, a friend-of-a-friend who'd opened a door for them. Everyone else was on their own.

And it was the realisation that this is solvable. Not perfectly, not overnight — but structurally. With the right platform, the right verification, the right kind of curation, you could turn a city's missing infrastructure into a community's quiet superpower.

That's when I stopped waiting for someone else to build it.

What I'm building

RooMate is a women-first, trust-based flatmate matching platform for Athens. Not a listings site. Not a search engine. A platform where:

• Profiles are verified — not just claimed.
• Matches are consent-based — you don't get introduced to anyone without explicit agreement on both sides.
• A Trust Badge shows who has completed verification, so you can see at a glance who you're talking to.
• Curation is human — I read every profile and every match, because trust at scale starts with trust at one.

We're starting with women. Women offering rooms. Women searching for rooms. Women looking for flatmates who feel like home, not like a gamble. The structure of the company stays open and scalable for future audiences, but the first community we're building is women-first by design — because that's where the trust deficit is highest and where the platform's protection matters most.

It is exactly the platform I wished existed when I was watching other women try to find their way here.

Why Athens first

Because Athens is where the gap is widest. The city is becoming one of the great European capitals in real time — but the housing infrastructure for the women arriving here has not caught up. Every year I return, more people are moving in. Every year, the same problems remain unsolved. That gap is not going to close on its own.

And because Athens — let me say this plainly — deserves better than this.

This is one of the most beautiful, generous, culturally rich cities on earth. The Greek concept of philoxenia — love of the stranger — runs through every part of how we welcome people. The meraki we put into our food, our homes, our care of each other, is not a stereotype. It is real, and it is everywhere.

And yet, when a woman tries to find a home here, the welcome is buried under a layer of risk and uncertainty that has nothing to do with Greek hospitality. It's a structural problem, not a cultural one. We have built the most welcoming culture in Europe on top of the least welcoming infrastructure for women trying to make this city their home.

That's the contradiction RooMate exists to close.

An open invitation

If you are a woman planning to move to Athens — whether as a student, a professional, a digital nomad, or simply someone who wants to live in this extraordinary city for a season of your life — I want you to know that you are not on your own.

You don't have to brave the Facebook groups alone. You don't have to spend a fortune on hotels because nothing long-term feels safe. You don't have to take the first room you find and hope for the best. There is a platform being built specifically for you, by someone who has watched what you're about to navigate and refused to look away.

And if you are a woman in Athens with a room to offer — a host who wants to share her home with someone she can actually trust, vetted and matched and ready — RooMate is being built for you too. Hosting through us is hosting through a community, not a transaction.

You can find us at theroomateapp.lovable.app. Sign up for early access. Tell me what matters to you. Tell me what you wish was different. I read everything, and I am building this with women, for women, in real time.

One last thing

You deserve to live in Athens. You deserve to experience Greek hospitality, generosity, and meraki — the way it was meant to be felt. Without having to worry about whether the person on the other end of the listing is who they say they are. Without losing money to scams. Without spending your first months in this beautiful city sleeping in hotels because nothing long-term feels safe.

You deserve a soft landing.

That's what we're building.

---

Dr Sotiria Moschopoulou is the founder of RooMate, a women-first trust-based flatmate matching platform launching in Athens. Dr Sotiria is a dentist, an Airbnb host in London, and a Greek woman who has watched Athens become one of Europe's fastest-growing capitals over the last decade — and refused to look the other way at what women here are still navigating alone.

If you'd like to be among the first women on the platform, sign up here. If you're a journalist, investor, or partner who wants to talk about what we're building, please reach out directly.