Arnau Bernabé, 22 years old and full of hope, recounts that the first landlord he had with his roommates in Valencia kicked them out after a year to sell the property, but the owner of the second one, where they now live, has not only never raised the price but also “is not abusive.” He tells it almost as if giving a headline in these times of exponential increases in housing purchase and rental prices, with the city of Valencia at historic highs. According to the recent Valencia Real Estate Market Report for the second quarter of 2026, by the Association of Real Estate Professionals of Valencia (APIVA), the price in the city already reaches 16.7 euros/m², 7.5% more, becoming the highest in its series.
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In this jungle of expensive and scarce apartments, three students from the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV), Arnau Bernabéu Corbí, Juan Company Canet, and Samuel Ruiz Tébar, wanted to enter. The first acts as spokesperson to report on the project, an app, Domate, which is presented as free for the tenant and aims, above all, to manage coexistence between tenants and landlords. “Our goal is utopian, but it is to achieve a relationship of trust and that the rental housing market is not only regulated by price, that the focus is on something else.”
That “something else” is ratings. A landlord or a real estate agency will stand out in the app if they accumulate good reviews from the tenants they have dealt with, and that reputation will open doors for them within the platform. “The system rewards those who behave well,” says Bernabéu, who draws from his own experience: “I would like to make known that our rent price has never been raised,” explains this student of the Master’s Degree in Telecommunications Engineering at UPV who has ventured into the business with two other graduates of the Double Degree in Business Administration and Computer Science at UPV.
Our goal is utopian, but it is to achieve a relationship of trust and that the rental housing market is not only regulated by price”
Arnau Bernabéu, co-founder of Domate app
For now, they have 700 users, mainly from Valencia and Alcoi, university cities they dominate. Expanding beyond that is considered for later, when they have the product well mastered. And among these users, there are landlords—who can be individuals or real estate agencies—and tenants looking for apartments, some of ages far from university age.
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“We have found quite a few people between 40 and 60 years old,” Bernabéu comments. During the first weeks of use, the app is also free for landlords and real estate agencies, and from then on private landlords can publish up to two apartments for free and will pay a fee for each additional apartment, and agencies will have prices depending on the volume they manage.
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Just as a landlord finds their tenants, these locate roommates in the app, since it proposes a matching by real compatibility crossing data on personality, routines, and lifestyle so that the system first shows people with whom it really makes sense to share an apartment. “Finding the right person to live with is the challenge we solve,” adds the entrepreneur.
The project, which was outlined in September 2025 and did not start to take shape until February, was formally activated in mid-July, when the university housing market is busiest before the new academic year. For now, their user base continues to grow, they have drawn on family savings to launch it, and they do not have profits; “we work 12 hours without any reward,” says the young engineer, who trusts in consolidating the business model, refining its details, and perhaps competing in cities like Madrid, Barcelona, or A Coruña. The first thing for them, however, is to have “good feedback.”
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