I am writing a business plan for a product that can be sold to people
who share housing with people outside of their family-- roommates who
split living expenses.  I need to know how many adults (>18 years old)
this market comprises in the United States.
 
Please exclude students enrolled in college and grad school.  I
already know that there are about 13 million undergrads and 2 million
grad students.
 
Breaking this down by city or geographic region is extremely helpful.

Bonus points if you can recommend effective ways to market to these
people.  For example, what websites do they visit?  What do they read?
Can I buy a list of roommate names and addresses from a broker? Any
other suggestions?

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Clarification of Question by bonzo-ga on 11 Jul 2003 15:55 PDT

Is this a difficult question?  Has anyone tried to answer this and failed?

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Request for Question Clarification by cynthia-ga on 11 Jul 2003 16:07 PDT

I started it yesterday and made some progress, however I was busy
today and didn't get back to it today. The information is readily
available at the Census web site, but I haven't used it a lot and am
not fast at sifting thru the available data to get the exact info you
seek.

Also, you have asked for it to be broken down into geographic areas
which means creating the same tables several times. Here, take a look:

American Fact Finder
http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/BasicFactsServlet
Your information is here. Try it yourself and you will see what we do,
why yours is time consuming, then possibly offer more incentive, or
even better --a worthy tip, and you'll see it locked in no time.

~~Cynthia

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Clarification of Question by bonzo-ga on 11 Jul 2003 18:11 PDT

Ok.  A $10 tip for an outstanding response.

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Clarification of Question by bonzo-ga on 23 Jul 2003 19:27 PDT

Does anyone have any leads on answering this one?  I've put a good
price on the question... is it just that hard to find the data?

http://www.roommates.com