Eurasmus

» see eurasmus.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Turkey joined Erasmus in 2004, which lands in the middle of my university years. I did not go anywhere on it. The people who did came back with one story about the paperwork and a worse story about the apartment, because the actual difficulty of an exchange was finding somewhere to live in a city you had never visited, in a language you could not read. Eurasmus was built ten years later to sell the fix for that.

The company started in 2014 in Seville. An exchange student could browse listed vacancies and pay for a room through a secure checkout, so there was a key waiting at the destination instead of a hostel and three weeks of viewings. Around the booking engine it ran city guides for Erasmus destinations and said a free internship portal would be wired in by the end of 2015.

Money came from the European Regional Development Fund, which is how a small Andalusian startup got to expand across Europe without raising a venture round. In September 2014 Diario de Sevilla reported it nominated for the Premio Emprendedor Europeo Joven.

~ the case file ~

~ booking a room you cannot see ~

The hard thing about the Erasmus housing market is that both sides of it are temporary. A landlord renting to exchange students gets a tenant for one semester who will not be in the country afterward to chase, and the student is wiring a deposit against a photograph. Eurasmus put itself in the middle and held the payment, which is the only seat at that table where trust can be manufactured rather than assumed.

It was also a market with brutal seasonality. Demand arrived twice a year in a two-week spike and then sat at zero, which is an unforgiving shape for a company that has to make payroll in March.

~ the seven-month hole ~

There is no shutdown announcement anywhere. The live Wikipedia article says nothing about an ending at all. The date comes from an infobox field reading 2018 and from the disestablishment categories hung on the page, and an older revision of that same article carried a sentence saying the site had been out of use since February 2018. That sentence is no longer in it.

The capture record puts a fence around the death without closing it. The full twenty-seven kilobyte homepage returns a 200 on 14 October 2017. The next capture that loads is 24 May 2018, and by then the domain is serving French adult-dating spam under the name Phoenix Corp. So the switch-off happened inside a seven-month window that straddles the year it is filed under. eurasmus.com does not resolve today on either host, the squatter having moved on in turn.

One correction for anyone searching. Erasmusu.com, founded in Murcia in 2009 by Emilio Riquelme, is a different company doing the same job, and it is still doing it. The two names are one letter apart and the live one is not this one.

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