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The next time you're looking for an affordable place to stay in New York, Chicago or Toronto, you might want to avoid hotels. Thanks to a new website, you could find yourself living like a city resident with a really nice apartment - for a small fraction of the cost of a hotel room.

With Roomorama.com, you can now rent rooms or whole apartments directly from the locals. Its New York service has been running since July. The service has recently come online in Toronto, Boston and Chicago as well, and it's part of a growing trend in "peer-to-peer" sites that provide short-term rental service.

Roomorama's co-founders, Jia En Teo and Federico Folcia, are both avid travellers, and they realized the most expensive part of their trips was usually accommodation. "On the flipside, I was renting my place out through Craigslist and other classifieds," Teo says. "But I ran into lots of frustrations" - such as waiting for renters who never showed up.

While there were other websites offering rural vacation homes for short-term stays, Teo and Folcia had trouble finding short-term rentals in cities.

There was Craigslist, of course, but the listings usually didn't provide enough detail about apartments, nor allow for feedback from previous renters about whether advertisers were trustworthy.

The two sensed an opportunity, and after recruiting a programmer friend, they quit their jobs at Bloomberg and launched Roomorama. Along with sites like airbedandbreakfast.com, it's among the first to address this niche so specifically. And the New York service is doing good business so far; earlier this week, it listed 115 rooms for rent.

For travellers, the process begins with a simple search. Enter the city, dates and desired rental type (a room in a shared apartment, a full apartment or a house), and you're presented with a list of available options - each with a detailed description, map, photographs and feedback from previous guests. "It's just like eBay in that everyone gets a reputation score," Teo says. "We want it to be a community-driven model."

You pay online when you make your booking (some rentals also require a deposit), and Roomorama gives you a four-digit payment code. Upon an acceptable check-in, you hand over the code to your hosts so they can access the payment.

The model is intelligent and easy to use, but it isn't for the faint of heart. There will undoubtedly be surprises when renting from strangers, both good and bad.

But if you're willing to take the risk, you could be handsomely rewarded.

For instance, when I stopped by one of the available rooms in Brooklyn, I was welcomed by Robert (Toshi) Chan, an actor (and part-time real-estate developer) who played the triad boss in The Departed.

But even more impressive than his résumé was his home - a pristine, sun-drenched loft with access to a garden (with private waterfall) out back.

Up the spiral staircase to the room available for rent and things only got better: a wall of windows, a spa-like en-suite bathroom, a flat-screen TV and more space than many Manhattan apartments. The immaculate room even included a mini-bar.

The biggest surprise? Toshi was charging only $189 a night.

If you were to rent out your own home while staying at Toshi's place, you could possibly even come out ahead.