This is Part 2 of “What’s the ROI of community building in coliving?” - read Part 1 here if you haven’t yet. Big thanks to Michael Liam from Starcity and Matt Lesniak from Conscious Coliving for their help and contribution on this piece.
Two weeks ago, we analyzed the different community building approaches. In this article, we will analyse the costs involved for each of those models, as well as the return on investment.
In this post, you will learn
You will see that stronger community doesn’t have to mean more spending - and that even if spending increases, the social return on investment increases exponentially.
Let’s dig into it.
As we’ve seen in the first article, there are currently four approaches on community building:
The more residents are involved in the community building processes, the more they feel a connection and responsibility towards each other. Those two are fundamentals to have a feeling of community.
Let's explore why.
“Real community is always self-driven. It’s the only way to create sustainable coliving.” - Nikita Kuimov, SMENA Station
The role of a coliving operator is to create a feeling of community - meaning an emotional connection between people.
This can only happen if you create systems that create interaction between residents.
Systems can be anything - from events that give residents the opportunity to interact, to community assemblies in which residents can decide on a common budget, up to pairing systems that connects new arrivers to an older resident from your space.
Point is: the more you involve residents, the more you will have true community - because you give residents ownership over their own journey and because you give the community a common goal.
Concretely speaking, this is reflected in resident satisfaction at coliving spaces. Thanks to insider knowledge and my own experience, we can look at the four approaches and see that the more residents are involved, the more they have a feeling of community:
In order to also prove that this is no BS, we can draw a clear correlation (and in my mind, causation) between the feeling of community and the average length of stay for each of those models:
Knowing this, let’s now look at the ROI formula and analyze what the cost/savings are for implementing each of those approaches.
Having a stronger community impacts the financials in five core different ways:
Let’s first dig into each notion in detail for each approach before looking at financial predictions and calculate the costs per resident in each of those five areas.
The more you have a feeling of ownership, the more you take care of the place, as it feels like your own. We therefore set the maintenance cost (meaning cleaning, repairs, damages) from $50/month/resident for Do-It-Yourself to only $15/month/resident for Systems (as in their case, it’s often the residents who clean themselves and/or create the space design).
The stronger the community, the better your reputation, the stronger your word-of-mouth, and the less you need to spend on marketing.
For example, OpenDoor in San Francisco (a Systems approach) claims that 95% of residents come from word-of-mouth.
We therefore decided to reduce acquisition costs the better the feeling of community is.
Onboarding is the process of educating your residents community culture and responsibilities. The more you involve your residents in your community, the more you need to educate them, and hence the higher your onboarding costs.
Note: all of these costs are one-time costs per resident, as they occur at the beginning of the user journey.
The more you go into building out true community, the more you need to take care of human interaction. This leads to moving away from a “community manager” (someone that animates the community through event building) to a “community facilitator” (a person who is in charge of educating and training residents on rule and culture, solving conflict, and being in charge of the harmony within the group).
Note: we decide to allocate one community manager, community facilitator or conflict manager for 20 residents. Hence, the monthly cost of a community manager per resident is $150 (as it’s a $3,000 salary divided by 20 residents).
In this section, it’s self-explanatory that the “Do-It-Yourself” model has no events cost at all (as they don’t organize events). What’s interesting is to witness a reduction in event costs the more the community is involved. That can be explained due to increased resident creativity and more manpower when residents are involved than if only the coliving operator would organize it.
Now that we understand all the notions, let’s see how it impacts the resident costs in the long-term.
Taking in those notions, we can analyze the monthly cost per resident for each of those approaches. Rows in yellow indicate a notion of increased costs, while rows in orange indicate a notion of savings.
Looking at only one month, is seems that the more you engage community, the higher the costs are. But that’s mostly due because of high onboarding costs - we now need to make predictions over a longer time period such as 6 months and 18 months.
Before we do that, let’s quickly remind ourselves of the average length of stay. This will impact the number of residents that will go through our time periods and hence impact the amount of one-time costs.
If we then measure the cost for a 6-month period, we get the following:
Note: as mentioned, the fixed costs are based on the number of tenants (first row), which is based on the average length of stay (see above). For example, acquisition costs in a 6-month period for “Do-It-Yourself” coliving spaces is $600, as they need to acquire 2 residents at $300 each.
And if we take this to a 18-month period, here is the result:
Let’s now draw some key conclusions from this exercise.
If we want to calculate the financial return on investments, we need to use the following formula:
Over an 18-month period, and taking the “Do-It-Yourself” approach as a baseline (as this approach does not involve any community building), it gives the following ROI:
The financial return on investment is therefore negative - apart for the Systems approach, which indicates that it is cheaper to have self-run communities than coliving spaces with no community engagement at all.
So how can one justify the top-downers and facilitators approach if it increase company costs?
The answer lies in the social return on investment (SROI) - namely, stronger community feelings and therefore a bigger emotional and transformational impact on the resident.
When looking at the 18-month costs, we realize that investing into community produces higher feelings of community.
Moreover, the higher costs of the Facilitator approach can be justified if we look at the impact it creates: increasing resident costs by 24% from $4,830 to $5,990 creates a 230% higher satisfaction rate.
Let’s therefore bring this all together.
All of that leaves us with five key take-aways:
Personally, I can only conclude with one statement:
Don’t wait for community to build itself. Help it to build itself - it will build you back.
Thanks for leaving your comments and discuss your perspective on this topic.
Gui
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
I'm Gui, a coliving operator, facilitator, and industry builder with one mission: to make coliving the best experience one can have.
I founded Art of Co, a global resource platform and consultancy to create transformative coliving spaces, wrote the 📘 Art of Coliving book , and am the director of Co-Liv, the global association of coliving professionals. Come engage with other passionate coliving builders in my 👉 Telegram community or join the 👉 Coliving Cocktail newsletter, where I send out recaps of everything that happens within the coliving world!
PS: Need help to create state-of-the-art coliving experiences? Write me an email here or contact me on LinkedIn 💥
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