Here are this week’s coliving news and thoughts. You can also join me tomorrow on a live webinar with Coliving Hub around 2020 trends and operational best practices!
Enjoy the slurp 😋
The long awaited post: ROI of Community Building (Part 2) —
How much does it cost to invest in community building and how does it affect your NPS, resident satisfaction and retention rate?
After two weeks of writing, crunching numbers and getting data, the blogpost is finally out. Key findings include that it’s cheaper to educate coliving residents on how to be self-run compared to having a totally hands-off approach; and that making the move from top-down to bottom-up yields a 230% satisfaction rate with only 24% higher costs associated to it.
Learn about the community building approaches, what they imply, and how they will affect your coliving business.
How to solve the community vs. convenience paradox? My dear friend Matt from Conscious Coliving wrote a great piece on his learnings from the recent Coliving Hub mastermind. One of them was to solve the following paradox: the more you offer convenience to tenants (such as daily instead of weekly cleaning), the more you deresponsibilize residents and hence weaken the community feeling. The way to solve it is to create systems that engage residents and responsibilize them. This way, convenience can still be offered without falling into the community vs. convenience trap (read more here).
How to think user experience? While doing a consultation workshop, I had to visually split the tenant experience into two parts: the space experience and the communal experience. While most operators try to convince their residents with fancy design, it is the latter that will make them stay (see my article on decision-making for colivers). Write me if you want to discuss the full model (which will be openly shared in my upcoming book).
What questions would you ask to measure the tightness of a coliving community? Some could be “if you get transferred to the hospital due to a grave accident, how would living in our coliving space help you?” or “how many people were you able to share your pain with?” - I’d love to read your thoughts on this! (Respond to this mail)
Is “family” and “home” a physical entity or a feeling? Those notions can be interpreted in both ways, and the world is moving towards honoring the latter. To both, the concept of belonging is key. The word itself derives from an Old English root meaning “being held” but can also mean “being within something”. Creating the notion of home (familiarity) is hard enough, so kudos for those coliving spaces that are able to create the notion of “chosen family” (trust and deep identification).
Dope coliving news & content —
Cushman & Wakerfield published their “Demographic Shift: the world in 2030” report. You’ll also find a one-page overview. Key highlights: 80% of millennials who don’t own a home want to (which is agains the “millennials don’t care about ownership” discourse) and almost 700mio baby boomers will reach retirement within the next decade.
For the folks in the UK - read the report by Herbert Smith Freehills that analyses all UK coliving operators and planned ground-up constructions, as well as the legal categories in which coliving can fall into.
Toyota announced at the CES that it’ll build a 2,000-resident, fully sustainable smart city to test AI, robots and self-driving cars. While coliving is not mentioned, it raises a question that will be found within coliving as well: the notion of data usage, and how far big tech companies are going to enter sectors that were so far reserved to public entities.
Common published their “year in review” stats. While there is no resident satisfaction (for example renewal rates) or social impact data, it’s an interesting set of numbers for those not involved in the coliving KPIs.
I just got to Amsterdam after finishing the first section of my book in Mallorca, followed by some horse riding (in the pic) and a few consulting gigs in Paris.
This week, you can find me Thursday 23rd at 4pm GMT+1 for the Coliving Hub webinar, where I'll share about 2020 coliving trends and operational best practices. You can also watch one hour earlier my upcoming Nomadic Explorers podcast with Beatriz Ebert from Selina Lisbon.
Lastly, I'm going to launch a Resident Engagement Guide - a quick overview of best practices on how to involve and empower coliving communities (crowdsourced from operators). If you're interested in participating or receiving it, drop your email in this form.
Have a great end of this month,
Gui
PS: If you have any thoughts on what you just read, please share them with me, I’d love to read them. And if someone forwarded you this email, you can subscribe to my newsletter here.
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