Coliving explored

Creating Thriving Communities for Modern Lifestyles

What do we offer?

• Advice to make your property profitable
• Training to manage your business
• Training for organic marketing
• Training in open technology and the latest trends

Host Essentials

What is coliving?

Coliving is a modern form of shared housing.
It is a way of living and sharing a home with like-minded people. The greatest value of coliving is access to community. Fully furnished and specially designed living spaces create an inspiring environment for people to interact and share experiences.

As it is something new, it is essential to understand what it is and observe that new alternative business models are being created apart from the usual ones: hostels, hostals, vacation rentals, rental accommodation… This new emerging form combines the housing needs with the work and vital needs: coliving.

What does coliving offer?

🧠 Knowledge Sharing
An opportunity to learn and improve business projects with new ideas and professional experiences.

📒 Networking and Contacts
It’s easy to meet people and find new business opportunities.

♻️ Establishing Synergies
Facilitates professional cooperation and the creation of complementary projects for the benefit of all.

🚀 Living with Entrepreneurial Spirit
They are designed and equipped to foster creativity, innovation, and teamwork 24/7.

☯️ Weekly or Monthly Rentals
Tenants are not tied to long rental contracts. This continuous rotation enriches coliving with new experiences and perspectives.

🆗 Living a Sustainable Lifestyle
They often emerge in the center of cities so that residents can walk, bike, or use public transportation. They also use renewable energy and minimize the use of plastics.

💡 Growing in a Global Environment
It is common to find a mix of residents from different nationalities, ethnicities, and cultures, further enriching the experience and entrepreneurship.

Who are the potential clients?

Digital nomads, global citizens, local citizens, expatriates, seeking their home anywhere in the world. A good network of colivings offers a reliable solution for their accommodation, so they can choose one as a base location and move according to their needs, rather than hopping from one Airbnb to another.

How to start a coliving?

There are many ways to start a coliving or a co-living and home-service, the most obvious being to research real estate business models. Visiting these already functioning spaces can only give you a limited idea of what works and what doesn’t.

To have a clear picture, we have interviewed the team at Vagabonds, a new concept of coliving, decentralized, distributed, and technological coliving. We will talk about this other new concept in another article.

Vagabonds has offered us a copyleft guide where they share their experience and their desire for Canarians and specifically, Tenerife residents, to study this new form of accommodation, beyond extractive tourism.

Vagabonds wants to give you advice on how to create a profitable and sustainable coliving space. A “vademecum” that, of course, does not replace your own research and is solely intended to guide and debate. Hoping that those considering opening a coliving space can be inspired by it while saving time and money. Opening the doors for you to ask questions, debate, and share the successes and challenges you may encounter.

To do this, let’s start by breaking down the concepts: Profitability and sustainability.

Profitability and sustainability

Any business wants to be profitable. To be profitable, you first need to analyze what type of profitability you need (material, financial, time, recognition…). Financial profitability is the most widespread, but it is not always the most suitable for what you need. Analyzing and discriminating your own costs will help ensure that financial pressure does not guide your project and therefore your life in the short and long term.

Sustainability in space and time. Creating or starting a business requires effort and resources; they aim to bring prosperity to you, your customers, and the place where your coliving is located. The balance between what you do and where you are guarantees the maturity and long-term viability of your project.

Community

What kind of community do you want to build? Or what kind of community do you already have?
“What makes a community?” is perhaps the first question you should ask yourself…
Well, it’s best for things to happen organically, not forced. But this doesn’t work well if you try to monetize and keep people in that community under your “control.” You don’t want people to form their own community and move away from what you’re trying to create.
They should know that the safest and best way to be with other members is in your home, and you are the reason they connected.
The community you want to build is the one that sees your space as the place where they can meet interesting people, share knowledge, and grow both personally and professionally.
It is essential to explain the idea, what unites you, what identifies that community, organizing events and meetings for both residents and non-residents.
This will strengthen the relationship between residents and also show others the value of being part of the group.

Build the kind of community you would like,
based on interests you already know well.

For example, diving, surfing, climbing, startups, technology, humanistic therapies , etc.
Different places will probably attract different crowds, so the place will have a different vibe if it’s in a mountain village, on a beach, or in a big city.
Another factor is price. Different prices for your services will attract different people.

The idea and the leitmotiv of the community will be what builds the identity of the coliving and spontaneously generates organic marketing and even new sources of financing or expansion opportunities.
To achieve this, we can suggest you hold Hackathons and reflection groups. The rest of the activities, such as organizing dinners, walks, barbecues… are more obvious, although they fulfill a different type of dynamic and purpose.

Read more about hacker culture here

Mission

Why do you want to open a space to create, nurture, and facilitate a community?
Why do you want to be the one to do it?

It should be because you have some of these available resources: skills, network, accommodation.

If you only have one or two of these resources, creating a coliving space allows you to attract suitable people who provide that or those gaps, thus becoming a win-win relationship.
Focusing on a group of people who have their individual missions, the coliving space will help them in THEIR mission. By focusing on this, the coliving space will also succeed.
Once you understand this idea, you will be closer to building something people will be eager and grateful to be part of.

If you start building something with the sole purpose of making money, it’s better to provide more value than the price to stay there.
Attract “A” players to join the space. This will attract other “A” players. Bringing high-caliber guests who can contribute strongly to your community will be the value that you can sell at a high price.

Research

How to build something that attracts and encourages these suitable customers to book with you?

Focus on the atmosphere of the space: Is it relaxed, productive, friendly, efficient, welcoming, or toxic and unprofessional? Is it tidy? Does it smell good? Do you hear knocks on the doors when you try to sleep?

Grab paper and pencil, imagine what you need to make your space ideal. Seek help, find inspiration in other people who already have colivings or have already matured their own trick.

Team

At the beginning, it is interesting to know the compatibility of the team that will be building the coliving space’s identity. For this, people with different aptitudes who get along well are needed, and what better way than to live together to weigh the motivation and mindset of your team by asking them to move into the space.

If you can’t live with them or they don’t get along with others, you’ll quickly see that they are not the right fit.

Communication

Communication is essential. Losing important information can cost you headaches, missed opportunities, or money, directly or indirectly, sometimes without even knowing it.

Managing a coliving space after COVID requires a new technological normalcy that was not previously required and that is precisely what has given meaning to the creation of colivings. Remote, asynchronous, automated, and optimized work must be a pillar in the coliving space’s internal organization. Technology (internet, free software, organic technological processes) is what makes this distributed and decentralized organization possible. This will attract people looking for this type of accommodation, where they can optimize resources and skills.

What the coliving space’s team does will attract other people who want to stay there. Good communication within the team ensures good communication with customers.

Become an innovative host, be ready for the future

Do you want to replicate your experience here with us wherever you go? and perhaps do it better?

We offer mentorship and help you create your coliving space.

• Trust
• Booking management
• Host management
• Support