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Over the next two weeks, we will share a panel discussion around the theme of Co-Living. Co-Living is an emerging and growing trend within the property sector and PropTech space in many respects.
Listen in as I host a panel discussion including Dan Jackson from Urban Shared, Luke Spikes from Higgihaus, David Bonk from Homefree Living, Angharad Owen from YPN Magazine and David Thomas from Libertygate Estate Agents.
We will discuss what it is exactly, what the drivers are behind it and where is it all leading to. As one member of my community describes it...'it's a real banger'! I hope you enjoy it too...
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Resources mentioned
Contact links for the Panelists... Dan Jackson from Urban Shared, Luke Spikes from Higgihaus, David Bonk from Homefree Living, Angharad Owen from YPN Magazine, David Thomas from Livertygate Estate Agents and Helen Pollock The Content Doc
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Transcription of the show
Over the next two weeks, we will share a panel discussion around the theme of Co-Living. Co-Living is an emerging and growing trend within the property sector and PropTech space in many respects.
Listen in as I host a panel discussion including Dan Jackson from Urban Shared, Luke Spikes from Higgihaus, David Bonk from Homefree Living, Angharad Owen from YPN Magazine and David Thomas from Libertygate Estate Agents.
We will discuss what it is exactly, what the drivers are behind it and where is it all leading to. As one member of my community describes it...' it's a real banger'! I hope you enjoy it too...
Property Chatter
Hi, everybody. Well, thank you very much for all the panelists for making their time available today. We've got a very exciting topic. We were just having the conversation before the conversation that co-living is probably something we wouldn't have thought about too much in the recent past, but over the last 12, 24 months in particular, we've started to hear this word pop up quite a lot in property circles. So it's very good and opportune, I think, to have an exciting panel, and we can probably say international panel of guests here today. We might use a lot of UK language. Sorry about that, David Bonk, but obviously this applies very much internationally, and hopefully we'll get this message across.
Just going to do a very quick introduction of the panelists by name. I've got Dan Jackson from Urban Shared, who operates 15 co-living properties in London and is creator of the Connected app, which facilitates add-on services, community, and better housemates experience. So that's going to be exciting.
And Luke Spikes from HiggiHaus. Co-living, boutique hotel, and service accommodation operator in Bristol in the UK.
David Bonk, principal of Home Free, who is a Canadian community-living developer specializing in looking after, facilitating older adults and accommodation.
And Angharad Owen, who is the assistant editor of YPN magazine and, very, very importantly, a co-living customer, to give us a bit of a balanced perspective there.
And not least of which, we've got David Thomas, who's director of Liberty Gate, which I am told is an award-winning estate agency based in Nottingham, so ...
I, by the way, am Richard Brown, also known as The Property Voice. Very interested in the topic generally speaking, having authored a book called #PropTech. But I'm going to try and ask questions more than answer them in this session.
So with that in mind, probably the best place to start is what on earth is co-living? Does anybody want to have a stab at trying to start us off with a kind of definition, which I'm sure we can all contribute to?
Well, it's not HMOs, and I think one of the challenges I've been facing in recent times, having been focused on this for a little while now, is you've got an awful lot of people who are relabeling an HMO co-living because it feels convenient and a very timely thing to be doing, when in fact they're making no fundamental changes to what their product or proposition was before, and therefore it isn't really co-living. So that'll be a sort of negative point to start off with, I guess.
For me, it really is more about feeling and experience and the sense of community that you create. The essence of it is reduction of the amount of private space, shall we call it, but a significant increase in the amount of shared amenities to make more efficient, more effective use of the properties and the buildings. So that, to me, is what co-living is all about. How do you create from a building or a piece of land a property that allows higher density, but at the same time doesn't compromise the experience of living in that place? That's where I would go with it, anyway.
Yeah. Very interesting. So there's this spirit, almost, that comes with it. It's not just a shared space. There's other aspects of that community.
What else? It's not an HMO, but what is it?
When I was looking for my place to live ... I decided to sort of go down the digital nomad kind of route for a while, till I found my boyfriend and came home. I know. Aw.
I was sort of looking for somewhere that I could just pitch up, stay for a month, and I could just come with my suitcase. Everything was provided. It had my workspace. It had somewhere where I could sleep. It had a kitchen. The place that I ended up staying in Barcelona was ... It had free tea and coffee as well, which was very nice.
So yeah, it was just somewhere for me that I could just pitch up in a new city and be with people who were similar to me, who were all remote workers, and yeah, just so I could have that kind of landing pad where I could just sort of come and everything was fine.
So almost everything was catered, provided for you, if you like.
Yeah.
Was there any sort of minimum commitment for the length of stay that you would have, typically?
Yeah. One month. There were a couple of other places I was looking at where I could have just stayed for a week, two weeks, but the particular house that I ended up living in was one month minimum. So it was quite nice for me to have that flexibility, that after a month I could go, "Actually, no. I'm ready to move on," or do what I did, which is actually extend my stay for another month because I liked it so much.
Sure. We're touching on something now which I think is quite important, isn't it? That the sharing economy ... There's a word thrown out there called "democratization," sharing assets in a new way, not necessarily ... With housing, typically people tend to enter into long-term lease or tenancy types of arrangement, and you've just said you could be there for a month or that sort of period of time. So that's one key difference, isn't it?
Yeah. I think so. I quite liked not having a minimum commitment, because what if I didn't like Barcelona? What if I didn't like the people that I was living with? I could have just moved on.
Sure. And Angharad, just if you don't mind me asking, and you don't ... Feel free not to share, but what sort of age range are you in?
I am 25.
You're 25, so you would be a millennial, I guess.
Yeah. Well, I don't like the word, but yes.
You probably can tell where I'm going with the question.
Is this model of co-living just for young people? David Bonk, perhaps. Maybe you have a view on that.
I don't think so. In my house ... Sorry, David. I had from 18-year-olds up to ... She was just over 40, so there was quite a big age range in my house.
Oh, co-living ends at 40. Okay.
I guess I look at in many ways that older adults, seniors have already been co-living as far as the physical properties, extended care, independent living. It's already been that model since popularized in the '80s in Virginia in the US, and I mean, now it's big business, right? Seniors coming together to live in a smaller room with larger shared amenities.
However, something big is missing. Co-living is more than just that smaller room with shared amenities, because that's been around and older adults have been doing it for 40 years. So absolutely, it's ... Just what is co-living, and how can we sort of tweak the model of the way that seniors have discovered to live together in safety and community? Well, I think really it is adding in that community piece and providing access for the people who live there with a sense of ownership, somehow, which is how we're trying to tweak the independent living model.
So yeah, it's already a big thing, and the new group of aging population, the baby boomers, aren't looking to live in the same way that their parents and grandparents did in these types of facilities. They're looking for something new, and in my opinion co-living is that answer. So ...
Go ahead.
It's a really interesting point, David, because one of the things that we started doing is focusing on millennials. Sorry, Angharad. Young professionals. And interestingly, the age ranges that we're encountering are pretty much as Angharad just said, between early 20s and early 40s.
But if you think about it as we have done, each and every stage in life presents you with a different set of challenges with regard to the type of space you need, but not fundamentally with the need to belong.
And as we started to think about it, and went, "Hang on a minute." If you take your next stage in life, maybe you're a couple now. What might you need? Well, the same things fundamentally. Then you move on to a couple with children with small family units. Then you go on the unfortunately consequences of divorce where you have now separation. Individuals who have children in the mix. How do you cater for a property or an environment which allows for kids to come stay on weekend, for example?
You keep moving, and you get up to "older adults," as I heard it referred to the other day, or seniors. And actually, this is fundamentally the same. So we've revisited our strategy and our vision and our model, and we're now defining what we're doing as through-life social living, because that's fundamentally what it is.
Then seeking to create a product at each stage that meets the stage of life. So you rethink the space that's required. You rethink the services that might be required to foster community. But fundamentally, the underpinnings are the same. So I don't think it matters whether it's a young millennial or an older millennial or an older adult or someone in middle life or a family. There are co-living opportunities across the stages of life, and that's how we'd like to think about it.
So age is no barrier. And David Thomas, we're going to come to you shortly about maybe on the sort of demand side as an estate agent. But perhaps before I do, Dan, maybe to cue you up a little bit, we've heard about some of the convenience aspects already. We've heard about the age not necessarily being a barrier, but maybe there's an association of co-living predominantly with a younger group. I don't know, but Luke, you're quite right that there's a growing need amongst all age groups.
But Dan, what do you think? Is there anything missing from this discussion about what co-living is?
I mean, I think so far we're kind of homing in on what we all collectively think co-living is, and I think it's about improving, essentially, the customer experience in a shared home, whether that be for the millennial generation, moving up through to kind of the older adults.
I think, however, there's also an element of ... Whilst the space is important ... And I take on board Luke's kind of view that the space evolves as the requirements change, which is actually a really interesting way of looking at it, because absolutely that happens. I think there also needs to be a focus on how we can use other tools to foster community and to create the feeling of belonging.
Obviously, you said you're teeing me up, but I'm very, very focused on the technology side of our product because I believe that property is the biggest asset class globally, and it's very under-invested in from a technology perspective. Spreadsheets are used all over the industry. There's very little focus on user experience, certainly in the tenant space. I think the investment in technology is certainly in areas like, for example, investment and all those sorts of things.
But we're very focused on what we can do to essentially put the control of the built environment into the hand of the user. And whilst our platform is in the early stages, we're seeing now technology from the States, which is where a lot of these things tend to start, that's really focused on ... How can we help them create a community? For example, simple things. How can we make the attendance of an event, whether that be in the space or whether it be down the road in a space that we can borrow, but how can we create community using technology? That, for me, is really part of the co-living experience. On the one side, you have to have nice properties that work for people in terms of their living space, but I think you also need to think about how you can use other things to create a feeling of community.
Absolutely. So we're getting there, I think. We've got some convenience. We've got some community. We've got some shared space. We've got the use of technology. I think there was a hint at services, certainly, in some of the comments that have come back.
But David Thomas, we promised you that we'd bring you in. Obviously from your point of view ... I don't know if you've got lettings as well as sales under your banner. You have. Okay. I'm curious, because obviously, how does this all hang from the sort of estate agent shop window point of view? What is co-living to you and to your peers, and indeed customers?
Bizarrely, this is one of the first times I've ever actually heard of it. Just seeing all the people here and understanding the concepts that you're working with and things like that, it's very niche in the market. What's interesting is the estate agency sector is very behind on it. I've not ever heard of it discussed at industry events or anything to do with the private rental sector, and I think that's maybe because it is quite niche at the moment.
As an industry we're quite behind, because we've only just recently started doing serviced accommodation management with the whole Airbnb thing. But there's very few agents that are even doing that. So I think mainstream estate agencies, because of the disruption at the moment, because of the regulation and all the things that are changing, the Tenant Fee Act and all these sort of things that are hitting the industry ... That the estate agency sector is very much sticking to what it knows at the moment. It's either focusing on lettings or sales, or maybe the commercial angle.
But what would be really interesting is, I think, if there's a specific city that has a developer doing this, then I think it would be great for estate agency to get more involved with it. Because from what I've heard and what I've researched for this, it would be a essential part of the private rental sector, because it really lacks that. I mean, if I had something like this that I could offer here in Nottingham to tenants they would jump at it, because at the moment they don't have that stepping stone and they don't have that community inclusion element to anything that they're offered. So yeah, it's an interesting concept.
Very much so. I think one of the interesting points ... By the way, if you're an estate agency offering serviced accommodation management, you're already ahead of the curve.
It's quite bizarre, because it has been around for quite a period of time. That's where this co-living as well ... I think this has a lot more where the synergy could work with estate agency to sort of get it out to a wider population and get more people aware of it, really.
I mean, what are the thoughts generally on the panel? If we think about disruptive technologies like Uber, Airbnb, generally speaking, a lot of the disruption has come from the technology itself as a platform making it easy to access for people. Is it going to disrupt and shake up traditional industries such as, perhaps, estate agency and lettings management?
Well, I think generally in terms of the money now that's being poured into co-living development, certainly if we look at in the ... There's one huge developer in London that's had half a billion pounds' worth of investment, and aside from that, then the money's in the States.
But there is an increasing amount of money now being put into specific co-living solutions. If we look at the United States market, I think over the sort of 10 big co-living operators in the States that are either developing, owning, or just operating, they have together created 3,000 shared rooms, which is ... 50 meters of where I'm sat now, there's probably 3,000 rooms in London. I mean, it's a tiny, tiny amount of rooms that have been created. In London, if we look at the major developer, they've got 1,200 rooms. We are just touching the surface.
I was quite surprised, David from Nottingham ... It sounds like we're on a blind date, but David from Nottingham, I was quite surprised, but then again, not necessarily totally surprised that you hadn't heard of it. I guess that's because it's still in its infancy. I'm guessing if we look at people like Luke as well, he'll know that there's only really one platform where you can find a tenant for a shared house, unless you're marketing on your own website and doing your own marketing.
So it's still very, very in its infancy globally, and yet, there is an increasing interest in it from the investment community. There's a huge amount of interest in the States in big, urban areas. So I can only see this kind of increasing over time, as ... I think that we're going to discuss it in more detail, around the drivers behind it, but it's ... We are sitting at the very start of what I believe to be a fundamental shift in the way we offer living solutions to the market, from the young millennial, whatever that is actually, Generation X, all the way through the David Bonk's target market, who are people just a little bit older than me, probably.
In the early stages. That's a great point, Dan. Well said. It's a bit counter-cultural right now, this co-living. It might disrupt couch sales. You call them couches in the UK, right?
Yeah.
It's the idea of having more by having less. Having less of the things that we were born to think that are important, like three couches and a high fence, and everything's mine, and just I have it all there. We're going to have less of that stuff in order to co-live, but we'll have more of freedom to explore the hobbies that we want, more maybe nutritious food because we have someone maybe preparing that for us. More relationships with people, and exploring the richness in that. So it might really disrupt what some people think is important, and that might be one of the big benefits of what we're all doing here.
I'd add to that, David, as well. I think one of the things that comes through often when we're talking about this subject is the need to create community, because it addresses some of the failings that there are in contemporary society today, largely wrought by technology. That's Facebook, Dan, not proptech.
But if you talk to folk, many folk will tell you now they feel less connected than they've ever connected, despite being arguably more connected by virtue of the technology that they have. I think that human touch, that human connection, that desire to belong is really strong, and if anything, by repurposing existing buildings ... But more important, I think what will happen is we'll build specifically for the product to address the need that we're talking about.
What you'll end up doing is you'll redefine the way people live, and in that sense it's disruptive, not in a negative sense. It's actually making a contribution to the wellness and wellbeing of the societies in which we live. I think that's a laudable ambition, but actually, it's absolutely what's going to happen. It'll take some time, take some while, but that's where we're going to end up. I'm pretty sure of that.
I think that's absolutely essential as well, to be honest, the way the market is and the way people are with technology at the moment. I think it needs to get a bit more mainstream traction. Because I'm quite interested as to where the developers market their properties, because on the main private rental sector, obviously we market on Rightmove, Zoopla, platforms like that, where people know to go. Then if you're on the nightly rates, serviced accommodation, it's generally Airbnb and booking.com. So where does co-living sit in terms of a marketing platform to the public?
When I was searching for my place, I was just ... I picked some cities that I wanted to live in and I Googled "co-living Barcelona," "co-living Prague." Co-living, and just sort of looked at the top three searches.
There is a platform called ... I think it's just coliving.com, where it's almost kind of like Airbnb. So it's kind of like Airbnb, where you can choose your room, but you don't book it directly. You kind of go to the website from there, so it's just a middleman, I guess, to connect the two. I found that tool really, really useful because I could see what was available in the cities where I wanted to go, or what wasn't available in cities where I wanted to go.
And does that work for the developers amongst the panel? Does that work in terms of giving you enough leads and occupancy for the developments?
For us now, it does for the time being, but as the developments get bigger and our ambitions grow, then that may not be the case. But that's actually the reason we chose right from the beginning to create a consumer-facing lifestyle brand. So HiggiHaus is not a property company. HiggiHaus is a place where we create places for people to stay, regardless of the tenure and regardless of the type. We're very focused on the customer need and the experience that they have with us.
As a consequence, that marks us out, A, being a bit different, but it also means it is quite difficult to find ... Let's call them conventional channels. Because the conventional channels don't yet exist, because this isn't conventional. So in that sense what we've sought to do is say, "Right, fine. We're going to have to do some of this ourselves and draw the people to us."
So we'd love to think that if Angharad went and searched on Swansea, we might come up. We might not. We don't know yet. What we are seeking to do at the present moment is to use social media, use all the various technologies available to us, to build some presence that actually draws the communities and people who want to live in this way to us for now. And then eventually it'll get to a point. There'll be an app for finding a co-living, just like there are apps for other things, right?
Yeah. Can I just, sorry, touch on something that you just said? When you sort of looked at ... You say you use social media quite a lot. That's something I looked at when I was looking. I wanted to see who the people who I would potentially be living with ... Sort of what was going on in the house, what events were going on. Sort of how active were they on social media? Because I thought that if they weren't that active, then is it going to be a bit of a dodgy house? Does anybody even live there? Is it a scam? Am I going to get murdered? All that kind of stuff.
I sort of did scrub off a couple of places where I was thinking, well, they don't seem to ... They don't have a Facebook. They don't have an Instagram. How do I know that they're real, and how do I know that anybody's even living there at the moment? So yeah, I think somebody my age definitely does look on social media for activeness.
You bring in an interesting point about trust and security as well, as it happens, but in a light-hearted way. But I'd like to come back a little bit to the whole marketing angle. By the way, I was going to say there's a push and a pull with everything. So the push part might be some of the drivers that we can perhaps talk about, but in terms of pull ...
Angharad, you were looking for something specific. You were looking for a place to stay with perhaps people with shared interests for a short period of time in an overseas location. You had something specific in mind. I don't know if you actually knew the word co-living ...
I did, but I tend to know it through work and through what I do. So I think that if I didn't do what I do, I probably wouldn't have heard of it, and therefore I wouldn't know what I'd be looking for.
Yeah. That's why I was going to come to Dan on that one, because do you promote your accommodation as co-living spaces, Dan?
We do. We did when we started a couple of years ago. Similar to ... Luke talked about a sort of a customer-facing brand, rather than a house. Our models are different. We leased on a long-term basis. Some people might know that as rent-to-rent. So we don't own anything, which makes it more difficult for us to create those kind of great spaces inside.
But our premise has always been that actually, what we're all about is creating a good customer experience. And because we were unable to maybe invest in these properties in the way that a developer had, we started to look at other things that we could do to create that experience, which is why we came up with the idea of creating a mobile platform for our tenants.
So yes, we did call it co-living. I mean, I personally hate the three-letter acronym HMO. It just sounds horrible. When I first heard it, I thought it might be something to do with the prison service. It just conjures up a really depressing scenario, as far as I'm concerned. So I'm glad, even if it's just rebranded something, to kind of say, "Hold on, guys. Let's try and create something in this space that feels and sounds better." So I'm kind of even glad that we're talking about co-living spaces.
And whilst we've identified that it's more than just the property itself, it certainly feels as though we're now bringing this part of the housing sector into something that's slightly more acceptable, and people are now focusing on creating a good living experience. I think that's great. I really do.
You also mentioned something interesting there about HMOs. Because when I do my little bit of speaking on the PIN circuit, as I do, one of the things that we talk about when I'm articulating it is why I don't like the term HMO, why it's banned in the land of Higgi.
It's not for conventional reasons. It's actually banned because the customer does not understand what it is. You don't wake up in the morning and say, "Mm-hmm (affirmative), I think I'll go and look to live in an HMO today." So if that's the case-
Why on earth would you use that language in your communication to your customer segment? You wouldn't.
Yeah, I can totally vouch for ... When I talk to my friends about my work and I go, "I interviewed this HMO guy," and they're like, "What?" They have no idea what it is, and I wouldn't know what it is if I didn't do what I do.
See, this is where I think that fundamentally it's a shift in thinking, and that's why ... It is very nascent, very early days, but it is going to be huge. I have absolutely no question of it. This is going to be an absolutely huge part of the market.
Institutional money is starting to appear. We ourselves have just agreed terms on what effectively allow us, effectively gives us infinite capital coming from Hong Kong, and allows us to bring our plans further forward by five years. So we're now contemplating purpose-built, 50-to-250 bed units internationally, because the money's starting to appear.
So it's not just the folk with vision and the folk who are early into these marketplaces. It is now being backed by the folk on the money side saying, "Actually, you know what? This is an interesting way to play real estate, so let's make large sums of capital available to allow this to begin to accelerate." And we're already seeing that.
Show me the money, hey? Show me the money.
[Yeah, well follow the dollars.Absolutely. David Bonk, actually, I'm probably going to bring you back in at this point, because A, you're a developer. B, you've got a slightly different perspective, obviously, with the different demographic that you're serving.
Just to lead into this part of the conversation, what would you say are the sort of trends or the drivers behind what we're seeing as this emerging co-living space, shared living community?
Oh, driven largely by younger people just disheartened by the barriers to entry of purchasing real estate. Maybe wanting to have more ... It being unaffordable. Maybe just wanting to do things differently than their parents and grandparents did. That's probably been the driver. Wanting a more free lifestyle, looking for that hybrid between owning and renting.
Maybe sort of like how digital currency sort of started. It was probably a young person sitting on its couch, going, "I don't really want to go to work. I want to stay on the couch. How can I create an income from there." Digital currency becoming popularized. Co-living, I think, is starting from there as well. People wanting to live in a different way.
I suppose that's been the driver, but I also think just out of necessity. The rates for homelessness, especially among seniors, are really skyrocketing, in especially the western part of Canada. So how can we house people, which has now just been entered into the Charter of Human Rights and in Canada that we're going to house people? That's a new thing, I believe. Co-living, I think, is ... If we can get used to having less stuff and less personal space, just what we need, that's going to really drive the trend as well. Yeah.
But back to that marketing piece, I also wouldn't mind book-ending that as well. I've been hesitant, very cautiously using the word co-living in any of our marketing. When I do the odd social media post, I'm more speaking for the older adults. When we do a social media post, we're talking to sort of the 60-year-old, like the child of our client, and we're relying on them to talk to their parent about coming here, so we don't really use the word co-living, because I don't think that it's commonly known in that age group, here, anyways.
But we do describe the feeling, and we lead with our brand, and people sort of get it. We get the odd comment about, "Oh, what, is this like a communal, hippy living development from the '70s?" We get the odd comment like that, which I enjoy. But yeah, we haven't used the word co-living too, too often, for sure.
I'm sure we're going to get to, well, how can this become more mainstream? I suspect marketing and language is going to play a part in that.
I just think in terms of the drivers, whether they're trends, mega-trends ... The whole concept of an HMO probably came about because of shortage of living space. Would you agree that's one of the drivers, perhaps, behind this trend?
I mean, I think certainly in major urban accommodations ... If you look at the top five or 10 cities in the world they'll all be, I think, leading the demand side of the co-living model. I mean, just looking at places like Berlin. There's some rent control issues in Berlin, but the co-living market in Berlin is vibrant and growing. London, New York, places like San Francisco also. And these are places where, essentially, it's too expensive to live if you're on a pretty standard income, and there's also not much space to build. I often describe this as there's almost a perfect storm in some parts of the globe with regards to the demand for what we're doing.
Back in the day, it was a shared house with five rooms and we called it an HMO. Essentially, the housing crisis was here, I guess, 15 years ago. I think for 30 years we've never hit the new build target in this country. So we could always argue that there's been a supply issue.
I think in urban spaces like London, whilst the stock isn't being built, and whilst HMOs were providing a solution, co-living is the next generation of the shared home, where it's addressing some of the issues that we've all discussed around ... There is an increased feeling of loneliness in this ever-connected world, but we're just spending time, ironically, on our screen. I know that I'm here to talk about what we do on our screen, but that does mean that the evolution of the HMO meant how can we create community?
I think that if you look at the fundamentals, it's simple, isn't it? It's supply and demand and a cost issue. There's not enough stock. There are more people looking, because the prices are going up. So whilst all those fundamentals are kind of pointing toward an increase in the number of people that need to live in these sorts of places, we're now looking at how we can make them even better.
And whether that's because we want to compete with other people or whether we want to actually create a better product, and start calling tenants ... I don't even like to call tenants tenants. I think that's a poor description of somebody that's a customer. I call them housemates. I'm interested to discuss ... How do we make it mainstream? You mentioned language. I think that would be a big part of it. I think talking about it in a different way, and treating tenants as housemates and customers is all going to be part of the move toward this.
What about in terms of facilities?
Go on.
You say about trying to make it more mainstream. The reason why I don't currently live in a co-living/HMO kind of shared house at the moment is because I work from home, and many ... I've not come across a house that provides a work space for me, apart from ... Well, that's something specifically I was looking for when I was going to go on my co-living adventure, because by the time I've paid rent on a HMO or on a room and I've got a co-working space as well, or a serviced office, I might as well have just paid rent on a one-bedroom flat, because it would have worked out the same. So is that something that you two, or all of you, are looking at implementing in your future houses?
You must come and see our next project, Angharad.
All righty.
We're converting a hotel, and it will end up ... There's going to be 19 bedrooms. 10 of them studios. 10 rooms, nine studios. It has a library, refectory. It has a cinema. It has a chill-out room. It also has a co-working space.
Because ... Sorry. Something that I've noticed is that people will just go, "Oh, you've got a desk in the room." I go, "Well, I don't ... I sleep in my room. You wouldn't expect somebody to work in their bedroom all day, and then go to ... " I was just like, "No, thank you."
No. We're seeing a different model evolve, which is effectively hybridization of co-working, co-living, and serviced accommodation. Where we want to go is purpose-built, because unfortunately many of the buildings that exist aren't suitable for our purposes we have identified for them. It's purpose-built, where if you imagine co-working on the ground floor, co-living in the middle, and we've even got some funky ideas to put Airstream caravans on the roof for serviced accommodation, so that what you effectively create is a single property or building ... Or it could be a collection of properties which combine all the thing ... Living, right?
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
How we live and work, how we want to live and work. How we see things ultimately manifesting is in what we call a Higgi village, and that's effectively an urban campus, because it's going back to one of the drivers, urbanization. An urban campus comprised of multiple buildings, where each building is significant in size, is designed around a life stage, but all of those buildings are collected together by a set of shared amenities designed very specifically to foster inter-generational community.
Because I think that's one of the things that's missing from our society today. I've been fortunate enough to run businesses in the Far East and in the US as well, and in the Far East it's a given. Grandma looks after the kids whilst the children go to school. There's a whole sense of community that's actually in family, too, that's missing from how we live today.
So what we're trying to do and we're all about is working on the fact that people want to live in urban settings. Urbanization is one of the big global drivers that's driving this. There's many, many people now want to come back in to live in the city centers. That's one thing.
Second is unaffordability, to use David's phrase. I love that word. Unaffordability. That also is driving this. So what that leads us to is we have to make better use of the land and the real estate assets in the cities where people want to live. You're not going to do that by simply redoing something that's already been done. You're going to have to rethink it, reframe it, knock some stuff down to build something new. And that's what we want to do.
And I think some of the developers who are raising very significant sums of money ... Collective was mentioned. Half a billion. Common's another that recently ... 300 million. There are some really significant players, eight, nine, 10 of them, some from the Far East, some from the US, all of whom are lining up really significant sums of money to do exactly what I've just described. They're building 500-bed, 700 ... The Collective's new building is 700 bed. They've got a unit coming out, one in New York, one in Chicago. I believe they bought a site in Brooklyn, but there's 350,000 square feet. This is where things are headed, right? So it, I think, is redefining how we live. It's as fundamental as that, and why I believe it's going to be huge.
Yeah, and I perhaps want to just pick up on that a little bit, because there's some of the economic drivers which are very obvious, and the trends of urbanization, lack of space, unaffordability. But are there some other factors such as society changes which are perhaps playing a part in this?
Well, how about increasing levels of suicide? How about increasing degrees of loneliness? I mean, there are some negative factors in society that need to be addressed, because they're an uncomfortable consequence of technology as it stands today.
I don't personally want to ... If I can do something about that, I don't want to stand by and not do something about it. So let's live in a more harmonious and a more positive environment where wellbeing is at the center of what we're doing, because that's also an important part of what I think co-living is fundamentally all about. It's the wellbeing of the individuals in your charge, if you are a developer or an owner or an operator. That's the focus on the customer, and that's the bit that we're trying also to do.
So for example, in our thinking ... It's not yet a reality, but we want to create growing spaces, in other words, where people can actually have some land to grow things, for example, where they can learn new skills. So art becomes an important part of the proposition, either because you want to learn to be an artist, or you enjoy art and beautiful things around you, so you want to be able to create things. So there's all sense of creativity that goes beyond the digital realm, built into the fabric of the building. That's what we're trying to get to. It's going to take us a while, and it's going to take a fair amount of money. I'm pretty sure of that. But that's what we're seeking to accomplish over time.
So are you looking at creating a place where people might not necessarily need to leave the building or the village in order to live?
Yeah. Why not? Technology in terms of ... And I don't mean necessarily technology from an app perspective. Technology from how you make buildings adaptable. so you reconfigure, how you make use of small space. I mean, the Japanese are masters at it, particularly Tokyo, because it has to be, because there is nowhere to go except being far more effective with the space you've got. So technology lends itself to how to configure the spaces.
But absolutely, why not? Why would it not be that you find a place to live, you love the way it lives, you're associate. And as you pass through life stages, there's another option for you to stay.
Do you think maybe ... Talking from my own personal experience, when I was in university, my halls was right next door to uni. I went to a specialized music college, so it was full of things that I absolutely loved. I was surrounded by people who were doing the same as me, who loved what I loved. But I actually ended up getting ... I had quite severe mental health issues, because I was just living in this little bubble surrounded by people who were the same, and I wasn't being exposed to anything different, so I was just ... Halls was here. University was 30 seconds' walk away. I was just living in this tiny little piece of Manchester, and I got very, very sick because of it.
So how do you think that you could potentially combat that and sort of expose people or encourage people to leave the bubble and go out and go for walks, or whatever?
Inter-generational. I think that's the key. If you go online now and you search, you'll find YouTube videos of some really interesting experiences, some in the Far East, where they've taken older adults and they've thrown them together with millennials, youngsters, to see what happens. In other words, create inter-generational co-living. Amazing things happen.
There's some experiments that have been conducted in Europe with putting old folk with small children. The effect on the mental health of the older folk involved in the care of these little ones ... Remarkable transformations occur.
So I think there's place. How do you work inside the place? But there's also space. How do you create the space? But also, how do you create the connections? I think that we are missing the fact that we all used to rely on grandma, auntie, uncle, and all these ... The wisdom and experience of age to help us. Well, let's bring some of that back.
Well, we used to live in little villages and things, didn't we? Everyone would support everybody else, and we'd all muck in. We've kind of then migrated away. We've gone into the cities. We've gone into our nuclear families, or the niche that you were in, Angharad, for example.
I think it's starting to play out in society. That's where I was going with are there other society issues? You've just talked about one, which is mental health. Loneliness has been mentioned. They're drivers for change. So we're seeing a lot of this co-living model ... It's still early stages, and it sounds to me ... Luke, you're a niche within a niche. Pioneering for the pioneers in taking it forward.
That's all from me this week, remember if you want to talk about anything from today’s show, or just talk property investing more generally, email me at podcast@thepropertyvoice.net, I would be happy to hear from you! The show notes can be found at our website www.thepropertyvoice.net
Thanks very much for listening again this week, so all that left to say is ciao ciao!