What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear the word coliving? Your members? Your coliving brand? Great community experiences? Sure! But have you ever thought about how many people, services, contributions and products were needed to make those unforgettable coliving experiences possible in the first place?

In order to make a truly excellent coliving experience, there are countless elements that need to seamlessly work together that are oftentimes not considered by the end users. Architects, consultants, software developers, hardware engineers, spatial designers, marketing professionals, community facilitators and property managers, among many others, all need to work together to create the end product.

All this is what we at Co-Liv are referring to as the coliving ecosystem - a network of people, products and services that all aim at making the coliving experience outstanding, and your operations easier. The more the industry is evolving, however, the more difficult it becomes to truly stay on top of all the latest developments as a coliving operator. Simultaneously for the service providers, it is also getting more and more difficult to understand how they can best relate to and interact with all the other providers within the same ecosystem. In other words, it’s important for coliving operators to focus on growing and continually improving their living experience, and therefore it’s equally important for coliving service providers to grow alongside the operators.

At Co-Liv we believe the demand for quality operators and service providers creates a clear need to help facilitate both at the same time. As the industry association that represents a full spectrum of players in the coliving ecosystem, part of our mission is to support all these actors involved in the global coliving scene in order to best move the coliving industry forward.

With this in mind, over the next couple of months we will be rolling out various Co-Liv communities, all aiming to bring experts within a specific sector together, while at the same time also strengthening the dialogue between operators and third party providers. After recently launching the Co-Liv Community Managers Mastermind, the Co-Liv Tech Community will be the second industry-specific group to be launched!

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Why Create the Co-Liv Tech Community?

Tech has become one of the most critical parts for any coliving operation, in particular for those that are operating at scale. This can also be seen by the fact that in our Co-Liv online events, tech is always one of the most mentioned topics when we ask our audience which areas they are most interested in (as shown in the graph presented).

Questions on how to better understand the tech side of coliving, as well as the opportunities that tech offers, are frequently brought up. That is why we decided to start with the creation of a community focused on technology in coliving.

The field of coliving technology is vast and ranges from software to hardware, covering all stages of the customer journey. Looking at a broad and complex market like this can be very daunting. We, however, deeply believe that it all becomes manageable once you look at it from the perspective of the members; technology never should be implemented as a means to itself, but should always aim to enhance your members’ experience (and/or to enhance your operations).

So thinking about your members’ journey will help you structure the tech needs that operators and their members might have before, during and after their stay. For example, if you are an operator, someone might be interested in living with you. They are submitting their interest, you are vetting them and have a couple of conversations before accepting them as a new member for your community. A while later, that person moves in, you welcome them and get them setup. Later they attend one of your events, perhaps they also receive some mail in a parcel locker, uses your bikes and enjoys a lot of your community events - until eventually, after a few months or even a few years, they move on to your next place.

How many different tech products or applications do you think that person might have been in touch with? 5? 10? The answer is probably easily more than 20 - ranging from a CRM system that has helped you track the conversions you had, which is linked to a WiFi provider, a booking tool, an access control provider, a community app, a smart laundry service, some parcel lockers and so on.

With the Co-Liv Tech Community we aim to bring all those leading providers together to hopefully make it easier for them to collaborate and ultimately improve the member journey.

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‍The Co-Liv Tech Community - Our Aims and Approach

With the Co-Liv Tech community, we are pursuing 3 main objectives:

1. First of all, we want to provide coliving tech providers with an opportunity to better understand the customer journey and the requirements from an operator’s point of view, to allow for a deeper understanding of the market and to possibly even find new or further validate existing use cases for their product.

2. Secondly, through this initiative we aim to set up a comprehensive and easy-to-use directory of all tech providers, including a short description of their products that they are offering to coliving operators.
3. Third, this initiative will also lay the groundwork for a technology accreditation system in the coliving industry.

To achieve those objectives we will be organising different activities within our Tech Community: workshops led by a specific topic leader on a specific tech area, mastermind sessions that dive into more generic topics as well as hot seat sessions that allow young start-ups to present and validate their ideas. Additionally, all those interactive sessions will be supported by a broad range of content and thought leadership pieces that we will produce and distribute into the wider coliving ecosystem. So our objective in this is ultimately bringing a community of like-minded people together to help coliving-centric technology solutions move forward; we also want to build bridges into the wider ecosystem to break down the boundaries between the various disciplines, and to make an even smoother member experience possible.

Of course we recognise that the coliving ecosystem goes beyond just technology. That is why the Co-Liv Tech Community is at the same time part of a group of similar Co-Liv initiatives for other fields within the ecosystem - such as real estate developers, investors, marketing, community building, spatial design, sustainability and more.

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Join Us!

We are looking forward to welcoming you within our tech community - either as an active community member, or even an active contributor or topic leader.

Please keep your eyes open for further announcements on our social media channels. The official launch date for the Co-Liv Tech Community will be during the Co-Liv Virtual Summit in early May. And to make sure we get the content right, we have started a first campaign to source your biggest questions and highest priorities to get us focused on the right topics. Feel free to submit your contributions here.

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