Interest in our coliving communities, whether it refers to building or managing them, has shifted to an emphasis on how technology can assist. With ‘smart coliving’, we merge digital age innovation with the passionate drive of coliving operators - thus generating discussion around this multifaceted topic.

My work with Startup Embassy has been featured in the top 10 communities for entrepreneurs in Entrepreneur Magazine. Since I started in Silicon Valley eight years ago, I have uncovered more than a few human stories that are published on my blog, Coliving From the Trenches. As a thought leader, my stories stem from real experiences that I share to help mould a sharp, community-focused mindset.

To build this mindset, you must have technological awareness - my own springs from my career working as an engineer, obsessed with IoT.

These tech options bring about an exciting future - imagine 3D-printed buildings, optimised ‘smart’ decor, and all within a decentralised blockchain economy. Gamification is an additional target; picture a new industry with an adaptive, engaging model that combines the best of productivity and entertainment, all tailored to a specific tribe. These could all bring disruption to traditional business models in the real estate sector. How would this kind of future provide more options to coliving companies?

Setting these projections aside, let’s talk about an immediate possibility: coliving automation with a community focus.

First, we can set something to rest: coliving operations generally lose sight of technology beyond what it can do for energy saving or access control. When a manager can easily detect idle devices, open windows or high heater temperatures, it is much easier to curb energy expenditure; even a 5% energy cost reduction is worth noting.

However, these factors alone make up only one side to how technology can assist your coliving business. In essence, the missing piece is that the right tech can open up unlimited verticalization, measurable quality of service and - my favourite - ease of delegation. The right software at your fingertips will be the catalyst to meeting coliving needs.

All this is available for you as a business owner, but the hidden gem in it all is its tandem benefits for customer experience. So, while we all are familiar with booking engines, CRMs and IoT for energy saving / access control, the real power here will come from implementing IoT sensors and chatbots.

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Community: our heart, our centre, our foundation

As a Coliving Insights reader, I believe we are colleagues, sharing the same views. Hopefully, we agree that at the heart of any healthy coliving space is a focus on community.

When merging this focus with technology, we must not forget our foundation as we move through our iterations. The tools are here to insist and enhance the customer experience, and their time in our spaces as a guest must never be hampered by our internal processes.

With this in mind, any architecture we design must come from the thought: how does this make our guest’s life better?

There is an easy answer to this. For thousands of years, humans have come together in groups to find a sense of belonging, which is the primary reason for a coliver to seek your space. These prospective guests go through different stages, and I have classified six of them from “excitement before joining the community” to “an experienced mentor for other colivers.” These stages walk a coliver directly from excitement into a warm role in the community.

Let’s again shift the focus back to technology in light of this and give a real-life example: Mike.

Example story: Mike, the entrepeneur

Let’s take a look at Mike, our soon-to-be guest. He has a trip planned to the city and makes a reservation via our website. He passes our filter because Mike is clearly a good fit for our community. He shares the common thread we set in career aspirations or hobbies that forms our central pillar. Before he arrives, we request that he downloads our app so he can have the full experience.

While some businesses struggle to onboard new guests to their digital platform, ours is so integrated that a potential guest must use it - there is no other option. In this digital age, the superpowers the app provides are experiential and foundational, integral to the coliving experience. If you do not use it, you miss the whole experience.

So, Mike downloads our platform, and we introduce him to other guests that previously stayed with us and are from Mike’s city. They lived the same experience Mike is about to live; we call this the ‘Consul’s Network’ at Startup Embassy, and they take an advisory role for our new guests. Instead of feeling lost or confused, Mike has at his fingertips the exact person to direct questions to and knows exactly how Mike feels before starting his journey. Any problem from visas, clothing or common issues can be solved by this connected experience facilitated by the Consul’s Network.

Our platform’s chatbot confirms when he has booked a flight. Once prompted, Mike can input his flight number directly into the app. Now, our team knows what time he will land or if a delay occurs.

Fifteen minutes after landing, we know that he’s at the immigration lane - time for the chatbot to remind him of our address:

“Can I order an Uber?” the chatbot asks. “Sure,” Mike taps a reply.

The House Manager (HM) receives a notification with Mike’s estimated arrival time so they can be ready to greet him.

Think about this: when Mike arrives, he’s already lived an experience; one of ease, professionalism and acceptance. The Consul’s Network has given him advice and remains a point of contact. When the HM checks him in, he has already felt what being in your coliving means and is welcomed effortlessly into the community. The HM introduces other guests to him and walks Mike around the space, detailing the house rules.

The same chatbot provides even more value to guests like Mike. Not only can it prompt reviews of experiences like check-in, but it can also relay important information about the surrounding area, the best feedback for improvement, event details and how to get involved in events.

To enable this kind of experience, we turn back to the two aforementioned technologies and take a deeper look at how they can be best utilised.

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Technology: Optimise your coliving space with sensors and chatbots

In addition to the example above, my solution is to use IoT and chatbots to measure KPIs for coliving spaces in various areas. These measurable insights give the operator actionable, effective data.

These technologies (IoT and chatbots) serve two different purposes:

• Chatbots are a direct (real-time) and bi-directional channel for communications with the guest. Additionally, it creates an accessible, private channel to receive feedback that would otherwise be difficult to obtain. From the team’s side, the chatbot may be used to transfer our data and manage tasks more efficiently.
• IoT, which in the end is a sensor, provides a cloud of data points (humidity, temperature, on/ off, metadata through AI) that would be useless by itself. However, pairing it with my method, we receive an aggregate of measurable information that we use to make solid decisions.

Together, these technologies provide the basis of a vertical plan that anyone may use to scale their coliving brand.

Through my eight years operating Startup Embassy, I have identified four main categories that create the pillars of my coliving method. Pairing these specific examples with the earlier tech advice, you may discover how this can optimally apply to your own coliving business.

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1. Community Building & Management 

‍Rituals: Rituals should be at the core of your community’s DNA. In our case, one ritual includes taking an instant picture with a polaroid camera and hanging it with a gallery on a wall.

As part of the onboarding process, the HM records a one-minute video asking the guest a few questions: “what does your startup do?”, “what are your expectations for this trip?”, and the likes. A few days later, we take their picture, and it joins the community photo display.

On their checkout day, the HM records one last video where they interview the guest again, asking questions about their experience. Our goal is to build an Augmented Reality (AR) application that will play those three videos when pointing to a picture on the wall. That AR app could also include any info worth mentioning about the guest, such as their level of engagement inside the community, memorable events and outstanding awards.

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‍Onboarding/Coliver Guidance: Chatbots are a perfect companion for the guest. It’s crucial to design the coliver’s journey in detail, then use your chatbot as a guide. Consider hiring a psychologist to design the chatbot personality to be perceived as a mentor or a friend.

Since we have already covered the onboarding phase, the rest of the journey can be a similar experience. The chatbot should be advanced enough to accept input for each stage, providing information as needed. If your coliving space has a personal or professional focus, the chatbot can be the perfect companion.

If well designed, it could also serve as a mental health supervisor to alert if something appears wrong. This could have helped prevent an unfortunate situation in my own coliving space. Mental health is more important than ever and should be taken seriously regardless of its use in technology or person-to- person.

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‍Community-Specific Data: As an operator, your IoT sensors grant you a data set specific to your space, allowing you to translate this information directly into practical tasks. This includes rules, but also general knowledge about the surroundings (i.e. “The co-op next door has a special on beer and pizza”) and, more importantly, culture.

This knowledge must be classified on importance, relevance and also tailored to the guests. For example, if a festival is coming up in the local town, but a guest is leaving the next day, the chatbot would not deliver that specific prompt. The knowledge base is in constant evolution, so you should construct your technology mindfully.

Guests can take differing amounts of time to acclimate. With the chatbots as virtual assistants, each coliver may take this adaptation at their own pace, freely interacting with the platform to receive news, information 

In addition, the chatbots can also provide your colivers with a profile, enabling a local version of social media or gamification. Each version opens up more avenues for personalisation and ease.

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‍User-Generated Content: Coliving operators must have a content strategy. This strategy includes events but also social media promotion and brand awareness through podcasts, Clubhouse, etc. This will be resource intensive, and it can be challenging if your turnover is high.

However, the solution is simple: use the naturally engaging day-to-day of your members to generate this content. Highlighting guest activity will bring new guests up to speed and creates an additional way to include them in your community as soon as they arrive, or even earlier. New members are generally the most excited about your community and are willing to get involved however they can. Leverage this!

Typically, new guests experience a fall-off in contribution when they realise they lack knowledge of community culture or are not sure how they can get involved. This is why I like WeDo’s approach; they
use a Tinder-like app for guests to opt-in to events, giving them control over their experience. On arrival, these guests immediately see which type of events are available to participate in or start on their own, from organising a simple BBQ for 20 people to a full-day fireside chat with a thought leader they are acquainted with, therefore leveraging their network.

Additionally, guests may suggest new event categories and are allowed to design the whole experience (requirements, stages, KPIs). Once approved by your team, that new category will be added to your stack, and any new guest may organise one.

Together with the guidance of a chatbot, the amount of scheduling, rules, prompts and other day-to-day actions can be automated, leaving your staff free to provide the human touch we all know is necessary.

Speaking of a human touch, an easy way to provide this connection through content is podcasting, and the industry has exploded in the last decade. With your guests, you have an endless amount of interviews (should they participate) with countless stories to enliven your brand’s social media. It is an easy way to feature your community’s human side and build excitement for those wishing to join it.

Lastly, a working knowledge base enhances any coliving experience. Even with the best, most prepared team, some issues will slip by, or even be so minute that one could never predict them altogether. With a user-generated content base, these small stories can be captured and used as examples to either show what is possible or what could be a cautionary tale.

• ‍Engagement: You can use both IoT sensors and chatbots to measure engagement. The definition of engagement might differ from community to community, but here are several examples of practical KPIs:
  1. Noise sensors in common areas: If there’s noise after 10pm in the hangout area, the community is healthy.
  2. If you have an application to manage events, as I mentioned before, you can track participation and how many events are run by community members rather than your team.
  3. Quizzes run by your chatbot will measure the group’s knowledge of your culture, the space, your rules, the city or even about other guests, allowing you to foster relationships between members. For example, asking “Did you know Mike is leaving in two days?” to encourage a goodbye dinner.
  4. It might be unpopular, but one extreme example would be using optic sensors together with an AI agent to measure interactions and body language, gathering real-life sentiment data for analysis.

You should expect your members to engage even after their experience in your coliving space. I’d love to see an app that detects when a member is travelling to a new city. The chatbot would put them in contact with other members in that city, making a global coliving brand that much stronger as a network.

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‍Expense sharing between members: Expense sharing is common with coliving guests. It might be buying groceries, going out for dinner, or catching a movie. Perhaps it’s the budgeting of an event. Platforms like JumboTiger already have this feature.

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‍2. Service Quality and Customer Satisfaction

To develop brand value and increase your guest base, it’s crucial to provide constant improvement in qualitative services, exceeding guest expectations across the board from pre-booking to post-stay. It’s one of the most critical factors for building customer confidence and maintaining a sustainable competitive advantage.

The problem I see is that guests are asked about the experience after their stay via a questionnaire. However, there is enough technology today to measure both service quality and customer satisfaction in the background and in real-time, switching course correction to be proactive instead of reactive.

This topic alone could cover a whole book, so I’ll give a few examples that can show you the potential of technology measuring two factors I am most concerned about:

Common Complaints: Note: Some people leave your space with a bad experience, but these same individuals could be non-confrontational if an app steps in to ease the feeling of “complaining.”

Noise: While this is a common complaint, many problems can be resolved with simple awareness, thus alleviating an issue that rests on a community’s mercurial preferences:

• People leave doors open while others are sleeping. 
• People turning the light on while others sleep.
• Sometimes noise is made inside the room (when moving suitcases or getting dressed). This obviously only happens in shared rooms, but it can happen in corridors or nearby areas with low noise tolerance while someone is sleeping and disturb single room occupants.

Solution: Bed sensors will alert you if someone is resting. Noise sensors can be placed in public areas: You can have the lights in the corridors blink intermittently like a “shhh.” If people don’t stop being noisy, the app itself will alert the HM.

Cleanliness: Obviously, you want to have your space clean all the time; that’s why you hire professionals. However, there are two places where even the best team can fall short: the kitchen and shared bathrooms.

• Kitchen: An AI image recognition agent can measure the kitchen’s tidiness. This agent should be connected to your event calendar. It’s okay to be untidy during events or while someone’s cooking. But at any other time, it should be pristine. The longer the kitchen is dirty on times where it shouldn’t, the higher the alert.
• Bathrooms: We use a tablet to allow guests to complain about:
  • Missing toilet paper
  • Dirty bathroom
  • Dirty sink
  • Dirty shower
  • Clogged toilet.

After coronavirus, I would choose a touchless device with the same functionality. You can know who was responsible if you measure who uses the bathroom. That can be done with face recognition before entering the bathroom, or more easily, with a smart key lock complete with individual guest codes. This puts pressure on everyone to maintain a clean environment by alerting staff. If one person ignores the mess, the next one might not, pointing the finger at the previous guest.
You can have the chatbot ask the guests if any issues are detected, be it noise or cleanliness. It’s important to note that all this will be measured in the background, and you should use this data not to police your guests, but to maintain a safe, fair and clean environment.

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3. Experience

‍There are many ways to define a coliving brand/ experience, but my definition contains an addition: there should be a personal growth component to the coliver experience.

What personal growth means depends on the niche you are targeting. If your target is narrow enough, there are many opportunities to offer personal growth to your guests, and technology is an ever-helpful assistant. Take the case of 42.org, a zero-tuition, zero-teachers, zero-class and self-paced computer programming school created and funded by French billionaire Xavier Niel.

You can argue that the campus they have in Silicon Valley is a coliving space. Whether you believe
it’s coliving or not, there’s much we can learn from them and how they use technology to guide their students from complete newbies to master coders in a few months. A coliving operator could use similar technology to guide a coliver in personal growth, offering self-paced guidance and courses to ‘level up’ their skills.

I imagine coliving spaces where people become chefs, professional esports gamers or build a stock trading career. Picture gamifying it, and making it collaborative by keeping the community as your centre.

Room personalisation: Imagine we could take the room experience to the next level. Smart frames show the guests’ family pictures, so they feel at home. Using humidity, temperature and air quality sensors, the team can guarantee perfect conditions. You could automatically open the windows when the air quality degrades. Blinds should open at the pre-programmed times in the morning and close at dusk.

Smart mattresses like Eightsleep’s allow a cool or heated bed according to a guest’s preferences. A smart mattress is also the perfect choice to measure sleep quality, monitor heart rate variability and even know when a guest has reached optimal sleep. If paired with a smart gym on the premises, your tech platform could provide a 360-degree health experience.

A smart shower can notify when it has reached the desired temperature, stopping the water flow until the guest steps inside. Whenever the guest moves to the back to use the gel, the flow stops again.

An Alexa-like device serves as the perfect interface. All these functions should be configurable by the guest in a seamless platform. Technology gives us the opportunity to design an experience no one can have at home, therefore providing the perfect value proposition that nobody can compete with.

Appliances: We can extend the use of technology to appliances. The guest should be able to know if the washing machine or any other appliance is available and, if not, get a notification when it is. Our chatbot can guide the guest on appliance use with text and video and one day using AR, imparting a clearer learning experience.

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4. Operations

Of course, with automation and other business-centred platforms, operating a coliving space is easier than ever, and scaling it is a matter of applying the proper techniques. These details stem from a balanced approach to operating your coliving community, augmented by technology, making it easy to replicate and build a strong (and even global) team. The full picture from multiple spaces can give real-time power to an operator with measurable KPIs for proactive tasks.

Technology is the perfect virtual (and silent) manager to put trust in. While limitless, here are my favourite examples:

The first is a simulator to train your team at onboarding: This simulation can quickly train your staff in guest selection processes, or could be a virtual representation of the space and see how they react to different issues that arise.

Another example from Startup Embassy is that we have a sensor that measures if it starts raining. The moment it does, it alerts the HM via the chatbot, and it triggers an Asana template with To-Do tasks like ‘cover the outside furniture with a tarp’ or ‘store the BBQ in the garage’. This way, the team knows exactly what to do, when to do it and I can measure if it’s been done. We can take it a step further by having our chatbot politely ask a guest to check if the outside furniture is covered.

Access Control: Apart from the obvious zones that control access and room reservations, I’d love to see a solution that would provide private fridges in the shared kitchen for guests, so they can order groceries to be delivered directly to their fridge, and only they would have access to it. In a coliving space, food is property! You can also provide access to bikes, scooters or cars to be shared and charged based on usage.

Energy Saving: There are still ways to improve how we save energy and resources. We can control thermostats, but what about water usage from showers? It’s easy to measure the time someone is using the shower. We could have a light in the shower head that would change its colour to red when the user exceeded a reasonable time. We don’t need to shut it down; just making them aware is enough.

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Privacy

On top of these four main pillars, there is also the subject of privacy. Privacy is a tenuous subject at the best of times, but it can be even more so within a coliving community. The focus is always on the community. Of course, you might have cultivated the perfect group balance, but over-reliance on staff (especially when operating from across the globe) can create issues.

However, there is one indisputable fact: guests exchange part of their privacy for more affordable living, finding their tribe and enjoying a shared space. Some guests might not grasp this at first, but if you want to keep the peace, the space must be run with clear privacy guidelines. Two places are universally agreed upon as completely private: the bathroom and private rooms. However, shared rooms and common areas do not fall under those rules. If your staff is ready to step in when arguments arise, and you are also alerted via a chatbot “privacy” feature, then situations can be resolved before they escalate.

The balance of privacy must be maintained by keeping an open line of communication from operator to staff and each guest. While it can be challenging at times, the best leaders create a space of mutual respect and honesty.

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Conclusion

At the end of the day, think of coliving tech as peace of mind. Ninety-percent of your platform should be under the radar. To your guests’ knowledge, your space magically works, coming together flawlessly by an industrious staff.

While important at the time, missing toilet paper or a messy kitchen will not end your career as a coliving operator. However, after years of data collection for your space, patterns will emerge. Guests fall in love with a local pub. Rain is particularly bad in September. A festival churns out noise but is a spectacular networking event. All of these things provide excellent data points to streamline how you present a stay for each person.

Imagine a large screen displaying all of these data points, complete with miniature houses and guest labels. With each display, you can dive deeper into how your brand is represented at ground level, all from a remote location. With this real-time data, reports are a thing of the past. You can quickly source the most critical data and relay exactly what your team needs to hear.

Tech is coliving’s future - especially with verticalisation. With this complete platform, trust is not the only thing you can rely on. A sophisticated system will continually optimise.

Of course, the biggest question here is, “where is this system?” If it can solve so many problems, why is it not available? To this, I say, we have an incredible opportunity here. We are on the cusp of something truly extraordinary. While many players are stumbling in this market, there is enough space for us to join together around this central pillar.

As coliving operators, we share the same thirst for community. And through community, we can make this world a better place.

Coliving consultants I’ve talked to mention how difficult it is to find a complete tech solution, and I agree. There’s none yet, but that’s precisely the opportunity! There are many players trying to nail it, but the market is large enough, and it would be interesting to see them joining forces. I hope that with this article, I’ve given new ideas to explore in order to achieve this goal and open your eyes to the potential technology has for us coliving operators.