We have designed our model based on three main pillars

1. Beautifully and smartly designed spaces that foster human connection
2. An engaged community, activated and empowered by our staff to enable them to be the creators of their own experience.
3. A technology that simplifies the traditional residential administrative burden and allows people to focus on personal growth and social interaction.

Since we started in 2016, technology has always been a key element in our vision. With dozens of property management and building apps on the market, we nonetheless decided to develop our own digital platform.

We named it Dunbar, after the anthropologist who specialised in social interaction and dubbed ‘Dunbar’s number’, a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships - relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person. Our Dunbar platform was created to provide the best experience for our residents, to reduce our environmental impact and to optimise our financial performance.

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Control the experience to make renting simple and enjoyable

In 2016, when we launched Urban Campus, booking a taxi or a hotel could already be done with a single click on your phone. Our vision has always been that signing a long-term lease and moving in should be as simple as that, and yet we couldn’t find this solution anywhere.

Our conviction is that to provide an engaging and distinguished experience to your customers, you need control over your infrastructure. In e-commerce, anyone can create an online shop in 5 minutes with software like Shopify, but if you want to offer an amazing 24-hour delivery service like Amazon does, you need full control over your logistics and warehouse; that’s the core of your infrastructure. As a residential operator, we believe you need to fully control your tech platform to make your rental experience a key differentiator. So we hired engineers to develop it.

At Urban Campus today, everything can be done online: from signing your lease to paying your security deposit and your rent, getting to know your neighbours, etc. It makes life easier for tenants, who have full control over their stay and their experience in the community.

Our objective here is to simplify our tenants’ lives, and to offer them access to a growing marketplace of services and perks: in one click, they can subscribe to additional cleaning services, bedlinen provision, delivery of boxes of organic fruits and vegetables, etc. We integrate with external services providers and everything is transparent for tenants: one interface, one click, one payment. Over time, we noticed that extra services play an important role in customer retention, and we keep expanding them by looking for new local partners.

From an operational point of view, these automations also mean our team can focus on customer relationships and community development, and less on administrative issues. Time that would traditionally be spent on drafting leases or chasing payments is used to talk to residents, organise community content matching their needs and set up new services and partnerships and more.

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Enabling European growth and scalability

Being a residential operator like Urban Campus is a business of volume. Technology plays an important role in enabling scalability of our operations, especially when our goal is to build a European network.

Dunbar enables the automation of a lot of internal processes that would take hours otherwise. Rent payment is a must in our mission. It is done automatically, grouping rent and services in one simple payment. Dunbar then handles the distribution of payments to building owners, as well as our different partners, such as the insurance companies we collaborate with to help insure our members. We can also simplify a lot more than this: online visits, self move-in and move-out process, planning of cleaning providers, reporting to building owners, etc.

Our system has been designed to adapt to any type of building, any organisation of space, any legal framework, any country. Opening a new space or even expanding to a new country takes minutes from a tech point of view (from a construction point of view, that’s another story...).

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Leverage data

To enable continuous improvement of our experience and operations, our system is connected to different tech suppliers (power sensors, smart locks, ticketing tool, CRM, etc.).

With connected locks throughout our building, tenants can open doors with a tag or directly via their phones. This enables self move-in and move-out, and simplifies property management tasks like cleaning or maintenance access.

With power sensors, we are able to monitor electricity consumption across the building and identify anomalies to correct them proactively. Through this data analysis we identified that, in winter, some apartments were using both their gas boiler and air conditioning in heating mode. With communication and better configuration of their heating systems, we were able to reduce electricity consumption by 15% during the first year of operation of our coliving spaces. The right data, when properly collected and analysed, can help optimise operational expenses and reduce environmental impact.

Data can also help reach and maintain maximum occupancy and find the best matching profiles for our communities. We are using our tech platform to optimise our commercialisation strategy. Dunbar alerts the team when an apartment has a high probability of becoming vacant - based on various parameters such as the apartment’s past occupancy, length of current contract, additional services subscribed to, etc. - reminding them to start the commercialisation process. It also gives them insights on the potential profiles that would best suit the details of the room as well as the roommates already in the flat. This is done so that our marketing team targets the best resident based on previous data about our operations and the unit itself.

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What's next for Dunbar?

Dunbar has helped us understand how it can automate as much as possible so that the residents and our staff can focus on the human side of a coliving space: community development.

After environmental and financial optimisation, Dunbar now focuses on providing the basis for members to integrate into the community seamlessly: from an early introduction to flatmates allowing members to gain visibility over what colivers are working on personally and professionally, to updates on what is happening in the community during their first week.

Dunbar is working on creating the foundation to promote authentic connections between members of the community based on common interests and passions.

This is one of our biggest objectives of 2021, to create a platform for all our members to share: current residents, our coworkers and alumni. A place where all can participate, support one another, share common interests, and learn from each other.

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