Co-living is all about empowering tenants
As part of our special focus on the issue of Co-Living and the launch of the Oppidan scheme in the Northern Quarter TheBusinessDesk.com organised a round table.
Today is the second day of coverage from the event.
The Oppidan scheme in the Northern Quarter is a first of its kind in the city.
People will live together in a shared space with the emphasis on communal living.
The aim is to create a new kind of living space and tackle the issue of urban loneliness for people who been people wo work and live in the city centre.
The event was held in partnership with Oppidan and was held at the scheme in Swan Street.
The attendees included:
Colin Shenton from the Shenton Group/ Oppidan Life
Hannah-Rose Close, Oppidan
Rob Hogarth, JLL
James Sidlow, Renaker
Nina Barker, CBRE
Nicol Deutsch, Slater Heelis
Rhys Westacott, 5 Plus
Victoria Russell, Property Alliance Group
Ned Brooks, Savills
Carl Austin-Bevan, VA Clean
Martin Ellerby, Placefirst
Geoff Willis, Craigleith Property
The conversation looked at a number of issues including what is driving the market.
Rob Hogarth
Institutions that are driven by income tend to obsess about things such as fixtures and fittings and as a result they lose tenants and income.
It is important to have happy tenants who want to live somewhere.
Colin Shenton
Colin Shenton
That is probably the difference between Co-living and build to rent. Restriction is nothing to do with building a community and if you start telling people what they can and can’t do that immediately would put me off.
Co-living is separate from build to rent, it is a different beast. It empowers the tenant.
Oppidan is part of the same group as Ziferblat and the culture there is the answer is always yes now what is the question.
If someone wants to hang up a picture, paint or wall or move the furniture it is their apartment for that period of time.
If you are trying to get a sense of ownership, the feeling that this place belongs to you. If your landlord insists you can only have a tenancy for six months and that puts you at the risk of being thrown out, or the rent going up dramatically then it becomes quite a transitory life.
Our answer to that is to offer tenancies between a month and five years on the basis that the tenant can give a month’s notice at any time.
We are committed to providing that tenant with a home but they are not restricted about when they want to leave. We are confident enough that we will be able to re-let the property within a short period of time.
We want people to say I love living here and so long as I continue to pay the rent and I am a nice person then that is not going to change in the near future. You are not going to be at the whims of some landlord you have never met or a committee in London suddenly deciding they want to impact on the way you live.
The second point I wanted to make is that all Oppidan’s have house committees which will run the buildings in terms of a social life and interviewing the next occupiers and so on. It is all about empowering the occupier.
We want people to feel people like it is their home.
It is not entirely altruistic because if the occupier feels empowered then they are more likely to treat the place with respect, to stay longer and to pay the rent on time.
Community is not just a marketing slogan, we think it directly affects our bottom line. It means we can get good rents from the most respectable tenants for the longest period.
Tenants are being empowered but in return for that we would expect a sense of responsibility and fairness.
Everybody should have a stake in a successful Oppidan building.
Nicola Deutsch
The government has said they will bring in controls so people will have longer tenancies.
That is going to take time but it seems we are moving in the right direction. The worry always is that people don’t have control over their long term futures.
The feeling is that you are dealing with faceless countries that are often on the other side of the world.
Rob Hogarth
If you look at Manchester the growth has been phenomenal in the last ten years and that has been driven by the increase in jobs in the city. We manage the Green Gate scheme.
We have great retention in Manchester and the quality of the universities is also helping with that.
There is huge demand for these properties and that is now slowing down any time soon.
Colin Shenton
The whole purpose of doing this in Manchester is that we are trying things out here and seeing how they work.
We are changing per person and the whole point of that is to put couples off. The reason for that is that we have 15 units. If there was a couple living in every unit we would have 30 people in a relatively small place.
If you had 30 people living in this space it would very quickly become a zoo.
We are not against couples, but at this point at the growth in the concept we are aiming at people who live alone.
Something I am very keen on which is the urban loneliness question.
If you are part of a couple then most people are not lonely. If you work hard and work long hours and then come home to an empty apartment at night that is no fun.
But with a scheme like ours you come home, the lights are on and someone has made a cup of coffee and is watching TV.
It deals with the mental health issue of urban loneliness which is getting lots more attention than ever before. We all know of people who have lived in cities and found it very lonely.
People who live in rural areas and villages do not found it lonely because there is a sense of community and togetherness there.
We all know people who live in large apartment buildings who do not know their neighbours.
If couples move into something like this then it is likely they will do things together and stay in their flat rather than mix with everyone else. That is exactly the opposite of what we want to see.
Couples are less likely to mingle and more likely to stick together in a clique which is not really the point of the whole exercise.
We want to try and attract people who want to mingle. Co-living is not going to be for everyone. People tend to like their privacy and that’s fine.
However, there are currently 25,000 units in Manchester and we have 15 units. We are confident that we will be able to find 15 people who would like to live here.
Hannah-Rose Close
A lot of what we will be doing in terms of managing the house will be about communicating. It is just about speaking to people and getting to know them. It is about understanding where people are coming from and what their interests are.
We will have a set of house rules. It is all about respecting the space and respecting the people in that space.
We want people to be curious kind and welcoming. There will be standard rules and there will be zero tolerance when it comes to things like racism and sexism.
We are trying to be relaxed as possible. It is all about respecting the space and about being grown up about things.
There will be an element of watching and seeing how things develop and we will take it from there. We will be talking to our residents about what works and what doesn’t and we will take it from there.
We are very much in a listening and learning mode at the moment. This is very much a work in progress.
