Top 7 Take Aways — Leah Ziliak on Creating The Perfect Coliving Experience

In our latest Rooftalks podcast episode, we invited Leah Ziliak, founder of the Coliving Consultant, to speak with us about how to create the perfect coliving experience, how to bring your residential community to life, and why the right onboarding is critical to create strong communities.

Rooftalks is created in proud partnership with The Class Foundation, Conscious Coliving, and Coliving Hub.

Don’t have time to listen to the whole episode? Read through the main takeaways below — or sign up at Obeyo.com/rooftalks to receive all future episodes right into your inbox.

Top 1 — Community means having always someone around who can help

This is the reason why as an operator there is a need to create connections and build trust between residents as a number one priority in how the entire customer experience is designed. Coliving is all about community — and connecting with people is what makes this a unique, outstanding, and sometimes even magical experience.

Top 2 — Don’t become an event planner

Don’t become an event planner but empower your community to take your community further. As a community facilitator, your job is to provide structure for the events and to facilitate them instead of planning them yourself.

Top 3 — Size is not everything

Retention rates, duration of stay, and referrals are just some of the possible metrics to look at. What you really want to optimize is engagement and connection this drives all other metrics. For example, small gatherings might often be more effective than the big ones as people really get to bond in those more intimate and specific settings. So measure engagement and connections and not just people showing up.

Top 4 — Bigger places often struggle more with creating authentic community

In community building, the goal is not to connect everyone with everyone but to connect the right people with each other. Quite often in large-scale developments, people lose themselves in large settings. Here, the right tech is crucial for its most important role to connect the right people and help each other discover their similarities. That's when the magic starts to happen.

Top 5 — Onboarding is where you set yourself up for success

Having a solid onboarding plan is critical to getting the coliving experience right. Important in this stage to set the right expectations, support with practical tips around how to best arrive, integrate themselves into the community, or possibly even connect with the group ahead of your time at that space.

Top 6 — Offboarding is where you build your brand long term

Offboarding on the other hand is equally important as onboarding as this is your chance to enhance your brand and brand awareness, boost word of mouth and turn your former members into your (brand’s) biggest friends.

Top 7 — A strong community is the biggest asset of your business

A strong community experience will become even more important as a differentiator as the market matures, and other residential living segments pick up on this trend. And now remote work has given a whole new boost to coliving and community as people are more isolated than ever striving for connections. On top of that, the community is difficult to walk away from which makes your residents stick around longer, and your biggest fans.

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• About Rooftalks — the podcast: Spirited conversation intersection of community, technology, and shared living with thought leaders and movers and shakers in the shared living space: sign-up at obeyo.com/rooftalks.
• About Michael: Michael is co-founder and CEO at Obeyo. Passionate about connecting people, he loves to explore ideas at the intersection between community, shared-living, and technology. Feel free to connect with him on LinkedIn.
• About Obeyo: Obeyo is the first all-in-one operating system and community app for residential living built around the learnings from 100+ shared living operators.

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