Embark on a journey through the communal heartbeat of coliving with Gareth and Daniel as we unravel the fabric of shared living spaces. We navigate the sometimes choppy waters of residing alongside others, from the pop-up vibrancy of short-term arrangements to the deep roots of long-term communities. Discover how the flexibility of stay duration impacts everything from social bonds to the logistics of moving, and how coliving companies are blurring the lines between a transient lifestyle and the stability of a place to call home.
We've all faced the decision of where to lay our heads, whether for a night or a year. The challenge becomes more intriguing within the coliving world. This episode taps into that discussion, contrasting the sense of belonging that emerges over time with the excitement of ever-changing neighbors and surroundings. Listen in as we share anecdotes from our own London lives, revealing both the spontaneous joys and the practical struggles that come with coliving, irrespective of the duration.
Gareth and I also speculate on the future of coliving, where the dial of living arrangements could shift with the grace of blockchain technology. Envision a world where moving from one space to another is as easy as swiping a screen, allowing social networks to strengthen even as addresses change. As we ponder this modern redefinition of 'neighborhood,' we invite you to weigh in on the conversation and join us in considering how fluidity in living spaces might just be the answer we've been seeking.
Embark on a journey through the communal heartbeat of coliving with Gareth and Daniel as we unravel the fabric of shared living spaces. We navigate the sometimes choppy waters of residing alongside others, from the pop-up vibrancy of short-term arrangements to the deep roots of long-term communities. Discover how the flexibility of stay duration impacts everything from social bonds to the logistics of moving, and how coliving companies are blurring the lines between a transient lifestyle and the stability of a place to call home.
We've all faced the decision of where to lay our heads, whether for a night or a year. The challenge becomes more intriguing within the coliving world. This episode taps into that discussion, contrasting the sense of belonging that emerges over time with the excitement of ever-changing neighbors and surroundings. Listen in as we share anecdotes from our own London lives, revealing both the spontaneous joys and the practical struggles that come with coliving, irrespective of the duration.
Gareth and I also speculate on the future of coliving, where the dial of living arrangements could shift with the grace of blockchain technology. Envision a world where moving from one space to another is as easy as swiping a screen, allowing social networks to strengthen even as addresses change. As we ponder this modern redefinition of 'neighborhood,' we invite you to weigh in on the conversation and join us in considering how fluidity in living spaces might just be the answer we've been seeking.
Welcome everyone to another episode of Co-Living Down Insights. This is your host, daniel, and today I'm joined by my co-host, gareth.
Speaker 2:Hi Gareth, hi Dan, I'm excited about this week's topic. It's gonna be fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah, today we're gonna talk about something which is quite fun, actually, and we'll talk about co-living, specifically short-term co-living versus long-term co-living. So we'll be discussing the differences, pros and cons, and then we'll tell you exactly how we do things here at Co-Living. Down, gareth, let's dive into this world of short versus long-term co-living.
Speaker 2:Yeah, let's do that, and what we'll do is we'll have a little bit of a review on what are co-living companies doing right now and how this fits into the benefits of a co-living lifestyle.
Speaker 2:So co-living is often set up to be quite flexible, and co-living companies often utilise very flexible tenancy agreements. Sometimes they don't even call them tenancy agreements. Sometimes they call them something different to reflect the fact that co-living is kind of like a cross between commercial and residential property and is considered that way in some legal jurisdictions, and so it might not even be a tenancy agreement, it might be like a licence or a different kind of legal agreement, and this enables co-living companies to offer much more flexible residency spans. They call them so. Typical co-living ranges all the way from 4 to 12 months although it can be a lot less than that as well and with short notice periods. Some of them even offer really short minimum stays for people to come and test them out, so you can come and stay like an overnight or a week and then decide if you want a longer term stay after you've tested it out. So built into the entire kind of way of living for co-living is this flexibility in the timescales, Dan.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. And also we need to recognise that the term co-living has been used to really encompass a wide range of different types of accommodations and, importantly, different types of arrangements. And on one end of the spectrum we have the quote unquote, super short term co-living spaces that are more similar to, let's say, a hostel or a hotel, where people can really stay even just one night if they so wish. There's usually a discount for people that stay for longer, but certainly it's still allowed to be there just for one night or a couple of nights or a week, and this type of co-living is really more akin to a hostel or a hotel. What this means is usually people are considered guests that are travelling. They don't actually live there, but the reason they're positioned as co-living is usually because of the nature of the activities that they offer and the target market that they have as well. So, if we take a typical hotel, meeting other people is usually not part of the value proposition. Co-working with other people is usually not part of that USB as well. What includes in these value propositions? Meeting other people is usually a hostel, but again, hostels usually target a different type of people, typically backpackers that are not necessarily working. So there's usually no co-working facilities in a hostel and also there's different arrangements and sometimes also different types of rooms, like usually in the co-living space. You probably won't see these huge rooms like 20, 30 beds or even more and so on you could see in some hostels. So there's some differences. There are cases where there's a lot of overlap. So there are cases where all of a sudden we see a very fine line between a co-living and a hostel and you may argue that it's basically a hostel. It's basically a hostel just calling itself a co-living, just to look a little bit more modern, and so on. So it's more marketing than anything else. So the purpose of this podcast now is not to define what is a co-living it was not supposed to be a co-living and so on. It's more about understanding what the market is offering and what the key differences are. So we can see one end of the spectrum.
Speaker 1:We have the very short-term co-living and this can happen really in two ways. It could either be permanent, which is what we describe now, so a permanent co-living where guests are staying for short stays, or a mixture of short and kind of medium term or kind of short term. Or we have pop-up co-living. So a pop-up co-living space is effectively a space that is not a co-living all year long and typically not even for a very long time. It could range from weeks to months.
Speaker 1:So a co-living operator decides to usually rent some sort of space, make it a co-living, attract some people. It could be for co-working, so it could be some type of entrepreneurs that share some commonalities, they meet together to co-work, or it could be more digital nomads it could be sometimes even just travelers that they want to spend a week or two weeks doing activities. So usually pop-up co-living. They would have a calendar of events that is a little bit more dense and intense, because obviously people are staying there for a short period of time, so they want to get the most of that event as well. So that's pretty much a summary of what we see out there when it comes to short term co-living spaces.
Speaker 1:Then we gradually see other co-living spaces that allow minimum stay, let's say one month, which is pretty common, and when the minimum stay is one month there's some turnover. So obviously good opportunities to meet new people and good flexibility as well. But also you'll see that some residents decide to stay for actually several months and you can get some sort of combination where residents have been there for a year or more and other residents are new, so you would have that feel as well and then, gradually, if we move along this spectrum, we see pretty much every kind of average stay and we see that in bigger usually larger co-living spaces or more long term co-living spaces, a typical average stay could be a year, year and a half. Then, if we go to the complete other end of the spectrum, we can consider housing, co-ops or housing arrangements where people can stay, let's say, with families. They could be classed as co-living.
Speaker 1:It's sometimes not really called co-living spaces, but in some cases they could be classed as co-living, especially if there's shared kitchen facilities, for example, or some other facilities. And what this means is that effectively, we do have some types of long term co-living spaces, again, especially if there's families or a relatively older target market. What this means is typically, historically, these people tend to move a little bit less compared to young digital nomads and therefore the average stay could be much, much longer, even several years. So this kind of encompasses all the types of co-living spaces that we've seen and, gareth, let's dive into the pros and cons of these spaces.
Speaker 2:Yeah, let's do that, dan, and I think it would help to look at the pros and cons through the eyes of one particular archetype or customer archetype. So, if we focus on digital nomads because they're quite an interesting kind of hybrid of different characters looking for very particular things when they move around so if you imagine you're a digital nomad and you've arrived in a new city somewhere around the world, you're all excited because it's an adventure. You're going to meet new people, you're going to get exposed to new cultures, it's going to be fun. Now, you're not a backpacker, so you're not there just to have fun and you do need somewhere where you can work right. So if you arrive as a digital nomad in a new city, if you want some really short-term membership, what are your options? Sorry, short-term accommodation what are your options? Your options are okay, go and live in a hostel, but it might be full of backpackers and there's not going to be much working space. I can go to a hotel, but I might pay quite high rates to stay in a hotel room for a few nights, but could be a good option to get to know the city. And or you could get like an Airbnb for a few weeks and book, you know, a fairly good piece of accommodation where you can live and work at the same time and get the benefits of both worlds. And, if you're lucky, in some cities there are co-living spaces.
Speaker 2:Now the great thing about co-living is that you can, on these flexible arrangements as a digital nomad. In the right co-living space, you can come in for one night a week, a month and you don't need to go through the whole signing a tenancy agreement, which would be an extremely laborious, bureaucratic process. If you want to move into an apartment or a flat in a city to try it out for a month, it just doesn't make sense to grab a flat or an apartment for one month on any kind of contract, even three months. Three months is probably the minimum amount of time. It would be worth, you know, using having that bureaucratic hassle. So a digital nomad can come into a co-living space very quickly, sign whatever length of agreement they're looking for. They might stay for a night, test it out, next day say you know, I kind of like this place, I like it. Let's sign a one month contract and then they're there for a month and they get to test it out and it's a very rapid living arrangement, a very rapid adjustment to what's required then.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So one advantage definitely the flexibility of making decisions on the go, pretty much so, whether someone has the intention of staying long term but still prefers to test the place out for a night or two before committing, or whether someone is simply just staying for a short term. That works, because certainly keeping this flexibility definitely appeals to a lot of people. Now, what's important to understand is that that flexibility has multiple advantages, not just because the person is testing the space and saying, okay, do I like this space, do I not like this space, and so on and so forth, but also because it means that a person could potentially even come back quite a few times, right, and so they might want to spend a few days in a place, or a few weeks, then leave, then come back, leave, come back. So the ability to rent just for short terms has this advantage as well.
Speaker 1:Another advantage of short term is that, effectively, there'll be a lot of new people coming in over and over, so the advantage of this is the fact that you can meet a lot of new people. So, rather than being stuck with the same people for a long period of time, some people might be a little bit worried and say what if I don't like my flatmates, my co-living space, residence? What if I don't like that? By having an arrangement where people can stay short term, there could be new people coming over and over again. So that could be an advantage, right, gareth?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a huge advantage because, again, if you take that digital nomad example, imagine there is no co-living option and you decide you need a living, a social and working place.
Speaker 2:So you get an Airbnb and you have a good place to stay, but you're in a new city, you don't know anyone. So, although you can work from home, you can't socialise from home. You need to go out, meet people, go to events or do whatever you need to do to go and build a social life right. So having these short term apartment options are good for working, but they're not so good for socialising, so there's trade-offs involved. So one of the major advantages of a co-living space is that you often have a co-working space. If you're a digital nomad, you can work there and as soon as you're done you can close your laptop and say hi to somebody right next to you or go grab a coffee in the coffee shop that might be situated in the co-living, or there might be a social event that night. So you're kind of like, really huge advantage to build a social life and keep your work life going at the same time simultaneously in co-living.
Speaker 1:Exactly so. That's a big advantage, and we'll get to the disadvantages of the short term model a little bit later. Let's see the advantages of, let's say, medium term and eventually long term co-living spaces as well. One advantage of staying longer in general, which is pretty obvious, is price, because usually stays that are longer they charge at a lower average rate. So what this means is that if somebody is on a budget going to places that allow short stays, like one night or two nights or even a week, it can be more expensive, whereas staying for longer usually comes at a lower price tag. So that's a potential advantage.
Speaker 1:Another advantage is that when people are in courage to stay for a longer period of time, effectively, there's an opportunity to bond a lot more with your mates, with our residents. What this means is that you're not just meeting new people and making some exciting connections, maybe some adventures, some memories, but you can actually make some long term friends, which is a big advantage, which rarely happens. If the average stay is a few days to a couple of weeks, by staying for months it's really possible to develop stronger bonds and make friends for life. So that's certainly an advantage of these types of places. Another one is stability as well. So, even though we're talking about digital nomads and say, yes, it's great to be nomadic, stability can be quite important as well, especially for people that have a demanding job or a certain life situation, or for people that want to be focused on different things, not just looking at where to go next, constantly, all the time. So that's another advantage. What else can we say about longer term, let's say medium, all the way to longer term co-leaving spaces.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the advantage of staying medium term to longer term is basically relationships. You build much deeper friendships and relationships and networking, even with people for business perhaps and that's the major advantage to staying in the same place. But there's also an advantage there in that you're establishing a base and you're getting to know that area of the city where you're situated. Building those relationships is the biggest advantage by far. I can't think of a better advantage to the medium to long-term approach done. But again, it's really coming through that combined social and work advantages at the same time in a co-living space.
Speaker 1:Yeah, definitely, if we think about our personal experience as well, we both lived for several years in the same co-living space in London. London is a place where it's not really difficult to meet new people. There's tons of new people, tons of events, tons of things to do, but what the city is not set up for is to naturally spend a lot of time with the same people. It's a very big city, a lot of different things to do, so being in a co-living space for several years really allowed us to build stronger relationships, stronger connections with the people around us so effectively. This is a big advantage in many cases and, depending on the life situation, if someone has children or a planet of children, if someone has a life that you know, maybe they're not necessarily looking for the next adventure every day, but they want to stabilize a little bit.
Speaker 1:it makes a lot of sense to be somewhere more long-term. And another advantage of being somewhere long-term is that people can really shape the place a little bit more. So if we think about spaces that are co-owned, potentially, or even when it's rental but long-term rental people can shape the space a little bit more and kind of make it their home, give it their own flavor and so on. Typically, if you're staying somewhere for only a few weeks, you won't make the space yours. In many ways, it's more about adapting to what someone else has created for you. But staying somewhere long-term really gives people the ability to shape it even further, Right, Gareth?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's where you start to get like a community identity. So, even if there is no theme, there could be a theme in a co-living and this is something we're going to talk about in a later podcast episode. To have a themed co-living where you know a certain shared interest group will get together and build a co-living together. For example, athletes. A bunch of athletes get together in the same sport and they live together in a co-living in order to further their own careers. We will talk a bit about that in another podcast.
Speaker 2:But what does happen when you have these medium-to-long-term relationships in a co-living is that a kind of community personality starts to emerge, a culture starts to emerge. The way people hang out, what they're doing, what they're interested in. You know you get those bonds and maybe a shared interest start to develop out of just the people hanging out together, which is really cool. There was a board game night where we lived in our co-living, dan, and that was a really popular event and a lot of people became board game players, even though they'd never really played board games before, because it was an easy thing to do on a Sunday afternoon. You just rock up and say, hey, what game do we want to play and you pull a new game out of the stack and everyone got really into board games for a few months, which was really, which was great fun.
Speaker 1:Absolutely so great experiences can come from long-term stays as well, and that's the beauty of it, after all. So this gives a good picture of what the advantages are of each type of arrangement and there's more, of course, and feel free to share. If there's anything that we've missed out, definitely let us know. Let's talk a little bit about the disadvantages as well, and some of them are obvious now once we compare the advantages. So, obviously, short-term stays typically more expensive and not as good to create long-term bonds, so that's pretty obvious, but there's more disadvantages as well. So, when we look at short-term stays, what normally happens is if someone is a digital nomad and is going from place to place, staying one or two weeks in each place, even months in some cases.
Speaker 1:Let's not talk about lifestyle, because I understand it's a choice, so they decide in their one-day type of lifestyle, so it might not be at this advantage for them, because it's their choice, but what happens, though, is, eventually, they will never have roots in one place and, more importantly, with the current system, they will never really have ownership of anything.
Speaker 1:It's pretty much like living in hotels or short-term rentals. What this means is they never get really the opportunity to make a place. There, they never get the opportunity to get any ownership and potentially not even a say in what happens. So usually they go to a place and they kind of have to adapt to the local community, they have to accept what's there as opposed to really creating something. And okay, in some cases you may argue there's a minimal type of input that people can give, even within a week or two. Sure, they can co-create the experience, but that happens to an extent, and it's a much smaller extent when you look at other types of arrangements where people can effectively fully embrace space and simply play a bigger role and have a bigger impact. So this could potentially be a disadvantage. What else should we add, gareth, in terms of disadvantages for the shorter-term end of the spectrum?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I mean, basically, you have to go and find somewhere else to live, right? So that's a major disadvantage, because when you're trying to work and socialize and you also need to worry about where you're going to stay next, it takes up a huge amount of time. Anyone that's ever, you know, moved multiple times from different accommodations knows the feeling of how much time that can take up to do your research, find out where you want to live. It's complicated, it takes time, it takes energy and you need to continually be thinking where am I going to live next? And you know it's hard enough for people looking for jobs, but also amplified when you're looking for just somewhere to live.
Speaker 1:Exactly. And it's not just deciding where to live, but imagine having to go through all this vetting process over and over again. So, once you find a space and you're comfortable in that space, having to find a new space and also ensuring that the space is good quality first of all, that it's safe, that it's comfortable, that fits the purpose that you're looking to have there, and even when everything lines up somehow, you're still jumping into a new community where you don't know anyone typically and you have zero pre-existing bonds or ties with that particular community. And again, it can be exciting on one hand, but doing this over and over it can be quite tiring and it can feel as though life doesn't really progress at some point, Because even though it can be fun and exciting at some point, it's like starting life from scratch over and over again, so not really having roots anywhere, not really having long-term bonds, and therefore I've seen a lot of people get burned out simply by moving from place to place.
Speaker 1:And what also happens is, again, it's not just the time spent but also the risk. What if the next choice is not as good? What if they choose a place it doesn't have certain things, for example? What if they choose a place with a bad internet connection, All of a sudden their work performance is penalized and the cost might be higher than the benefits of being in that place. So all this risk would then all of a sudden encourage people to stay long-term in a certain place.
Speaker 1:But then we go into these advantages of long-term spaces, and the one that is pretty obvious is that people can feel that they're kind of stagnating in a certain place, maybe a lack of stimulation, lack of adventure, lack of new exploration, Even though some long-term co-living spaces still offer an interesting calendar of events. They still offer opportunities to meet new people and do different things still being in the same place, especially if there is a long-term commitment. We know some co-living spaces require people to commit for at least a year, sometimes even more than that, and what this means is for a lot of people it can become quite limiting. Gareth.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely Dan, and it's kind of this weird flip side of the benefits of the flexibility you get in co-living spaces through short-term contracts. It's extremely flexible, more so than other accommodations often but then the flip side on the long-term contracts is that they're not that easy to get out of. Some of them have quite difficult or absent break clauses, which means you need to wait until the end of your contract to get out of it. And if you do get out of it, you have to find somebody to replace you in the contract in order to not have to pay the remaining rent that's due for however many months. So that has a major disadvantage.
Speaker 2:If you need to pay three months' rent or find somebody to take your place, that takes a lot of time and energy to find somebody who's not already in the building to come and take your room. So and that's the same, the same or similar when you move into an apartment or a flat and you have a tenancy agreement or a lease agreement in different places, sometimes you have a break contract where it's easy to get out of a contract and sometimes there isn't. Sometimes you need to wait six months before you can actually get out and move. So the disadvantages are similar, but again, these things can be customized in different co-living spaces. Different co-living companies can take different approaches, and that's what we're going to move into and talk about for how co-living DAO enables or mitigates some of these disadvantages, enables some of the advantages while mitigating the disadvantages, to get the best of both worlds.
Speaker 1:Exactly so. Let's start from the most obvious advantage, which is the ability to have shared governance and shared ownership. Now, certainly, there might be different ways of doing that, and we discussed different governance models and different ownership models in many of the other episodes here at co-living DAO Insights. So by all means, check them out if you want to hear more about that. What happens when someone wants to live let's say, as an example, short-term or even, let's say, medium short-term?
Speaker 1:In a normal arrangement, there's no way they would be able to own anything and there's probably not a lot of chances to really have governance rights either. But we co-living DAO, what we allow is fractionalized ownership and decentralized governance. What this means is that even if someone chooses a short stay, they could potentially still become part-owners of the place and just get fractions of the shares of that place or fractionalized shares. Similarly with governance, even though someone is staying only for a short term, it doesn't mean they have to be excluded completely from any form of governance. They might still get a say proportional to the length of their stay, for example, or some other parameters, and this means that even when a stay short, people still get the opportunity to shape the community where they're in and also get the opportunity to feel a sense of belonging, because if they earn shares in a certain community, they do have a stake in that community even after they leave, which is a complete different way of living effectively, right? Gareth?
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly so. We spoke about the benefits of ownership and having a real voice to shape the community you live in. This applies to short-term residents as well. In the co-living-dow model, if you stay in a co-living-dow community, you will earn shares, even if you're only there for a day. Perhaps you can earn fractionalized shares, which completely changes the game, because then, even when you leave, if you stay for one day and you move on, you're always going to feel a part of that community because they've given you a fraction of a share.
Speaker 2:You may benefit from that in the future. It can open up doors to other co-living spaces, which leads into. One of the major benefits for short-term, medium-term and long-term stays at co-living-dow, in a co-living-dow community is that we're not just one co-living community, we're a federation of co-living communities. You might stay in one co-living-dow community for a day and it's not quite the right location, or it's not quite the right community for you. You can then, because you're familiar with that community. You can then move on to the next co-living-dow community in a different location with a different community. That suits you better than the federation opens up a whole bunch of opportunities.
Speaker 1:Let's break it down, because this is really important.
Speaker 1:One element is that lack of stability that we mentioned about short-term co-living spaces is really offset in the co-living-dow model by the fact that you can still stay within the network, within the federation, even though you're living one particular co-living space, going to another co-living space which is part of the co-living-dow family.
Speaker 1:First of all, it saves you a lot of time in terms of vetting, because it's already been pre-vetted by co-living-dow. It saves you a lot of time when it comes to really understanding what type of community it is, because every co-living-dow community will have clear guidelines and clear communication on what to expect once most people live there. You're probably also already familiar with the platform to use the resident app and how to really implement the shared governance ownership that we're talking about, and really how to find your way around everything. Even though you're physically changing your geographical location, you're effectively staying in the same federation, so sort of the same extended community, which again is a great advantage in terms of stability, but potentially in terms of bonding as well, because we mentioned short-term stays have this problem where people can't really bond for a long term. This is potentially offset again in co-living-dow because the same co-living-dow residents may choose to move to another co-living-dow community and therefore you might effectively be spending time with the same people in different locations. So how cool is that, garth?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's super cool because you can go to one location and you stay for a night or a week and then you go to another location that suits you better and actually some of the people you met in that other the original co-living dial community actually moved as well because they were looking for a move to a different location too. And then you bump into each other and you recognize each other, and so what this starts to unlock is it mitigates against those disadvantages of the short term stay because you're maintaining some relationships and building some relationships with the co-living dial community network. And also, if you think about it, this starts to really unlock the ability to move between short or medium or longer term stays across different co-living dial communities. So you could, for example, stay in one for a week and say you know what? This is great. This is kind of like a party co-living space. It was a great place to be in the summer for a week, but now we're moving into the autumn and I need to get serious about my work. So I'm going to go and get a three month agreement in another co-living dial space.
Speaker 2:That's more suitable for people who really want to grind and start working, you know, building their business or whatever it is that they're doing, and so you can really start to flexibly juggle between short, medium and long term as it suits you. And it removes those disadvantages of the bureaucracy because, as you said, dan, all that effort and energy that you need to move between different short term spaces like if you're moving between short term hostels and apartments and airbnb's there's all this paperwork and bureaucracy. In theory, when you're part of the co-living dial federation, you've done all the identity checks, you've done all the paperwork. It might just be as simple as opening your app and saying I want to book a week in the co-living dial on the east side of the city instead of the west, and you're there the next day. You've done all your paperwork is done, your bureaucracy is done. You stay for a week and then you move on to the next one and stay for three months. So it starts to really unlock a flexibility that doesn't exist in today's co-living spaces.
Speaker 1:Oh, yes simplified paperwork is a massive advantage and, of course, with the benefits of blockchain, things can really be streamlined. And what's interesting as well is because we mentioned all these disadvantages of being somewhere long term and, yes, it's a great combination All of a sudden becoming possible with co-living dials, staying long term kind of medium term, somewhere short to somewhere else, and so on. But the beauty of being in a co-living dial community, even for the ones that want total stability as they stay in the same place over and over, is that, first of all, because they're part of the same federation, it's possible to have a holiday in another community and still feel home in many ways. So, again, that's sort of holiday time, adventures, exploration, but at the same time being still in the same ecosystem, which means, again, it's kind of getting the best of both worlds, of being on holiday and still being home to an extent. And so, even in long term spaces, there is the advantage of having this opportunity to still spend time in other communities. Also, because the co-living dial communities are connected. Even if you choose to simply stay in one community and never sleep anywhere else, which some people will want to, the advantage is that there are still connections with other communities. So there could be events with other communities.
Speaker 1:Let's imagine communities that are not too distant from each other. There could be physical events, there could be competitions. Imagine sport competitions with other communities. Imagine collaborations. Imagine creating art together, facilitating workshops together, events, concerts, all sort of different things can be done like that.
Speaker 1:So it is possible to still meet a lot of people outside of the specific community someone is living in because they're part of the same federation, so getting really the advantage of being mobile and flexible even without sacrificing any sort of stability when it comes to to meet new people and so on. Also, several co-living dial communities may allow short term, as we mentioned, because we make it so simple. What this means is that there could still be a number of people coming short term. It could be even just utilizing some facilities, some co-working, so there may be communities where some people just come and co-work, some people maybe stay for a little bit of a shorter time, but then still there is a significant larger number of people staying longer that, in the meantime, have this stable, long-term bonding opportunity and having the type of lifestyle that they've chosen effectively without having to sacrifice anything.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly Dan. I just want to mention one other mitigation. We mentioned that there was a disadvantage in long-term co-living sometimes because it's difficult to get out of a contract. Well, a co-living dial because we're on the blockchain and we're using Web3 technology. If a co-living dial space decides that they want to make it easy for residents to flexibly move around that federation you can just build in that it's easier to get out of a contract. It could be maximum you need to wait a month, 30 days notice, and then you can leave, or even less than that. In theory on the blockchain, even in a long-term contract, you could potentially exit with a days notice if the flexibility in the contracts was there and co-living dial enables that to happen.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. It really comes to the specific community to decide what the minimum length or the notice period should be. Certainly, because there is a federation there, it's also potentially a lot easier to find a replacement. So we know that some communities it happens very often Some co-living spaces I see ads sometimes on these ad boards for places to live.
Speaker 1:I live in this co-living space and I want someone to simply replace my current agreement because I want to leave but I still have to pay for the next six months. So would someone want to come here? And then obviously a lot of people be like why should I take this person's place where I can just go direct with the organization and it's probably the same price. I don't have to deal with this individual. And then therefore, individuals need to lower the price or to still lose some money in the process and it's complicated and all that.
Speaker 1:So this can easily be solved at a co-living dial. Because of the interconnected nature of the community, members will already be connected, so it just becomes a lot easier to find all sorts of arrangements between people. The Pave, it works a lot easier. The element of trust is there, partly built thanks to blockchain, so a lot of things they actually don't even need to involve trust. A lot of things can be trustless thanks to blockchain and partly because of the closer ties that different communities, different co-living spaces will have as well. So these are a lot of advantages that can be introduced through the co-living dial model, right, gareth?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:And you know, if we look at across to everything we discussed today, from short to medium to long term pros and cons in co-living spaces, I think what you have to realise is that if you look at those advantages and disadvantages across all those spectrums of time, the co-living option is often superior, right, because you get these sort of combined benefits of social and work environments combined into one living space, and co-living is designed to be more flexible and to offer all these advantages.
Speaker 2:So co-living is often superior across short, medium and long term timeframes compared to apartments, compared to hostels and all those other alternatives. It's an important thing to bear in mind. And then, if we look at the co-living dial model, some of the disadvantages are mitigated hugely because of the federation and the wealth and decision making sharing that's built into our model. And so co-living becomes this solution that offers, you know, a non zero sum trade off. You don't have to trade off your social with your work. You don't need to trade off flexibility with long term relationship building. You kind of get the benefits of all worlds in the co-living dial federation when you look at the advantages and disadvantages of short versus medium, long term. So this is really cool and I'm excited to be building this with you, dan, and making this a reality so that people can get all these amazing benefits from living.
Speaker 1:Exactly this is why I'm so excited, too, and for everyone who's listening, I hope you're also getting excited because we are turning this into reality. And for everyone who wants to get involved or simply wants to have a conversation, make sure you reach out. You can check out our website. You can reach out in multiple ways. Make sure you stick around. If you're not subscribed yet to this podcast, make sure you do, because we are back every single week with more and more content on co-living, decentralized ownership and new ways of living, and a lot more as well. So make sure that you stick around.
Speaker 1:So thanks, garth, for the episode today. Beautiful summary at the end. That's exactly what we're doing combining the best of the advantages of short term, long term co-living and anywhere in between, and really mitigating the downsize, and not only that, but turning the downsize into advantages in many cases as well. So finding the optimal solution, and that's what we're working towards and that's why we'd love to connect. So, once again, make sure you reach out if you want to share any thoughts or ideas or if you have anything else that you want to tell us. And, as usual, we'll be back next week with more content. So watch G-Space, stay subscribed and we'll be back with you next week.