We’re Doubling Down on our Coliving Capital Markets Summit. Here’s why.

Brad Hargreaves
4 min readJan 29, 2020

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Common’s first Capital Markets Summit in New York City.

In June, we brought together over 300 real estate developers, investors, lenders, and architects for our first-ever Coliving Capital Markets Summit in New York. We followed it up with a second gathering in Los Angeles in October, and we recently announced our third Summit in Miami on February 28th.

We view Common’s Coliving Summit as our developer conference, what Dreamforce is to Salesforce or OpenWorld is to Oracle. Developer conferences are the bread-and-butter of the technology world, with large software companies taking over convention centers, hotel rooms, and entire cities for multi-day mega conferences that showcase new features, energize their audience, and build community amongst their customers. Over the past 30 years, the developer conference has become a centerpiece of building a software business.

We’re excited to bring the technology-style “developer conference” model to real estate, hosting regular gatherings of our real estate development and equity partners to build a community, share learnings, and get deals done.

Here are three reasons why we’re doubling down on our Coliving Summits:

Panelists on the Financing Coliving panel at 2019’s West Coast Capital Markets Summit.

Community matters for everyone… even real estate developers

Coliving is most commonly associated with dense, expensive coastal cities like San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles. But it’s increasingly catching on in cities like Atlanta, San Diego and Philadelphia, where developers and local governments are seeking innovative solutions for their own affordable housing crises. In those cities, pioneering developers are bringing coliving and micro-apartment projects to their markets and pushing the boundaries of what has traditionally been built.

In some cases, a Common development partner might be the only person in their city building coliving. As an industry, real estate development can be very insular and local, and often unwelcoming to new ideas. Getting out and meeting other developers successfully innovating by building new types of housing and embracing technology is inspiring and energizing, driving even the smallest developers to try new things and push the envelope.

Shared learnings are a big part of any community’s value. While Common incorporates our own learnings across our projects, our development partners have the on-the-ground experience of addressing the day-to-day challenges that come with building a new kind of housing. Putting developers together to share lessons and tips is invaluable and leads to a better end product for the renter. While coliving has built a reputation for building community among renters, we’re proud of Common’s track record building it among our real estate development and capital partners.

Deals get done and projects get built

We could have the best building designs in the world, but it wouldn’t matter if we didn’t have the resources to build them. Ultimately, the success of our business will be driven by getting more Common projects financed and completed. A lot of pieces and players contribute to getting a project done: developers identify the land and underwrite the project, equity and debt capital bankroll the construction, and architects and designers balance efficiency, experience, and aesthetics to create the right product.

Getting all those players in a room together can be a powerful catalyst. Remember, Common isn’t a capital markets broker; our business doesn’t depend on being an intermediary in a transaction. We’d much prefer to put relevant, hand-picked players together in a room and let them work out a deal.

Since we hosted our first Coliving Summit in June 2019, Common has signed over 60 additional projects and 7,000 beds. While not all of those came together at the Summit, it has been an integral part of building the ecosystem.

Keynote conversation with Scott Miller at the West Coast Capital Markets Summit.

There’s a connection to a higher purpose

For a developer or real estate investor, the financial arguments for coliving are real and obvious: coliving simultaneously offers higher income per square foot to the owner while decreasing total rent for the tenant, allowing the project to serve a broader swath of renters.

But it’s important to remember that coliving is also providing critically-needed housing for people who may not be able to otherwise afford a private apartment. Urban rent growth has exceeded wage growth for the past 60 years, and tens of millions of Americans in cities are struggling to afford a place to live. Coliving can’t solve our affordable housing crisis in its entirety, but it is a critical part of the solution. Our development partners are essential to delivering on this promise, and the Summit serves to reinforce this message and our joint connection to a broader social goal.

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Miami, a global hub for thoughtful and innovative design, is the perfect destination for our Summit’s newest iteration. Data-driven design is at the core of building great coliving, and design isn’t just for designers: investors, developers, and operators must be fluent in the fundamentals to build the right residential products for the 21st century.

I’m looking forward to seeing both new and familiar faces on February 28th to start discussions that matter, in an industry where innovation is paramount to the success of our cities in 2020 and beyond. To request an invite, go to ColivingSummit.com.

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Brad Hargreaves

Founder & CEO of @hicommon, co-founder of General Assembly (@GA).