Ahmed Nizar and I started Casa Mia Coliving a couple of years ago. During the earlier stages of our careers, we had the opportunity to work across the globe, from New Delhi to Seattle and Toronto to London.
When we rented our homes, we had the knack to always end up in the “wrong” neighbourhood for too long; we didn’t seem to have the luck to find the right “strangers” to be our flatmates and hunting for that perfect house was a mammoth task. It was not a living and working overseas experience that we envisioned.
We learned a lot from these international experiences, and we decided to take these learnings and capitalise them into Casa Mia Coliving.
If the concept had existed when we needed them earlier in our careers, our young professional life in those cities would have been a better experience. Still, Casa Mia Coliving would not exist today.
Launching a co-living startup during COVID-19 was a challenge when the business was so reliant heavily on movement between borders. We took the challenge in our stride because we saw an opportunity even with the presence of a global pandemic.
Today, we have 150 bedrooms in central Singapore across popular neighbourhoods such as River Valley, Tiong Bahru and Orchard. We have reached an annualised revenue of US$2.5 million, and we continue to experience fast growth.
How did the pandemic affect Casa Mia Coliving?
Most businesses went into “survival mode” when the pandemic struck. We took the opportunity to accelerate our business by focusing on what was essential for Casa Mia Coliving. One of these was digital transformation.
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Back in 2019, when Casa Mia Coliving was just launched, we relied heavily on virtual tours of our homes where our prospects could easily use the tool to check out the rooms they wanted to rent.
We were one of the few coliving spaces having the feature in Singapore, and now, the trend has picked up among our competitors. Although we must say that it’s becoming a common feature to host virtual tours, it is still not executed well and professionally.
Rethinking our obstacles
Many opportunities could be found during the last year. For us, we don’t need global borders to open to growing our community of coliving members.
We have a substantial number of untapped young professional ex-pats in Singapore who are seeking to find their “perfect” place and flatmates.
It is a great opportunity, and we stay focused on building our brand name, our member community and targeting the professionals already in Singapore. The effort paid off, and we grew our business by 100 per cent.
Leverage during the ‘downtime’
The ‘downtime’ that the pandemic brought was the perfect time to build. As we mentioned earlier, not in the physical sense, but we focus on building up our digital transformation.
We came up with ColivHQ, a software that brings together customer support, property management and content management and billing system for the whole team. It has increased efficiency for the team and created a better understanding of the status of our homes and members.
The COVID ‘downtime’ has enabled us to be one of the few operators here to have a proprietary software platform to manage coliving operations end-to-end. The pandemic highlighted that an outdated and inflexible business model was not the way forward. It was an excellent opportunity for change.
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Looking into the future
I believe that the future is bright for coliving space. This year, we aim to double our Singapore business and launch a second city in the coming months.
We are breaking even and intend to keep being profitable as we continue to grow, as we do not believe in growth at all costs. Coliving is a business where scale is significant.
We have strong unit economics with a 10x LTV/CAC ratio, but that’s possible only by focusing on the right real estate partners and assets. We can run a profitable business at our scale with our unit economics.
We also intend to build a customer-centric culture and focus on the end-user. And we do not forget to also focus on talent, the young professionals we have in Singapore.
If you are in a traditional industry, such as real estate, focus on accelerating the transformation to digital by bringing in tech-savvy talent from adjacent sectors.
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