“Norway is not ready to share”
Memories from Oslo Urban Arena
I am currently working and pondering on social value in real estate. It’s been my belief for years now that co-living brings positive social and societal impact to its residents. But can one measure it? And how spread are those measurement standards? Is there an international consensus beyond the UN’s SDGs on this?
As I was rehashing my work, I remembered an interesting interaction I had at #OsloUrbanArena in late 2019. I was 8-month pregnant, totally in awe of this conference and completely forgot to publish my thoughts after the event.
Here are the notes:
People don’t want to share
As I was speaking at Oslo Urban Arena last week [this is october 2019], I was asked to react to the Norwegian Housing Department Chief Economist’s presentation: “Norway is not ready to share”.
She made a very good case, and showed that because Norway is a rich country, with a unique culture, and where homeownership is standardized, less than 5% of the surveyed population was inclined to change their lifestyle to start “sharing”. Bam!
Fascinating survey, but there’s a catch: the survey was evaluating three options — homeownership, renting, and sharing — without further explanation.
If you don’t explain what they can gain from it
What does sharing mean? Isn’t co-living renting? Can’t you be a homeowner in a co-housing complex? Co-living, or shared housing, does not oppose to owning or renting but rather adds another layer to those traditional offerings.
In my opinion, and in that context, the cultural barrier argument of “my culture does not do well with sharing” (often heard in France) does not stand. JLL actually published a report this year showing that 86% people who had said they were not culturally fit to share, became captive of co-working/shared-office models after seeing what it looked like. Every consumer deserves to know if there is another product that better serves their needs, even in housing.
People don’t necessarily understand what sharing a home means and will typically react negatively until shown the upsides.
Dublin learned it the hard way and the city faced strong opposition to its “shared accommodation” addition to the zoning code while most of us professionals had seen it as a positive signal.
My point here is that it’s time to get co-livers involved in our research: to learn more and enhance the product obviously, but also to start building an argument around the positive impact of co-living and engage with policy-makers to lift regulatory barriers.
Since then, we’ve gone a long way…
At Keys AM, we’ve created #KeysLiving, a new impact fund dedicated to managed housing in France. And Co-Liv together with Coliving Insights have led an incredible research effort on impact in co-living, in which I have had the opportunity to publish this piece on impact and shared living.
But we’re not there yet. Pursuing positive impact might very well be real estate’s most challenging and important goal for the years 2020s.
