Watch: How a tenant-centric approach fuelled the growth of 400+ HMO rooms

Hi everyone, thank you for coming to listen. It’s going to be an amazing day, I know it was when they won the first HMO Awards and good luck to all the finalists as well. It’s an absolute honour to speak today, never would I have thought we’d be in this position four years down the line and I’d be asking to speak at something as amazing as this when Van asked and I’d said yeah.

I had a little bit of imposter syndrome afterwards, but here we go, so be kind. So for anyone who doesn’t know who we are, I own Cosi Living with Jo, and we’ve been going now for four years, what used to be known as J.O. Property Group. We started in the second national lockdown where we spent pretty much all of our time, other than drinking Prosecco in the garden, learning everything we needed to know about HMOs. And this is what I think having a tenant-centric approach has done for Cosi.

We started in May 2020, like I said before, as J.O. Property Group, and we rebranded from J.O. Property Group to Cosi Living in May 2023. We’re going to be a team of seven in July. We have a management portfolio on track to hit 500 rooms by end of this year. We’re both management and guaranteed rent properties, and we’re on track to turn over 750,000 plus over the next 12 months. And we’re building the brand to deliver to the future generation.

tenants. So this was us, this was our very first house back in 2020. It was a huge 10 bedroom. This was us being all suited and booted because that’s how we thought we needed to come across. And this is us now. We’ve got a lovely little company car, an office soon to be High Street. We’ve been in articles in our city and on the first HMO awards we won best master lease operator.

So my talk today is going to be split into two sections. First one is going to be about drive, determination and sacrifice because that’s how I believe we started and built the right foundations to start the business. And the second is going to be all about brands as well. Brands is so important to us and I truly believe that that’s probably one of the reasons, probably the reason why we’ve been able to grow so quickly and so organically. starting off with this, so this will all make sense soon. But this is a screenshot which

Olivia Maher (02:20.312)

I never knew I would ever use or share. This is a screenshot of a picture I took of Joe. It was in Joe’s mum’s room, where we were living at the time, in Joe’s room, sorry, in his mum’s house. He was actually stretching his back out from an injury that he’d done in the gym, and I took a picture of him. So years down the line, I looked back, and this was a sticky whiteboard, which was on our wall. And every single day, it was something that we looked at, and I looked back, and these three things really kind of stood out to me. First one being drive. Now…

Up there on the right that is house number one and we needed a minimum of £600 and that was ticked. That house was the house that made us lose our jobs because we were spending so much time renovating this house that we were not worrying about the job that we actually had to do. It’s a target based job and they were absolutely cut throat. So we were both hammering, painting till 12, you know, at night and they sacked us both on the same day and this was the reason, this was when we realised right, okay, it’s either.

get another job or go absolutely hell for leather on the business, which is what we did. So just underneath was a month later, we needed house number two because we didn’t have enough for our outgoings at all. And that’s I think drive come into it because every single day we’d get up, we’d look at the whiteboards and we’d go and do exactly what we needed to do that day to get house number two. So determination was second. Now on the left, this was our morning routine. And I’m not going to stand here and say that this is still my morning routine because whoever.

owns a business in here knows that you you get into a thing and you’re have so much free time and you have quite the opposite. But this was wake up at five, it was a cold minute, sorry a two minute cold shower, 10 minute motivational video, 10 minute read or meditation, six planning organized a day and seven was exercise and we did that every single day when we first started and that made the determination in us and put the structure in both our life and the business when we first started.

We’ve got a couple of quotes down there as well, but the third thing is sacrifice. just in the left or the right hand corner is our outgoings. They were the outgoings that we needed for our whole month. And some of you might laugh, but this was a serious conversation we had. So obviously we’ve got in there, gym, food, petrol. And the third one down actually says, Joe here. We had a serious conversation about if we’re starting this business and we’re meeting landlords, you can’t have long hair. We’ve got to look professional.

Olivia Maher (04:42.295)

We sacrifice parties, holidays, night out with friends. We sacrifice everything, but not the haircut. But I feel like on this, kind of just showed me that we’ve done all of these three things. And that’s how I truly believe we were able to start the business, because that naturally flows into everything we do, day in, day out now. second thing I want to talk about is brand. Now we decided to rebrand to Cosi Living because

J.O. Property Group just didn’t align with the type of agents that we’d naturally started to become. We wanted to be relatable with our tenants. When we thought about a name, we wanted something that included Co. So we go, you know, for Co. Living. So that’s how we come up with Cosi. We wanted something that we had a brand full of colors that we could use in our HMOs. We wanted to brand the spaces. We created a strapline of a home worth sharing, which is exactly what we use in all of our houses. We use on the bottom of emails. We created a hashtag.

We created colours that we use. Our whole focus was on brand. We cared so much about this and care so much about it day to day. That’s so much so. When we last advertised for our most recent role, one of our housemates who lives in one of our houses at the moment got in touch and said, Adri, I love exactly what you do. You’re like the best agent I’ve ever lived, I’ve ever lived with. What you’ve done for me and my housemates over the past few years has just been amazing. Can I apply?

and I’m so pleased to say that Emma’s starting with us in July. Now, of course, you do need the houses to fill with the tenants that we’re doing all this for, but I feel like the service to the landlord also comes back down to brand. We’re so protective over it that we won’t take any properties that don’t align with our brand. We will turn away properties even though that, you know, most businesses will take them for obviously cashflow reasons, meaning that the landlords who do come with us, properties do align with our brand.

They’re so confident that we can fill them with good tenants who stay for longer, who look after their assets. So this year, after taking on incredible staff members, it’s given me the ability to step into my new role of Head of Tenants Experience. That way I can focus on benefiting all of our tenants and making sure their experience living in one of our houses is the best ever. know, tenants will stay with us year on year. You know, they’ll recommend us to friends. They’ll move around to properties.

Olivia Maher (07:05.42)

and that gives the landlords something that they’ll never get by another agent. Our void periods are non-existent, our occupancy has been as close to 100 as far as I can remember. Rent have increased year on year and we’ve had 100 % landlord retention and that’s all because we focus and care so much about brand. Recently as well, we’ve launched something called the Cosi Club which is a club that all of our Cosi exclusive housemates join, we recently put on.

a Pilates event where we’ll offer to the tenants free events, know, paid for by us. Because obviously being a student, you know, they don’t necessarily have the best money and things like that. And our brand is so clear in everything that we do. And I think a stigma, which I’ve always wanted to change is it’s just a rental, they’ll ruin it anyway. And that’s something we heard when we first started, people said, why are you going out spending 10s and 15,000s of pounds on renovations for?

We help manage huge amounts of properties for landlords as well. And we leave no stone left unturned as well when it comes to renovations. We brand everything that we do. And the more agents and landlords that don’t listen to it’s just a rental and invest in their properties, it’ll probably be one of the best decisions, business decisions that you ever make. And if future future future proofs your property and puts you a quarter above the rest, because tenants know exactly what they get when they come to one of your houses.

And I know I just absolutely sped through that, but I just wanted to say thank you for listening. And I hope after today you understand that how looking after your tenants not only makes your job more enjoyable and more profitable, it’s also a bloody good business decision as well. Thank you.