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Plushusene App Fosters Communities Within the Community
Martin Kring, CEO at Plushusene, in front of one of the touch screens placed in all the communal houses of Plushusene's co-living communities. (Photo: Jesper Blæsild)
The story of Wicomico begins with a visionary CEO recruited from an industry other than real estate. Coming from the international hospitality industry, Martin Kring joined Plushusene with the ambition of making tenancy an experience – 365 days a year.
By Ida Borch, Head of Marcom at Evryone Group
The story of Wicomico revolves around merging social IT with proptech to create a new tenant engagement platform. Its main purpose is to support two societal agendas: enhancing life quality, including reducing loneliness, and helping the integration of volunteers in addressing local community tasks.
We spoke with Martin Kring, CEO of Plushusene, about his collaboration with us at Wicomico. Here, he shares why he and Plushusene chose to invest in developing a new digital solution to facilitate communities that make tenants happier, safer, and more attentive of their housing and each other. He also elaborates on how the platform is performing at Plushusene today — nearly 5 years after the initial sketches for the app were made.
In 2019, Martin Kring was recruited to Plushusene from Germany after five years as CEO of Legoland® Deutschland Resort. Initially, he thought he was returning to Horsens, Denmark, to build a senior citizen co-housing corporation. Plushusene's owners, Nrep and M+, had a new type of living concept on the map, inspired by the co-housing communities of the 60s and 70s. The first property was to be located on what was then a green field in Hedehusene, near Roskilde in Denmark.
However, a survey of the senior citizen housing market showed that many senior citizens preferred living with different generations rather than just among themselves. "Of the 8,000 senior citizens we surveyed in the mapping phase, 74% said they preferred living with others. To ensure families with children had the same desire, we surveyed 2,000 families with children. It turned out that 9 out of 10 also preferred living with senior citizens” says Martin Kring, who is now CEO of Denmark's largest co-housing concept with 990 housing units.
When the next 600 are completed, they will be spread over 10 locations, all strategically located near a major city, but no closer than to still have rural idyll and nature nearby. All feature a communal house with an interactive touchscreen mounted on a wall, at the center of the community, and the Plushusene App on tenants' phones or tablets.
Today, five years after construction on the first site begun, Martin Kring can confirm that the ambition for different generations to enrich each other's lives is being fulfilled in Plushusene. 75% of tenants report having made new friends among other residents, and satisfaction measurements also show that children feel safe walking home from school alone. The adults keep an eye out for the young ones, and it is not unusual for senior citizens to become surrogate grandparents for children and youth in the community.
Martin Kring calls it a 'public business secret' that from the start, Plushusene thought differently about living communities. The inspiration comes from his career in the resort industry, where he often observed vacationing guests and thought about whether the offer of various daily events and experiences could be brought into everyday life. Right where you live.
The inspiration led to a reinterpretation of how to create “liveability” in large communities. In Martin Kring’s interpretation, it happens by facilitating smaller communities within the large one — both physically and digitally. “One large community doesn’t emerge when there are 400 people in a housing association. People can't socially handle relating to 400 new people, but they can manage10, 20, or 30,” he says. Therefore, it has been about creating free and equal access to what he calls 'communities within the community'. Smaller, typically interest-based communities that together make up the large community.
The physical base of the community is the communal house. Such a house exists in all Plushusene properties. Large houses with professional kitchens and dining halls, multi-halls, and spaces for smaller events. Communal houses with clear policies on how the house may be used. For example, you cannot rent rooms for private events, because it should never feel unwelcome to walk through the door of one's communal house.
Martin Kring's ideal is for tenants to experience the communal house as a place they are welcome all day until it closes at 11:00 PM every day of the week. The same goes for the guest rooms that are also a regular part of Plushusene's offerings to tenants.
Instead of having your own rental housing with a guest room, you can rent a guest room in the development. “If you experience the facilities outside your own four walls as an extended living room, you can scale down the number of squaremeters in your apartment. That is also part of the philosophy in terms of the bottom line, which is the building environment,” says Martin Kring.
The concept is for tenants themselves to initiate both large and small social and sharing economy ventures, joint events, clubs, courses, lectures, celebrations of anniversaries, and communal dining. Swap meets, and potentially more 'Libraries of Things' and other sharing schemes for cars, drills, hand trucks, ladders, and more. Fundamentally, there's no reason for all tenants to own these items individually.
Such an extensive concept, which need to administer so many events and actions, must be facilitated. Both by professional hosts and by technology, for "in such large co-living communities as ours, you cannot rely on communities built on volunteers and general social media," says Martin Kring, "Then it becomes the usual suspects doing all the work, and that is not a long-term or satisfactory solution in a concept like ours. Neither for the volunteers, nor for us."
Plushusene's hosts are social coordinators responsible for ensuring the communal houses are full of events and life, and that the content in the Plushusene app is constantly updated with everything happening in the co-livning community. To ensure that the hosts can facilitate both the physical and the digital community, Martin Kring has chosen that the hosts be recruited from sports- and event management – preferably with hosting experience from hospitality.
They should be people who are receptive, inspire trust, and can initiate and follow through on many different things. The host role with the special Plushusene focus on event and hospitality is a breakthrough in the housing market itself.
Another advancement Martin Kring has contributed to is Wicomico, a technology solution developed together with Plushusene, because "our communities are too large to be built on notice boards, checklists, and SMS chains. Or free solutionslike Facebook, where one has no control over the algorithm, data, or, just as importantly, the tone among tenants," he says.
Martin Kring sought a 'glue' to unite the hosts and the myriad of different activities. He envisioned a digital platform to facilitate access to information, manage registrations, ensure secure payments, and foster communication among residents – both individually and in groups. A GDPR-compliant, white-label solution tailored for Plushusene where tenants are registered upon move-in and deactivated at move-out — should they ever decide to leave their community. The enduring goal is to keep community-oriented tenants stay for as long as possible.
Existing solutions were primarily derived from the proptech sector, concentrating on technical and property management needs. Martin Kring, however, felt they fell short of Plushusene's ambitions. As a result, he sought out solutions developed for sectors accustomed to addressing 'soft,' common human needs. He aimed for a solution accessible to everyone, from ages 10 to 100, regardless of their ability to handle technology.
“In this context, we discovered IBG – Interactive Citizen Guide, a solution originally developed for specialized social sectors. It's designed for people with diverse technological skills," Martin Kring explains. "This system could definitely be tailored to meet the needs of Plushusene's tenants, both for organizing activities and for managing them through an app," says Martin Kring.
The solution needed to allow easy visibility of events such as yoga, badminton, concerts, sewing clubs, postnatal gymnastics, pilates, or summer parties. It also had to facilitate straightforward communication about who is bringing what to gatherings and who is signing up for cleanup duties.
Registering for a communal meal may seem straight forward, but it actually involves a series of decisions. These include dietary preferences like vegetarian or meat options, any allergies, willingness to help with the event, specific tasks one might take on, household members attending, and whether to dine in the communal house or opt for take-away.
Martin Kring believed that IBG was the optimal choice to meet Plushusene's high standards for functionality and accessibility. So, in 2019, Martin Kring reached out to Jesper Seedorf Karlberg, CEO of Evryone Group, the parent company of IBG. Together, they laid the groundwork for what is now Wicomico. This white-label platform, initially tailored for Plushusene, not only meets its specific content and design needs, but also includes Plushusene in its ongoing journey, granting them a minor ownership stake in Wicomico.
Plushusene's hosts ensure that initiatives are energetically whipped up and prominently displayed both in the app and on the interactive screen. Tenants can sign up for activities and, like e.g. at Facebook, see who else is participating and post comments. They also can create threads to share information, make request, or express gratitude, such as thanking others for birthday wishes.
Martin Kring notes that the tone within the Plushusene App is considerably more tactful than what might typically be encountered on social media platforms. Additionally, tenants are selected through a screening process that evaluates, among other things, their willingness to contribute to the community, ensuring a more engaged and harmonious environment.
Particularly, the latter can be crucial in determining whether a potential tenant is offered a rental unit. If a person can contribute something that the co-housing community lacks, it significantly improves their chances of securing the rental. This approach is all part of a strategy to ensure the right mindset, an appropriate age distribution, and a varied range of activities that suit the specific demographics of the location.
PlushuseneApp has now been on tenants' phones, tablets, and the interactive screen in the communal house for 3 years since the first residents moved in in 2020. Satisfaction with both Plushusene and the app is high. Recent measurements show an average of 90 events per housing complex per month, ranging from board game nights and children's dance to wine tasting and senior training. Additionally, 95% of residents use the app regularly, and 85% agree that it makes it easy to connect with other residents.
Martin Kring is confident that integrating event, sports, hospitality, and service management into the rental housing market will be a significant market driver. He believes that the industry will increasingly incorporate such initiatives into their ESG reports' social scopes.
He concludes with a reflection on the housing industry; that it is often perceived as 'harsh.' Therefore, he says, there is a blue ocean opportunity for those who not only provide housing, but also foster a large community and offer an easy-to-use digital platform for tenants to interact with their neighbors while entrusting a significant part of their lives to their housing administrators.
