Who Kevin was
Dino and Kevin were both United States Marines. They met in 2013 at a VA transitional center in Hollywood. They worked their way up together over the next few years, and in 2018 they opened their first business — a hostel, bootstrapped almost entirely off Craigslist. Free furniture. Construction materials. Fence boards. An entire shed they hauled home and turned into a tiny house. Revenue doubled year over year.
They both loved hostels. Not as the cheap option — as the form itself: strangers in a common room, the mixing, the fact that you leave knowing people you would never otherwise have met. They were in one together shortly before Kevin left for Thailand. That was the last time.
Kevin passed away in August 2023.
What he did was call people — constantly, for no reason, to check that they were all right. From the outside it looked like a man wasting his time. It took losing him to understand that Kevin had been focused the entire time, on the only thing that actually matters.
The company was going to be called Portal.
It is called KEVIN, in memory of him.
This is us
The mission
To create a global network of flexible, work-ready living spaces — enabling people to live and work anywhere without sacrificing comfort, productivity, or connection.
KEVIN is a hybrid of three things that already exist and none of which is quite right on its own: a hotel, a sharehouse and a hostel. Fully equipped, work-ready rooms under one monthly membership, in a network you can move through rather than a place you sign a lease on.
It is built for the in-betweeners — people between cities, between jobs, between chapters — and for the ones who want to actually know a place rather than sample it. Dino was one of those people in 2013 — a Marine out of the Corps with nowhere fixed to be. So was Kevin. Nobody builds for them, because they are not there long enough to be worth building for. That is the gap.
The belief underneath all of it
Immersion, not a sampler.
Nobody knows a city from a week in it. You know the airport, the main street, and whatever reception circled on the map. A few days buys you the highlights reel and a camera roll.
Stay long enough and something else happens. You get a regular place. You do a grocery run. You learn a handful of names, then a handful of words, then how the neighbourhood actually works and who runs it. You come away knowing the people, the place and the culture — not a sample of them.
That is the entire argument for the length of the stay. It is not a discount for booking longer. It is the difference between visiting somewhere and living there.
Ten toes down.
Why it starts in Japan
A prefectural town with direct access to Tokyo, rather than central Tokyo itself. Far enough out that the land and the shell are affordable and the house can still have a garden, a bath and parking. Close enough that the city is roughly an hour away on rail that already exists.
It is also where Dino intends to be based.
The vehicle already exists
KEVIN enters Japan through Mitsukaido Holdings GK (水海道ホールディングス合同会社), registered in Minato-ku, Tokyo in March 2021 and named after Mitsukaido in Ibaraki, where Dino was living in 2019. Its two existing lanes are urban hospitality assets in Tokyo — minpaku, apartment hotels and coliving — and community-scale coliving development in Mitsukaido itself. KEVIN is the branded expression of the second lane.
The Hokuten Group is a subsidiary of Mitsukaido Holdings LLC, a Puerto Rico company, and Mitsukaido Holdings GK is its Japanese affiliate. Destination and site decisions are not final; this section will be updated as they are confirmed.
Why this is on a brokerage website
Because brokerage is how it gets paid for. There is no fund behind KEVIN. The capital comes out of closings, one at a time. That is the entire connection between the two.
Not a credential. Nothing about this makes anyone better at selling a hotel, and it is not offered as evidence that it does. It is here so that whoever is working with Dino knows what he is actually aiming at and where he is going.
Hyper-amenitised, and spare where it counts.
Not basic — basic sounds like a saving. A room is a bed, a wardrobe, a full-width floating desk, a task chair, one armchair, layered light, blackout, a door that seals. No ensuite. No marble. Nothing to photograph.
The money that would have gone into forty small private bathrooms goes into a handful of very good shared ones — and into the things nobody photographs at all: acoustic separation between rooms, ventilation that does not carry sound, redundant fibre, hard-wired desks. Restraint upstairs is what pays for the building downstairs.
There was no promise. There was a plan — and it is still the plan.
Build the thing the two of them liked being inside of. Be on the giving end of the help they were both once on the receiving end of. Dino is carrying the torch.
KEVIN is a separate personal venture of Dino Monteverde and is not a service, product or offering of The Hokuten Group, Keller Williams Commercial or KW Worldwide.