Prague Coliving Summit, Cohousing is Future, Office-to-Coliving Conversions, Spain, France, & Luxembourg Coliving Markets, and Everything Else Coliving
[Observations] Cohousing: A Community-First Answer to the Housing, Loneliness, and Climate Crises
As housing costs rise, cities densify, and social isolation becomes the norm rather than the exception, cohousing is quietly re-emerging as a compelling alternative to traditional housing models. Far from being just “shared housing,” cohousing is built on intentional community: private homes combined with shared spaces designed to support connection, cooperation, and everyday care. Long established in Scandinavian countries and slowly gaining traction across Europe, cohousing sits at the intersection of affordability, inclusion, and sustainability—addressing not just how we live, but how we live together. While it isn’t without challenges, it provides insightful lessons for anyone rethinking the future of urban housing.
Why cohousing is gaining attention
Affordability through sharing: Shared infrastructure and cooperative ownership models reduce per-person housing costs and limit speculative pressure.
A response to loneliness: By design, cohousing strengthens social ties, intergenerational exchange, and informal care networks.
Environmental sustainability: Many projects integrate renewable energy, compact design, shared resources, and circular systems that lower ecological impact.
Smarter urban density: Cohousing offers a middle ground between single-family homes and large apartment blocks—denser, but more humane.
Participatory governance: Residents collectively manage spaces and decisions, fostering ownership, responsibility, and long-term resilience.
The challenges to acknowledge
High participation requirements: Community governance takes time, energy, and conflict-resolution skills.
Risk of exclusion: Without intentional design, cohousing can become socially homogeneous or unintentionally elitist.
Financing and regulation hurdles: Cooperative models are still poorly understood by banks and often clash with outdated planning frameworks.
Cohousing isn’t a universal solution, but as part of a broader housing toolkit, it offers a powerful reminder: solving the housing crisis isn’t only about units and prices. It’s also about belonging, sustainability, and designing places where people can genuinely thrive together.
[Coliving Conversions] How to Fill Empty Offices With Co-Living Residents
Credits: Pew Research
Across major cities, a striking paradox is emerging: millions of people can’t afford a basic apartment, while vast amounts of centrally located office space sit empty. The Pew Charitable Trusts recently convened to explore the potential of co-living as a solution to transform vacant offices into affordable, community-oriented housing. By reimagining office floors as compact private rooms paired with shared kitchens, living areas, and services, experts argue this model could deliver housing faster, cheaper, and closer to jobs. But while the opportunity is real, execution, funding, and regulation remain the decisive challenges.
Key insights from the discussion
A massive supply opportunity: Around 20% of office space in major U.S. cities is vacant, often in prime, transit-connected locations.
Lower conversion costs: Office-to-co-living conversions could be 25–35% cheaper than traditional apartment retrofits, with projected rents well below studio apartments.
Strong affordability impact: Nearly half of U.S. renters are cost-burdened; co-living targets singles and workers priced out of conventional housing.
Financing is possible—but not easy: early projects succeeded through relationship-driven lending, innovative financing, and proof of concept.
Regulation is the biggest bottleneck: zoning rules, limits on unrelated residents, parking mandates, and outdated codes often make projects infeasible.
Operations matter more than design: coliving requires hospitality-style management, fast turnover, and active community oversight—not traditional property management.
Policy momentum is building: Some cities and states are updating zoning and funding frameworks to explicitly allow co-living and micro-units.
The takeaway is clear: office-to-co-living conversions won’t solve the housing crisis alone, but they represent a rare alignment of unused assets and urgent demand. The real question is no longer whether this model can work, but whether cities, lenders, and operators can move fast enough to make it work at scale.
[Coliving Conference] Prague Coliving & PBSA Summit
Prague Coliving & PBSA Summit brings together decision-maker stakeholders: operators, investors, developers, and proptech. This inaugural event unites investors, developers, operators, advisors, and institutional stakeholders to examine two rapidly expanding and often misunderstood asset classes in European real estate: coliving and purpose-built student accommodation (PBSA).
Prague, along with the wider CEE region, is currently at a pivotal juncture. Demand is structural, supply is constrained, and capital is actively searching for scalable, resilient living concepts. Yet the market is still fragmented, short on data, and full of assumptions. This summit aims to sift through the confusion.
Expect practical insights, real market data, and unfiltered discussion on:
Where coliving and PBSA actually work and where they don’t
What investors are underwriting today versus the reality on the ground
How operators, cities, and universities are shaping demand
The regulatory, pricing, and operational challenges ahead
This is a focused, high-level conversation with individuals actively shaping these sectors, without any unnecessary distractions. If you are involved in residential living, hospitality, or alternative real estate and want to understand where these asset classes are heading in Prague and CEE, this is where the conversation starts.
Everything Else Coliving
General Coliving News
Tribe Stays announces an exclusive strategic partnership with CCI India to accelerate enterprise and institutional expansion. Under this Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), CCI India will act as Tribe Stays’ exclusive strategic partner for enterprise and institutional business, enabling access to large corporates, international and national universities, institutional clients, expat housing programs and multi-city accommodation mandates across India and select global markets.
Over 10,000 co-living homes in London’s planning pipeline. Planning data shows thousands of co-living homes progressing across the capital, with activity concentrated in a small number of boroughs.
Coliving: A modern solution to Australia’s housing crunch. Co-living is an upgraded rooming house offering safe, shared accommodation for mature tenants needing housing. Properties accommodate up to nine households and feature hotel-like suites alongside shared living spaces.
Co-living: A relatively new phenomenon in Luxembourg. Co-living is a new housing option that has found its place in the real estate market. The concept is based on co-tenancy.
The first edition of the Coliving do Carme artistic residencies kicks off in Lugo. Three creators will develop projects over three months that combine crafts, painting, dance, and rural heritage.
10 bedrooms, one roof: New coliving townhomes seek to lower costs for Houston renters. The Third Ward townhome is among roughly 33 new coliving properties recently built or under development in Houston by investors working with Passive Investment Network (PIN) Group, a Houston-based real estate investor network. The properties are spread across the Third Ward and University of Houston area, Near Northside, Independence Heights and the East End. They're part of a growing network operating through PadSplit, an Atlanta-based firm focused on providing affordable housing through coliving.
‘Stop coliving’, a partnership to combat housing “monsters”. Residents of buildings affected by this problem, housing unions, and neighborhood associations are joining forces to confront investment funds | In the Esquerra de l’Eixample district alone, there are 68 buildings owned by real estate giants
Coliving Planning and Permissions
Madrid will build Spain’s first municipal coliving space. The Spanish capital will develop the country’s first municipal coliving space in response to housing access difficulties. Access to housing has become one of the main urban challenges in major European cities, and Madrid is seeking to respond to this scenario with a model that is unprecedented in the country. The Madrid City Council announced the construction of Spain’s first municipal coliving space , a public housing project aimed at young people that focuses on cohabitation, space efficiency and affordable rent.
France is moving closer to formally grounding coliving within existing housing law rather than creating a new regulatory category. In a January 2026 response to MP Iñaki Echaniz, the Ministry of Housing clarified that when a coliving unit qualifies as a tenant’s primary residence, it already falls under the July 6, 1989 residential lease law—meaning rent control applies, including in regulated zones. This directly challenges the narrative that coliving operates outside rent regulation. The Ministry acknowledged that courts increasingly reclassify coliving contracts as standard residential leases, especially when stays exceed eight months, and highlighted existing rules for serviced residences designed to curb excessive fees and bundled services. Notably, the government rejected calls for a standalone coliving legal framework, arguing that existing legislation is sufficient and that regulatory simplification—not new categories—is the priority. For operators and investors, the message is clear: coliving is no longer viewed as a regulatory grey area, and compliance with traditional housing law is becoming the baseline rather than the exception.
Spain’s housing market is changing faster than its legal framework can keep up. Rising housing costs, increased job mobility, demographic shifts, and evolving lifestyles are pushing people away from traditional rental models toward alternatives like coliving and build-to-rent, which are no longer experimental but increasingly mainstream in major cities. Yet regulation remains anchored in rules designed for conventional ownership and long-term leases, creating a growing disconnect between how people actually live and how housing is governed. This mismatch is driving legal uncertainty for residents, operators, and investors alike, slowing innovation and increasing risk. Coliving and build-to-rent are not fringe concepts anymore—they are clear signals of where urban living is headed, waiting for policy to catch up.
We hope you enjoyed this edition and wish you a great weekend ahead. Reply us with your thoughts on what more you want to read and if you have any feedback.
Mayank & Everything Coliving Team
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