EC09: Transforming Office Space, Upcoming Conferences, and Latest Coliving News.

🔁📝Missed last week’s insights? We covered utopian experiments and nomadic hotel design. Take a look at the link below for a refresher before jumping into today’s topic:

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Transforming Office Space Into Coliving

We stumbled upon 5Boro, a think-tank in NYC dedicated among others to finding new housing solutions. Their report from October 2023 highlights the opportunity to turn office space, which is becoming abundant in NYC, into coliving.

One of the key challenges that we’ve heard so far has been how to turn these office spaces, which are usually very large and hence don’t allow for room in the middle to have windows, into desirable housing scenarios.

Have a look at their proposed floor plan. This is how an office usually looks like:

And here are two floorplans: one of dorm-style coliving apartments (left) with 31 bedrooms, and one for suite-style coliving apartments (right) with 25 bedrooms across 5 apartments:

Are you currently desiring to convert office space into coliving? Let us know, we’d love to brainstorm with you how.

To read the full report, visit their website here.

Join the Artof.Co Mastermind (March 8-10th)!

Join this weekend retreat to connect with leading coliving professionals and the Artof.Co team, exchange knowledge and let your coliving ideas mature.

We are hosting a weekend in-person masterminddedicated to coliving founders who want to exchange, learn from one another and build better coliving models.

We will facilitate this mastermind, which will contain:

1. Unconference Sessions: participants propose and vote at the beginning of the day on topics to discuss, which are then facilitated by the Artof.Co team
2. Hot Seat Sessions : participants have 5min to explain their problems and get 15min of feedback/ideas from others
3. Social Time : we'll organise apéros, have time to bond over food and connect outside group events.

We will stay a 10-min drive away from Cannes center in our own coliving villa:

The cost of this event excluding food is 350€ per person for a shared room (two people). Single-room options at 650€ are also available.

Please apply now - spots open on a first comes, first serves basis.

Attend Housing Matters! (March 11th)

The leading coliving and innovative living solutions event, gathering up to 800 participants this year. Gui Perdrix from Artof.Co will be the event moderator and many coliving entrepreneurs will join this event.

Every week, more than 1.5 million people move to a city somewhere in the world. Yet most cities are not keeping up with rising housing demands, which drives up prices and housing inequality in the process. Now is the time to imaginatively explore how we might shape the future of living.

In response, MIPIMand Co-Livare convening a new event dedicated to housing in collaboration. Their unique audience, comprising key decision-makers in the real estate sector from over 90 countries, ensures a platform for exchanging tangible and replicable innovations and perspectives capable of driving significant change.

Come to explore solutions such as built-to-rent, coliving, multi-family housing, corporate housing, and share visions of what sustainable housing should and could be.

Join on Monday 11 March for this inspirational and innovative event!

JOIN HOUSING MATTERS!

PS: You can also attend the entire MIPIM event, which lasts from March 11th to 15th, and gives you access to Housing Matters! MIPIM is the leading real estate conference, attracting 20,000 real estate professionals from Europe and beyond.

Everything Else Coliving

Discover the summary of everything coliving happening around the world.

New Coliving Reports

• Dive deeper into an overview of the coliving situation in France: legal statuses, difference to flatsharing, ROI for investors and yearly growths. And read further about the current coliving mindset in France here(including a projected growth from 2,600 beds in 2020 to 14,300 by 2023).
• Explore an overview of coliving in Los Angeles- with a short historical overview and some basic information on what makes coliving stand out.
• Read a recap of current coliving advantages and challenges, as well as some key trends in terms of future predictions when it comes to coliving offerings.
• The Citylifer made a recap of the major trends that are pushing coliving forward, including changes in societal values, skyrocketing real estate prices and the rise of remote work.

Regulations

Washington House of Representatives approves bill to expand dormitory-like housing, citing that cities and counties must allow coliving housing on any residential lots where buildings with six or more residential units are permitted. The units can include options like boarding or rooming houses, or residential suites. The requirement would begin in January 2026.

Operator Growth & New Concepts

• Developer Progressive submits architecture plans to complement Greengate towerin Manchester
• Coliving operator PadSplit surpasses 10,000 co-living rooms, bringing affordable housing to 23,000+ people throughout the country. Their growth model is insane, and we’re impressed by their active efforts to find landlords. They even have an earning calculator on their page- genius!

• HUB and Bridges agree £88m forward-funding deal for London co-living scheme
• 525 LINC, a hybrid apartment and coliving space, opened its doors in Massachusettswith a total of 279 bedrooms. The concept seems rather standard yet offering a mid-end lifestyle.

• The British Property Federation created a coliving working group, including leading operators such as Verv-Life, brokers such as Savills and leading developers.
• BedStudent Padova unveils new coliving for students - around the passion for music! The Jazz Coliving space will be the home for music lovers in Italy - love it!
• Adam Neumann is trying to buy back WeWork!His new company, Flow Global, wants to buy WeWork or its assets, and get bankruptcy financing to keep it going. Crazy? Yes. Read a further analysis here.The telenovela continues…
• A new hotel-coliving concept opened in Malaysia, BRIX KLIA. According to its press release, the desire is to bring in artists - among others through an artist-in-residence (A.I.R.) program, which would allow veteran artists to come in for a week, drawing inspiration from its environment and have the opportunity to create art.

Note: when looking at the property itself, we couldn’t really see the inspirational aspect in the gray-dry standard cheap non-inspirational interior design - so let’s see if they’re able to pull this off!

Coliving Stories

• Read the story of a mother who decided to join a coliving for single mums- the so-called “mommune” - and how it has been affecting her life positively.

Inspirational Resources

• A new podcast has been launched, Housed: The Shared Living Podcast. We’re curious to see how it will discuss coliving, BTR and other shared living schemes.
• For those who haven’t heard of it, let us share again the One Shared House 2030survey. It gathered data from several thousand participants around what they want to share, why and how. It also allows you to filter results based on age, relationships status and countries - showcasing the different cultural values.

Want to be featured in the next newsletter? Tag #everythingcoliving on LinkedIn or Twitter for us to find your company updates!

That’s it for this week! We hope you enjoyed and wish you a good weekend,

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🆕 Excited for more? We’ll dive into crowdfunding for coliving projects and digital nomad solutions in EC10, followed by a look into AI-powered tools in EC11.