ALOS is the single biggest non-pricing driver of operating margin in coliving. Every move-out triggers cleaning, tenant acquisition cost (CAC), and typically 2–4 nights of vacant downtime. Doubling ALOS roughly halves these per-bed-night costs.
ALOS is also the cleanest signal of product-market fit. A long ALOS means tenants want to stay; a short ALOS means they're shopping. Most coliving operator failures correlate with declining ALOS quarter-over-quarter — the leading indicator of community + product-fit erosion.
Formula
ALOS = Total Occupied Bed-Nights ÷ Number of Unique Stays
Worked example: Property: 1,395 occupied bed-nights in a month, 25 unique guest stays (some started in prior months). ALOS for the month is harder to compute on a clean monthly basis — the cleaner version is rolling-90-day or trailing-12-month: 4,200 bed-nights ÷ 50 unique stays = 84 days ≈ 2.8 months.
In the field
Habyt's investor updates publish trailing-12-month ALOS as a key portfolio health metric. Outsite tracks ALOS by acquisition channel — direct bookings have ~2x ALOS of OTA bookings, which informs marketing-spend allocation.
Common pitfalls
- ×Computing ALOS on month-only data — most stays span months, so monthly ALOS is volatile and misleading.
- ×Treating cancellations as zero-night stays — depresses ALOS artificially.
- ×Not segmenting by acquisition channel — direct bookings, OTA bookings, corporate contracts have very different ALOS.
- ×Confusing ALOS with average tenancy period — booking turnover and tenancy churn are not the same.