The Vendor's Coliving Sales Guide

Who buys at a coliving company, the buying committee, your ICP, the spend stack per bed, category sales tactics, a discovery question bank, objection handling, pilot-to-rollout motion, pricing models, outreach sequences, and a full worked deal. ~10,000 words, free.

Introduction

Coliving operators look like multifamily landlords but buy like hotels. They look like SMBs but expect enterprise tooling. The buyer behavior is its own animal, and once you understand it, deals close 3x faster.

Coliving operators are weird buyers. They look like multifamily landlords but buy like hotels. They look like SMBs but expect enterprise tooling. They have between 5 and 50 properties, run on margins thinner than a Brooklyn loft wall, and somehow still want a roadmap conversation with your CEO before signing a $1,800-a-month contract.

If you sell into hospitality and assume coliving is just smaller hotels, your pipeline will tell you otherwise. If you sell into multifamily and assume it's just smaller apartment portfolios, same story. The buyer behavior is its own animal: a founder making instinct calls in a Slack DM at 11pm, a community manager with veto power, a finance lead who's never been in the building, and a property owner who isn't on any of your calls but kills the deal at signature.

Everything Coliving has spent the last decade as the go-between for vendors and operators. We've watched 60+ operators evaluate hundreds of vendors. We've seen the same five mistakes kill deals over and over: pricing built for hotels, pilots scoped like enterprise SaaS, RFP responses that read like government bids, decks that talk about ADR when the operator measures occupancy, and "enterprise" packages priced for someone with 10x the beds.

This guide breaks the buyer apart. Who actually signs. Where the budget goes. Which categories are open territory and which are locked. How to scope a pilot, respond to an RFP, price a deal, handle the objections that actually come up, and find operators in the channels they actually use. By the end you should stop sending generic decks and start closing.

The market you are selling into

Before the tactics, size the room honestly. Coliving is a real and growing category, but it is small enough that precise numbers get thrown around loosely. Use ranges, not false precision, when you talk to investors or build your own forecast.

Grand View Research (2025) puts the global coliving market at roughly $7.8B in 2024, growing to roughly $16.1B by 2030 at about a 13.5% compound annual growth rate. Broader definitions that fold in adjacent flexible-living stock push the 2026 figure closer to $17B. In Europe, the JLL European Coliving Index (2025) counts roughly 56,000 operational beds with another 75,000 in the pipeline, while Coliving Insights (2025), using a broader definition, counts more than 110,000 European beds. On the capital side, Savills (2025) reports that 51% of surveyed investors plan to invest in coliving within three years.

Read those numbers as a vendor, not an analyst. Three implications matter for how you sell:

• The total addressable market is large enough to build a category-defining company, but small enough that reputation travels fast. Operators talk to each other constantly. A bad implementation at one operator is known by five others inside a quarter.
• The pipeline beds outnumber operational beds in Europe, which means a lot of your future buyers are projects that have not opened yet. Selling to a pre-launch operator is a different motion from selling to a running one, and both are in your funnel.
• Investor appetite is turning into new operator formation, which means a steady flow of first-time buyers who have never bought your category before. You are often selling the category as much as the product.

Everything Coliving's own read on the operator landscape comes from the Everything Coliving 2026 Operator Survey (500+ operators surveyed across 40+ countries). Where this guide cites operator behavior without an external source, that survey and our advisory work are the basis. We flag it so you know the difference between an industry statistic and a field observation.

How to use this guide

Read the whole thing once to build a map of the buyer. Then treat it as a reference you open per deal. The sections are ordered the way a deal actually unfolds: understand who buys, understand where their money already goes, understand which category you are playing in, then position, discover, pilot, respond to RFPs, price, handle objections, and market. The worked example near the end stitches it into a single deal so you can see the motion end to end.

One framing to carry through every section: coliving operators are operators first and buyers second. They spend their day filling rooms, keeping residents happy, and defending margin. Every conversation you have competes with a leaking pipe and a move-out. If your pitch does not connect to a room filled, an hour saved, or a risk avoided, it loses to the pipe.

Define your ICP as a coliving vendor

Most vendors we advise do not have an ideal customer profile for coliving. They have a target list that is really just "operators who replied." That is not an ICP, it is an inbox. Before you build a pitch, decide who you are actually built to serve, because coliving operators vary more inside the category than most vendors expect.

An ICP for a coliving vendor should be defined on four axes: size, model, maturity, and geography. Get these explicit and your win rate climbs, because you stop wasting cycles on operators your product does not fit and you stop generic-pitching operators who need a specific pitch.

Size

Bed count is the single most predictive variable in a coliving deal. It determines who signs, how long the cycle runs, what proof they need, and what they will pay. The four bands used throughout this guide (0 to 30 beds, 30 to 80, 80 to 300, 300+) are not arbitrary. They are the points where the org chart changes and a new buyer appears. Decide which bands you serve. A product that needs a 60-day enterprise cycle to be worth selling should not be chasing 20-bed founders, and a self-serve tool with a $99 floor is wasting its life in a 12-month procurement review.

Model

Coliving is not one operating model. The main ones you will meet:

• Master-lease operators rent whole buildings from a landlord and sublet by the room. They are margin-obsessed because the head lease is a fixed cost regardless of occupancy. They buy things that fill rooms and cut cost.
• Owner-operators own the real estate. They think in asset value and refinance timelines, and they will spend on things that protect the building and the resident experience because it protects the asset.
• Management or franchise operators run buildings for third-party owners. They have a second master to satisfy, the owner, which adds a buyer to your committee who is never in the room.
• Asset-light community operators run membership, events, and matching without holding much property. They buy community and CRM tooling, not smart locks and IoT.

Your product fits some of these and not others. An IoT leak-detection vendor is compelling to owner-operators and master-lease operators, and close to irrelevant to an asset-light community brand. Name which models you serve.

Maturity

A pre-launch operator building their first building buys foundational systems (PMS, locks, payments) and buys them fast because they need to open. A three-year-old operator has systems in place and buys replacements or additions, which means you are displacing an incumbent and inheriting their integration debt. A scaling operator standardizing across a portfolio buys governance, reporting, and integration, and they will rip out point solutions that do not consolidate. Selling a replacement is a different motion from selling a first install, and both need different proof.

Geography

Regulation, payment rails, and buyer norms differ by market. A US operator lives in fear of Fair Housing Act disparate-impact exposure on screening. A European operator lives in GDPR and SEPA. A UK operator cares about deposit protection schemes and right-to-rent checks. If your product touches money, identity, or resident data, geography is not a nice-to-have segmentation, it is a compliance gate that decides whether you can sell there at all.

Write your disqualifiers

An ICP is as much about who you say no to as who you chase. Write down the operator you should decline or defer. Examples of honest disqualifiers we see work:

• Under 15 beds if your product needs a 60-day cycle and a $2,000 monthly floor. The math never works and you will churn them in a quarter.
• Single-building operators with no expansion plan if your value is portfolio standardization. There is no portfolio.
• Operators whose model does not touch your value (asset-light brands for a hardware product).
• Pre-revenue projects with no signed building if your product needs live operations to show value.

Every hour spent pitching an operator outside your ICP is an hour not spent with one inside it. The fastest way to lift a coliving vendor's win rate is not a better deck, it is a shorter, truer target list.

1. Who actually buys vendor products at a coliving company

0-30 beds (1-2 properties)

The founder buys everything. Lock systems, the PMS, the cleaning vendor, the candle scent in the lobby. They're often a former tenant or a real estate person who fell into operations. They make decisions on instinct, recommendations from peer operators, and how a demo feels. Cycles are short, 7 to 21 days from first call to signature.

Who you target: the founder, by name, on LinkedIn. Skip everything else. Who you actually need to convince: the founder. There is no committee. What they'll ignore: SLAs, security questionnaires, "enterprise-grade" anything, partner-tier slides. They'll also ignore your case studies if they're from operators 10x their size.

30-80 beds

Founder is still the final yes, but a community manager has emerged who runs day-to-day, plus a part-time bookkeeper who's loud about cost. Cycles stretch to 30-45 days. The founder gut-checks decisions against social media, a bad Reddit thread can kill a deal you thought was won.

Who you target: the community manager (workflow) plus the founder (signs). Who you actually need to convince: the community manager has a soft veto. They'll torpedo a tool that adds work to their day. What they'll ignore: API documentation, integration roadmaps, anything procurement-flavored. Month-to-month billing terms matter heavily, the bookkeeper is whispering in their ear.

80-300 beds

A COO is starting to emerge. There's now a dedicated ops lead, sometimes a Head of Tech who came from a hotel chain or a multifamily REIT. RFPs become possible, though most are still amateur. Cycles run 60-90 days. The founder is now too busy to be in every demo.

Who you target: the ops lead first, the COO second, the Head of Tech if they exist. Who you actually need to convince: the ops lead is your champion, but the COO signs. Build for the ops lead's daily workflow, then arm them with a one-pager. What they'll ignore: founder-tier demos, monthly-billing-only pitches, anything without integration to their existing PMS. They will not read a 40-slide deck.

300+ beds (multi-property professional operators)

VP Ops, IT/Tech lead, Finance lead, sometimes dedicated Procurement. Real RFPs. Real security questionnaires. Real legal reviews. Cycles run 90-180 days, occasionally 12 months for anything touching payments or resident data.

Who you target: the IT/Tech lead for technical fit, the VP Ops for the business case, Finance for budget, Procurement for legal. Who you actually need to convince: all four, separately, with different decks. What they'll ignore: anything from a vendor without a SOC 2 report, a security whitepaper, or a real CSM team. They'll ignore your founder unless you bring them in for the strategic close.

The mistake we see most: vendors pitch a 200-bed operator like a 20-bed operator because they got a quick reply from the founder. The founder's reply doesn't mean they're the buyer at that scale, they're being polite. Map the org before you map the pitch.

The founder's reply at scale isn't a buying signal, it's a courtesy signal. Every week we watch a vendor mistake one for the other and lose a 6-month sales cycle to a buyer they never actually pitched.

The coliving buying committee, role by role

Once an operator crosses roughly 80 beds, you are no longer selling to a person, you are selling to a committee that rarely sits in the same room. Each member has a different question, and a deal dies when even one goes unanswered. Learn to recognize the roles even when the titles are messy.

• The economic buyer controls the budget and signs. At small operators this is the founder. At larger ones it is a COO, VP Ops, or Finance lead. Their question is "does this pay for itself, and can I defend the spend." Give them payback math in their own numbers.
• The champion feels the pain daily and wants your product to exist. Usually the ops lead or community manager. Their question is "will this make my day better and make me look good for backing it." Your entire deal runs through this person. Arm them relentlessly.
• The technical evaluator decides whether it works with the stack. A Head of Tech, an ops-minded generalist, or the founder wearing that hat. Their question is "does this integrate with our PMS and not create a second system of record." Answer integration on the first call.
• The user is the person who touches the product every day: the front-line community manager, the maintenance lead, the resident. Their question is "is this more work or less work for me." They rarely sign but they routinely kill deals in month two by not adopting.
• The finance blocker watches cost. A bookkeeper at small operators, a Finance lead at large ones. Their question is "what is the real all-in cost and what happens if we cancel." Kill surprise fees and lock-in before they find them.
• The invisible buyer is the property owner or investor who is on none of your calls and appears only at signature to ask "why are we paying for this." At management and franchise operators this person is decisive and you will never meet them. Your champion has to sell them for you, so give the champion an owner-facing one-pager, not just a user-facing one.

The practical move: on every deal above 80 beds, name each of these six people (or note that a role is empty at this operator) before you send a proposal. If you cannot name the economic buyer and the champion, you do not have a deal, you have a conversation.

How coliving operators actually buy

The buying process is not a funnel that flows on its own. It stalls unless someone inside pushes it, and that someone is your champion. The typical shape of a coliving purchase:

1. Trigger. Something breaks or a threshold is crossed. A lock system fails, occupancy drops, a spreadsheet stops scaling, a new building is opening, an investor asks for reporting the current stack cannot produce. Operators rarely buy on a smooth timeline, they buy when a trigger creates urgency. Your job in outreach is to arrive near a trigger, which is why reading their recent public content works so well.
2. Informal scan. The champion asks peer operators what they use, searches the Everything Coliving Vendor Directory, and lurks in operator group chats. You want to already be the name that comes up here, which is why referrals and directory presence beat cold outreach.
3. Shortlist and demos. Two or three vendors get a demo. This is where most vendors over-show and lose. Show the one workflow that maps to the trigger, not the whole product.
4. Internal selling. The champion now has to sell you internally to the economic buyer, finance, and sometimes the invisible owner. You are not in these conversations. Whatever you handed the champion is doing the talking. This is the most under-served stage in vendor sales and the highest-leverage one to invest in.
5. Pilot or trial. At any real size, operators want to see it work in their building before committing. See the pilot section.
6. Commit and roll out. Contract, then expansion across properties. The rollout is a second sale, not a formality.

Deals do not close in your CRM, they close in a conversation you are not invited to. The single highest-return thing a coliving vendor can build is not a better demo, it is a better internal-selling kit for the champion who pitches you when you are not in the room.

2. The coliving spend stack, where the budget actually goes

Per-bed-per-month spend ranges across operators Everything Coliving works with, normalized for a US-or-Western-Europe urban operator. Adjust down 30-40% for tier-2 cities, up 20% for London/SF/NYC.

Property/rent: $400-2,500 per bed. Operator-controlled. You don't sell here.

Staff/community team: $50-200 per bed. Sales hook: anything that reduces headcount-per-bed ratio. The pitch is always "X tool replaces Y hours of community manager time."

PMS / booking software: $3-12 per bed per month. The largest software line item. Mews and Hostfully top of range. Operto and Cohabs platforms middle. Niche coliving-native PMSs at the bottom. Central nervous system, operator moves slowly, but when they move, they move for years.

CRM: $1-4 per bed. HubSpot dominates by inertia. Pipedrive in lean operators. Almost no one is happy with their CRM-PMS handoff.

Payments processing: 1-3% of revenue, plus interchange. Stripe default. GoCardless for European ACH/SEPA needs. Operators obsessed with chargeback rates and failed-payment recovery.

Smart locks / access: $5-15 per bed amortized setup, $1-3 per bed monthly. Latch dominated by inertia, lost ground after outages. Salto reliable and expensive. RemoteLock quietly winning mid-market. August in small operators. PointCentral for multifamily-adjacent crowd.

Community platform: $1-3 per bed. Slack, Circle, Cohab AI, Discord. Most operators have something running, almost none can prove engagement metrics.

Accounting: $1-2 per bed. QuickBooks for US, Xero for the rest. Boring, sticky, low churn.

Insurance: $5-15 per bed. Property and liability operator-controlled. Opening: renter's insurance, Lemonade, Sure, Assurant piloting coliving-specific products.

IoT / sensors: $2-8 per bed. Minut leads on noise. Roost and PointCentral on leak/temp. Rising fast, insurance underwriters demanding it.

Marketing tools: $2-6 per bed. Fragmented and small.

Cleaning / turnover: $30-80 per bed. Mostly people-cost. Vendor opportunity in scheduling, supply procurement, inspection apps.

Maintenance: $20-50 per bed. Property Meld and similar workorder platforms have a foothold. Most operators still run maintenance on WhatsApp.

How to read the stack as a seller

The numbers above are the map. The strategy is knowing which kind of line you are trying to become. Three moves matter.

Know whether you are a new line or a reallocation. If your product creates a line item that does not exist yet (IoT, coliving-specific insurance, community engagement that actually works), you are asking the operator to grow the stack, and you must justify net-new spend against a hard margin. If you are replacing an existing line (a cheaper coliving-native PMS, a better lock system), you are competing against a number the operator already knows, and your job is to beat it on total cost or pain, not to invent budget. The pitch is completely different. New-line pitches lead with a cost avoided or revenue gained. Reallocation pitches lead with a switching case that clears the switching cost.

Follow the money to whoever controls the line. Each line has an owner. Community and CRM lines are the champion's. Payments, accounting, and insurance are finance's. Locks, IoT, and maintenance are ops and sometimes the owner's, because they touch the physical asset. Pitch the person who controls the line you are trying to enter, then get them to pull in the economic buyer. Pitching a payments product to a community manager wastes both your times.

Respect the leasing calendar. Operators buy on a seasonal clock. Systems that touch move-ins get bought before peak leasing season (spring and late summer in most Northern Hemisphere markets), because nobody rips out a PMS in the middle of a move-in wave. Budget for the following year often locks in the last quarter. If you are talking to an operator two weeks before their busiest month about replacing a core system, you are not losing on merit, you are losing on timing. Ask when their leasing peak is on the first call and map your implementation around it.

Where they're under-spending

IoT/sensors. Insurance. Bias-audited tenant screening. Anything that prevents an incident is under-bought because the value is invisible until something breaks. Sales pitch: lead with the cost of one noise complaint that became a city violation, or one unscreened tenant who became a 6-month eviction.

Community engagement tooling. Operators say community is their differentiator and then spend $1-3 per bed on it. Room for a $5-7 per bed product that actually moves NPS, but you have to prove the lift.

Where they're over-spending

CRM and marketing tools, almost universally. Operators stack 4-6 marketing SaaS subscriptions because the founder bought them and never canceled.

PMS, in the sense that they're paying for hotel features they don't use. Mews and similar carry hospitality bloat. Opening: a coliving-native PMS that's 30% cheaper because it's not also doing F&B and channel management.

The build-versus-buy reflex

Coliving operators, especially those with a technical founder, have a strong build reflex. Cohabs building their own PMS is the famous example, but you will meet the reflex constantly at 80-to-300-bed operators who have one developer and a lot of confidence. When an operator says "we could just build this," they are usually not making a technical claim, they are telling you your price feels high relative to the perceived complexity. Do not argue that they cannot build it. Reframe on total cost of ownership: the build is not the feature, it is the feature plus maintenance plus integrations plus the opportunity cost of their one developer not working on the thing that actually differentiates them. The operator's scarce resource is attention, not code. Your pitch is that you free their attention. That lands far better than "it is harder than you think."

Entrenched vs new-entrant categories

Entrenched: payments (Stripe), accounting (QuickBooks/Xero), smart locks at high end (Salto). Don't fight head-on, integrate or sell adjacent.

New entrants winning: coliving-native PMS, IoT, community platforms, AI screening, insurance. This is where the air is cleanest.

The pattern across every category coliving operators struggle with: the incumbent vendor was built for an adjacent industry. Hotels' PMS, multifamily's CRM, residential's smart locks. Native coliving tooling is the white space, and the buyer is paying attention.

3. The 6 vendor categories operators struggle with most

1. PMS that actually fits coliving

Hotel PMSs treat every night as a discrete transaction. Multifamily PMSs treat every unit as a 12-month lease. Coliving is neither, flexible-stay (28 days to 12 months), room-level inside a unit, with community-aware fields. Most operators we work with are on something they openly hate. Hostfully and Operto have made coliving plays. Cohabs built their own. No clean winner. The vendor that nails room-level inventory, flexible billing cycles, and a clean CRM handoff will dominate the next five years.

How to sell into it: the PMS is the operator's system of record, so switching fear is enormous. Lead with migration, not features. Show exactly how you get their current data out of the incumbent and into you without a lost move-in. Offer to run in parallel for a leasing cycle. The operator's real objection is never "your product is worse," it is "I cannot afford a botched cutover during move-in season." Answer that and the features sell themselves.

2. CRM with operator workflow

The coliving funnel is lead to tour to application to deposit to move-in to onboarding to ongoing community. Most operators duct-tape HubSpot or Pipedrive plus Notion plus a Google Sheet. Sales-to-ops handoff broken at almost every operator we audit. Opening: a CRM purpose-built for resident lifecycle, or a HubSpot-Pipedrive integration layer that lives in the PMS.

How to sell into it: the pain is the handoff, not the CRM itself. Do not pitch "a better CRM," pitch "the lead never falls through the crack between sales and ops." Map their current funnel on a call, point at the exact stage where leads leak (usually deposit to move-in), and quantify the leaked revenue. That number is your entire business case.

3. Reliable smart locks at scale

Latch had multiple outages in 2023, operators have not forgotten. Salto excellent and priced for hotels. RemoteLock workable, best PMS integration. August doesn't scale. The opening: mid-priced, cloud-managed system with native PMS integrations and an SLA operators trust.

How to sell into it: trust is the product. Lead with reliability, an SLA in writing, and what happens during an outage (offline access, backup credentials). Operators in this category have been burned, so a demo of the happy path is worthless. Demo the failure path. Show them what a resident does when the internet is down. That is the question they actually have and no competitor is answering it on the first call.

4. Community platforms that get used

Slack works for ops, dies with residents. Circle and Discord better for residents but ops won't move there. Bridge is unsolved. Cohab AI making a play. Hard problem isn't software, it's engagement model. The vendor that proves a 30%+ monthly active rate among residents closes every operator that hears the pitch.

How to sell into it: engagement is the only proof that matters, and it is the hardest to fake. Do not pitch features, pitch a monthly-active-resident number and how you got there. If you cannot yet prove engagement, run a pilot whose single success metric is exactly that, and be willing to walk if you miss it. Operators have bought three community tools that died. You are selling against their scar tissue.

5. Coliving-specific insurance

Most underwriters refuse to quote coliving or price it punitively. Lemonade, Sure, Assurant have run pilot programs. Opening: renter's product priced per bed with operator-friendly billing, every operator we know would buy it tomorrow.

How to sell into it: the friction is billing and administration, not appetite. Operators want it. Lead with how the resident enrolls, how it is billed (per bed, on the operator's existing invoice ideally), and what the operator has to do (as close to nothing as possible). The operator is not underwriting a risk, they are avoiding a chore. Make the chore disappear.

6. AI for tenant screening that doesn't get sued

Operators want AI screening because manual screening is expensive and inconsistent. They're terrified of FHA disparate-impact lawsuits, and should be. New AI screening vendors that lead with bias auditing, model documentation, and adverse-action workflow compliance are the white space. The vendor that hands an operator a defensible audit trail wins.

How to sell into it: the buyer is buying legal cover, not accuracy. Lead with the audit trail, the bias-audit methodology, and the adverse-action workflow, in that order. Bring compliance documentation to the first call, not the third. In the US, name the Fair Housing Act exposure explicitly so they know you understand the risk they lie awake about. The model's accuracy is a footnote the legal reviewer reads after they have decided you will not get them sued.

Vendors lose AI screening deals not because the model is wrong but because the deck doesn't say "we'll defend you in front of a regulator." Lead with the audit trail; the algorithm is a footnote in the legal review.

4. How to position to a 5-property operator vs a 50-property operator

Same product, three different sales motions. A pitch built for one will lose with the other.

Tune the motion to the buyer, not the buyer to the deck. The pitch that wins a 5-property founder will lose a 50-property procurement team, and vice versa. Vendors who build one master deck and run it across all three lose deals on both ends.

Small operator pitch (5 properties / under 150 beds)

Lead with payback period in months. The operator's mental model is "can I get this paid back before my next refinance / next round / next investor update."

• ROI under 6 months, demonstrated with their own numbers.
• You handle setup. They have no IT team.
• Monthly billing. Annual contracts spook them. Offer a 10-15% annual discount as an option.
• No annual lock-in.
• Founder demo. Your founder, talking to their founder. Skip the AE.

What kills small operators: annual minimums, setup fees over $1,500, mandatory training packages.

Mid-size operator pitch (5-15 properties / 150-600 beds)

The trickiest segment because they're transitioning from founder-buying to org-buying.

• Integration with their existing PMS, name it on the first call.
• SLA in writing. One-page response time and uptime commitment.
• References from peer operators at the same size.
• 12-month contract with quarterly business reviews. The QBR saves the deal.
• Implementation timeline mapped to their leasing season.

What kills mid-size operators: "we'll get to that integration eventually," reference customers in different segment, no implementation manager, surprise overages.

Large operator pitch (15+ properties / 600+ beds)

Enterprise sales with a hospitality twist.

• Enterprise SLA with credits.
• Security questionnaire pre-filled. SOC 2 ready.
• Custom roadmap input.
• Multi-year deal with year-over-year rate protection.
• Named CSM with quarterly executive business reviews.
• Procurement-friendly paper. MSA + Order Form, redlines welcome.

What kills large operators: "we usually do it this way" when they ask for a redline, CSM who's also the AE, founder-led account management.

Proof and ROI framing that actually lands

Positioning is only half the job. The other half is proof, and coliving operators are allergic to generic proof. Three rules make your ROI case credible instead of promotional.

Build the case in their numbers, not yours. A slide that says "customers save 20%" is noise. A slide that says "at your 240 beds and your $1,150 average rent, a 2-point occupancy lift is roughly $66,000 a year, and the product costs $17,000" is a decision. Always ask for the two or three inputs you need (bed count, average rent, current occupancy, community manager hours, failed-payment rate) on the discovery call, then hand back the math on the next one. The operator will check it, and checking it is them selling themselves.

Frame value in the currency the operator manages. Operators do not manage ADR or RevPAR, whatever your hospitality background says. They manage occupancy, net operating income, time-to-fill, resident churn, community manager hours, and incident count. Translate every benefit into one of those. "Reduces support tickets" is weak. "Gives each community manager back six hours a week, which is most of a move-in day" is strong, because hours are the operator's scarcest resource.

Distinguish hard ROI from soft ROI and lead with hard. Hard ROI is money in or money out you can defend to a finance lead: occupancy, failed-payment recovery, headcount avoided, an eviction prevented. Soft ROI is NPS, community feel, brand. Both matter, but at every operator above founder-scale the economic buyer needs hard ROI to approve the spend, and the champion needs soft ROI to want it. Give the champion the story and the economic buyer the number, in the same proposal, clearly labeled.

Size the proof to the segment. A small operator believes a peer's word and a live demo. A mid-size operator needs a same-size reference and a written SLA. A large operator needs a SOC 2 report, a security questionnaire, and a reference call with someone in their own segment. Sending a SOC 2 report to a 20-bed founder signals you do not understand them. Sending a founder anecdote to a 600-bed procurement team signals the same. Match the proof to the buyer.

A discovery question bank

You cannot build the ROI case, name the committee, or scope a pilot without discovery, and coliving discovery has its own questions. Generic SaaS discovery ("what keeps you up at night") wastes an operator's time and marks you as an outsider. Ask questions that only someone who knows coliving would ask. Below is a bank to draw from. Do not run all of them, pick the six or seven that fit the deal.

Situation and stack

• How many beds across how many properties, and what is your expansion plan for the next 12 months?
• Which operating model are you: master lease, owner-operator, management, or something in between?
• What is your current PMS, and on a scale of love to hate, where are you with it?
• Walk me through your resident lifecycle from first inquiry to move-out. Where does it currently live: which tools, which spreadsheets?
• When is your leasing peak, and when is your budget set for next year?

Pain and trigger

• What made you take this call now rather than three months ago? (This surfaces the trigger, which is the whole deal.)
• What is the most manual, repetitive thing your community managers do every week?
• Where in the funnel do you lose leads or residents you should have kept?
• What is the last incident that cost you real money or a resident: a noise complaint, a failed payment run, a lockout, a bad screening?
• What have you already tried to fix this, and why did it not stick?

Decision and committee

• Besides you, who else weighs in on a decision like this? (Then name them back and ask about each.)
• Who owns the budget line this would come from?
• Is there an owner or investor who would need to sign off on this spend?
• What would make this an easy yes for your finance lead? What would make it an easy no?
• What is the last tool in this category you bought, and how did that decision go?

Success and proof

• If we did a 6-week pilot, what single number would make you say it worked?
• What would you need to see to expand this from one property to the whole portfolio?
• Who is the peer operator whose opinion you trust most on tooling?

The most valuable question in the bank is the trigger question, "why now." An operator without a trigger is a nurture contact, not a live deal, however friendly the call. Knowing the difference stops you from forecasting deals that were never going to close this quarter.

Discovery in coliving is not qualification theater, it is where you gather the exact numbers and names that let the champion sell you internally. A call that ends without a trigger, a committee, and a success number was a nice chat, not a discovery.

5. Pilot program structure that wins coliving deals

The 6-week pilot converts highest. Anything shorter doesn't generate enough usage data. Anything longer loses momentum.

One property, one workflow, one named champion, six weeks. The pilots that convert at 70%+ all share these four constraints. The pilots that stall always added a fifth.

Week 1: Scope the problem and success metric in writing

Single-page pilot scope document. The operator signs it. Contains: specific problem you're solving, the property where pilot runs, the resident-facing or staff-facing change, named champion on their side, named lead on yours, success metric, go/no-go criteria.

Weeks 2-3: Integration and setup at one specific property

One property, not a portfolio. One workflow, not the whole product. Vendors blow it by trying to demo the whole product. Show one thing working.

Weeks 4-5: Live use, instrumented data

The actual pilot. Operator's team uses the product in production. You instrument everything: usage frequency, error rates, time-to-task, support tickets, NPS pings. Send a weekly Friday email with three numbers and one anecdote.

Week 6: Review session with predefined go/no-go criteria

Live session. Walk through the criteria you wrote in week 1. Show whether they were hit. Have the production contract ready before the meeting.

What to say yes to

One property, one workflow, named champion. Free or steeply discounted for the 6 weeks. Real integration work, pilot with their data, not a sandbox. Mid-pilot check-in (week 3).

What to say no to

"We'll discount your ARR if it works." Most common ask, most expensive mistake. Pilot success should convert to standard pricing.

"Let's pilot at three properties at once." Scope creep dressed as enthusiasm. One property, then expand.

Sample success metrics operators agree to

• Occupancy: 2-5 percentage point lift, or 10-20% reduction in time-to-fill
• Time saved: 5-10 hours per week per community manager
• NPS lift: 5-10 point improvement on a quarterly resident survey
• Vacancy days reduced: 3-7 days per turnover
• Payment recovery: 15-25% reduction in failed payments at 30 days
• Maintenance: 20% reduction in average ticket close time
• Lock incidents: 50%+ reduction in lockouts per month

Pick one. Two at the most.

The mutual action plan template

The single biggest reason pilots stall is that both sides assume the other is driving. A mutual action plan (MAP) fixes this. It is a shared, dated list of who does what to get from pilot to signed rollout, agreed in week 1 and reviewed every Friday. Keep it to one page. A workable MAP for a coliving pilot looks like this:

1. Pilot scope document signed by champion and vendor lead. (Week 1, both.)
2. Success metric and go/no-go criteria agreed in writing. (Week 1, both.)
3. Integration to the operator's PMS configured and tested at the pilot property. (Week 2, vendor with operator tech contact.)
4. Pilot property staff trained, 30 minutes, live not recorded. (Week 3, vendor.)
5. Mid-pilot check-in, review early data, resolve blockers. (Week 3, both.)
6. Champion identifies the economic buyer and the invisible owner, and books them into the week-6 review. (By week 4, operator.)
7. Weekly Friday data email: three numbers, one anecdote. (Weeks 4 and 5, vendor.)
8. Draft production contract and pricing shared for review before the review meeting. (Week 5, vendor.)
9. Security or procurement questionnaire completed if required at this size. (Week 5, vendor.)
10. Week-6 review against go/no-go criteria, decision, and rollout plan. (Week 6, both.)
11. Signed order form and rollout sequencing across the next properties. (Week 6 to 7, both.)

The MAP does two things. It makes the champion's internal work explicit (step 6 is the one that actually determines whether the deal closes), and it removes the "let me check internally" limbo by naming who owns each step and when. Send it as a shared doc, not a PDF, so both sides edit it live.

Pilot to rollout, the second sale

A converted pilot is not a closed portfolio, it is one property. The rollout across the rest of the estate is a separate sale and vendors routinely fumble it by treating it as automatic. Two things happen at rollout that did not happen at pilot: the invisible owner and finance now scrutinize a bigger number, and the operational load of deploying across many buildings becomes real. Plan for both.

• Sequence the rollout to the leasing calendar. Deploy building by building in the order that avoids each property's move-in peak. A staged rollout that respects the calendar closes faster than an all-at-once plan that scares the ops team.
• Convert pilot proof into a portfolio business case. Take the one-property result and extrapolate it, in the operator's numbers, across the estate. The pilot's six hours saved per week at one property becomes the portfolio's headcount conversation.
• Name a rollout owner on each side. The pilot champion cannot personally deploy ten buildings. Get an operator-side rollout lead and give them a repeatable playbook from the pilot.
• Price the rollout for the estate, not the pilot. Move from pilot pricing (free or steeply discounted) to standard per-bed or per-property pricing with a volume tier that rewards the full portfolio commitment. Never let pilot pricing become the anchor for the rollout, which is exactly why you refuse the "discount our ARR if it works" ask up front.

6. RFP best practices when responding to operators

Most vendor RFP responses for coliving fail not because the product is wrong, but because the response was written for a multifamily landlord. Coliving operators have different decision criteria, different timelines, and different ROI math. Tune the response to match.

Most coliving operator RFPs are amateur. Read them like a detective.

What to look for

Vague success criteria. Push to specify before you respond. A 15-minute call asking "what would make you say this was worth the money in 90 days" is worth more than 8 hours of writing.

Missing decision-maker names. Ask. If they won't tell you, you're filler, they have a preferred vendor.

Multiple incumbents being benched. Political. Find out who and why before writing.

Compressed timeline. Real decision-maker has already chosen. Either you're chosen (great) or paperwork (don't waste 40 hours).

Buried budget. You're being shopped for negotiation leverage. Respond with a price band, not a number.

How to respond

• 1-page executive summary leading. Named champion, named deal team, three things you'll do in first 90 days, the price.
• Checklist questions in checklist form. Yes/no/partial with one sentence of context. No paragraphs.
• 2-3 references at peer operators. Same size, geography, segment.
• Transparent pricing. Show the formula, not just the total.
• Bring your deal team in. Implementation manager, CSM, executive sponsor. Operators sign with people, not logos.

What to avoid

80-page response decks. Paragraph-form answers to checklist questions. Generic case studies from outside coliving. Pricing that requires a call to disclose.

Deciding whether to respond at all

Not every RFP is worth 40 hours. Coliving operators sometimes run an RFP to justify a decision they have already made, to pressure an incumbent on price, or because an investor told them to run a process. Qualify the RFP before you invest in it. Respond fully when you can talk to the decision-maker before writing, the success criteria are specific or can be made so, and the timeline is realistic for your implementation. Respond with a short, honest, lower-effort proposal (or decline) when they will not take a pre-response call, the timeline is compressed to a point that implies a chosen vendor, or the requirements are copied from a multifamily template that does not fit coliving. Declining a fake RFP gracefully and staying in touch often wins the next real one, because operators remember the vendor who did not waste everyone's time.

7. Pricing, per-bed, per-property, per-feature

Coliving operators reject pricing for two reasons more than every other reason combined: minimum contract values they can't justify to their finance lead, and setup fees they can't justify before seeing value. Both are fixable; both lose deals every week they're left in the proposal.

Per-bed per month

Cleanest model. Scales with operator. Best for ongoing services where value scales with usage: PMS, CRM, community, payment processing markup, insurance.

Bands: $1-3 light tools, $3-7 core operational, $7-15 PMS-tier. Tier breaks at 100, 500, 2,000 beds. Don't have more than three tiers, operators get suspicious of complex pricing.

Per-property per month

Works when value doesn't scale linearly with beds. Smart locks, accounting, maintenance platforms, IoT base stations.

Bands: $50-150 light tools, $150-500 hardware-adjacent, $500-1,500 premium. Add per-bed overage above a threshold to capture upside without scaring small operators.

Per-feature with seat limits

Enterprise model. 200+ beds with named seat counts on the operator side. Module 1 (PMS core) is X, Module 2 (channel manager) is Y. Each module has named admin/staff seats with overage pricing.

Only works at scale and only with a procurement function that thinks in modules.

Packaging for operators, not just pricing

Price is the number. Packaging is how you wrap it, and packaging is where coliving deals are won or lost, because operators are pattern-matching on risk as much as cost. A few packaging moves that consistently work:

• Anchor on the metric the operator already tracks. Per-bed pricing wins in coliving precisely because operators live and breathe bed count and occupancy. Pricing per bed lets the operator do the ROI math in their head during your call. Pricing per "workflow" or per "transaction volume tier" forces them to translate, and translation is friction.
• Make the entry package small enough to say yes to alone. For small and mid operators, design a package that the champion or founder can approve without convening finance. If your smallest real package requires a committee, you have priced yourself out of the fast-moving segment. A low, honest entry point that expands with beds beats a high floor that stalls.
• Bundle the scary parts in, do not bill them separately. Setup, basic training, and standard integration should be inside the price, not line items. Operators read separate setup and training fees as nickel-and-diming and as evidence the product is hard to adopt. Bundle them and, if you must recover the cost, raise the recurring price slightly instead.
• Offer the annual discount, never the annual mandate. Small operators fear lock-in. Give them monthly with a clear 10-to-15% annual discount as an option they choose, not a floor they must clear. The ones who trust you will take the annual deal after the first quarter.
• Reserve multi-year and modular packaging for operators who ask. A 600-bed operator with procurement wants an MSA, order forms, and modules. A 40-bed founder wants a single number and a start date. Do not show enterprise packaging to the founder or single-number pricing to procurement.

Worked example: pricing a per-bed product across three operators

Say your product prices at $4 per bed per month in the core operational band. The same list price produces three very different deals:

• A 40-bed founder-run operator. $160 per month, monthly billing, no setup fee, you handle the config, founder signs in a week. Annual option offered at roughly $1,632 (a 15% discount). Total first-year revenue in the low thousands, but the cycle cost you two calls.
• A 240-bed mid operator. $960 per month on a 12-month term, PMS integration named on call one, one-page SLA attached, a same-size reference call, quarterly business reviews. Cycle runs 60 to 90 days through a champion and a COO.
• A 900-bed professional operator. Roughly $3,600 per month at list, but now with a volume tier that steps down per-bed pricing above 500 beds, a SOC 2 report, a pre-filled security questionnaire, a multi-year term with year-over-year rate protection, and a named CSM. Cycle runs 90 to 180 days through a full committee.

Same $4 list price. Three different motions, three different packages, three different proof requirements. The vendors who lose are the ones who quote all three the same way.

What loses deals

• Minimum contract values
• Setup fees over $3K
• 3-year locks
• Per-transaction surcharges that compound
• Opaque enterprise pricing
• Auto-renewing annual contracts with 90-day cancellation windows

Handling the objections operators actually raise

Objections in coliving are patterned. The same handful come up across categories, and each has a right and a wrong response. The wrong response is almost always to argue. The right response is to reframe to the operator's real concern, which is usually risk or attention, not the thing they said.

"We could just build this ourselves." The real concern is that your price feels high for the perceived complexity. Do not defend the difficulty. Reframe on total cost of ownership and their scarcest resource, attention: the build is the feature plus its maintenance plus its integrations plus their one developer not building what actually differentiates them. Offer to integrate with what they have built so they do not feel the sunk cost is wasted.

"We already use [incumbent] and it is fine." The real concern is switching risk, not satisfaction. Almost no operator is happy with their stack, they are afraid of the cutover. Do not attack the incumbent. Acknowledge it works, then quantify the specific pain they have already told you about, and lead with your migration plan and parallel-run offer. You are selling a safe switch, not a better product.

"This is too expensive." Separate the two hidden objections: minimum contract value they cannot justify to finance, and setup fees they cannot justify before value. Both are packaging problems, not price problems. Move to monthly billing, bundle the setup, and re-anchor the price against the specific number from discovery (the leaked leads, the eviction, the community manager hours). Expensive relative to what is the question you are really answering.

"Send me some case studies." Often a soft brush-off, sometimes real. The right move is a same-segment, same-size reference, ideally a warm intro to a peer operator, not a PDF. If your only case studies are from operators 10x their size, do not send them, they will hurt you. Offer a reference call instead and, if you lack one, offer a scoped pilot with a walk-away metric.

"Let me check internally." This means your deal has entered the room you are not in. Do not just wait. Arm the champion with a one-page internal-selling kit: the ROI in the operator's numbers, an owner-facing line on the spend, the reference, and the pilot terms. Then use the mutual action plan to put a date on the internal step so it does not drift for a month.

"Can you discount if the pilot works?" The real concern is downside protection, which is legitimate, but discounting ARR is the wrong instrument. Offer the downside protection in the pilot itself: free or steeply discounted for six weeks, with a written walk-away if the success metric misses. Convert a successful pilot to standard pricing. You are protecting them from a bad bet, not from your list price.

Behind almost every coliving objection is one of two fears: the switch will break something during move-in season, or finance will ask why we are paying for this. Answer the fear, not the sentence. Vendors who argue the sentence win the point and lose the deal.

8. Marketing channels that work, and don't, for vendors

What works

Direct outreach with specific operator pain hooked from public content. Read their blog, LinkedIn, podcast appearances. Find one specific thing they said about a problem in last 90 days. Reply rate jumps from 1-2% to 15-20%.

Sponsoring the National Co-Living Conference (Denver). Booth alone won't do it, be at the dinners, side meetings, after-hours. ROI math: two mid-market deals pay it back for three years.

Podcast appearances. Everything Coliving Innovators and a handful of others. Ops leads listen on commutes. One good 45-minute episode generates 3-6 inbound demos for 4-6 weeks.

Guest posts on industry sites. Operators read these because there's nowhere else to read about their industry.

Operator referrals. Highest-converting source, period. Warm intro from another operator closes 30-50% of the time. Build a referral incentive.

LinkedIn DMs to ops leads with concrete demo offer. Specific 20-minute slot with three things you'll show, tied to their stated workflow.

What doesn't

Cold email at scale. Operators get hammered by every multifamily and hospitality vendor. Generic cold email is dead.

Generic webinar series. Every operator has been to ten of these.

Programmatic ads to operators. They don't search and don't browse. CPMs are wasted budget.

Listing on G2/Capterra alone. Operators don't browse generic SaaS catalogs. Fine as a credibility signal, won't generate top-of-funnel.

The shortest path to a coliving sale is a peer operator vouching for you in a closed group chat. Everything else is just trying to manufacture that moment.

Build the referral incentive before you build the next ad campaign. A single warm intro from an operator the buyer respects compresses a 90-day sales cycle to two calls and a contract.

The outreach framework that earns a reply

Since cold email at scale is dead and specific outreach works, the differentiator is research per message. The framework that consistently pulls a 15-to-20% reply rate has four parts, in order:

1. The trigger line. One sentence referencing something specific and recent the operator said or did: a podcast comment, a LinkedIn post about occupancy, a new building announcement, a job posting for a community manager (which signals scaling pain). This proves you are not blasting a list.
2. The relevant pain. One sentence connecting that trigger to a problem you solve, phrased in their currency (occupancy, hours, incidents, churn), not your feature.
3. The proof point. One sentence with a same-segment reference or a concrete result, no adjectives. If you have a peer operator who will vouch, name the segment, not the logo, until they say yes.
4. The small ask. One specific, low-commitment ask: a 20-minute call at a named time, or three specific things you will show tied to their workflow. Never "can I get 30 minutes to tell you about us."

Keep it under 90 words. The goal of the first message is a reply, not a sale. Everything longer reads like the multifamily vendors they already ignore.

A sample outreach sequence

Here is a five-touch sequence for a mid-size operator, built on the framework above. It runs over about three weeks and mixes channels, because ops leads live on LinkedIn and email unevenly. All specifics below are illustrative.

1. Day 1, LinkedIn connection with a note. "Heard your comment on the Everything Coliving podcast about deposit-to-move-in leads slipping through. That gap is most of what we fix for operators around your size. Worth a quick compare of how you handle it today?" Short, trigger-led, no pitch.
2. Day 3, email if connected or no reply. Full four-part framework message. Trigger (the podcast comment), pain (leaked leads between deposit and move-in), proof (a same-size operator recovered a measurable share of those leads), ask (a 20-minute call, two named slots).
3. Day 7, value touch, no ask. Send something useful with no meeting request: a one-page teardown of the typical coliving deposit-to-move-in leak, or a relevant Everything Coliving guide. This is the touch that separates you from vendors who only ever ask.
4. Day 12, reference nudge. "One thing that might be more useful than a demo: a 15-minute call with [peer operator segment] on how they closed this gap. Happy to set it up." Offering a peer conversation instead of a pitch converts skeptics.
5. Day 18, break-up. "I will stop filling your inbox. If filling rooms faster becomes a priority this quarter, here is a single link with the three things I would have shown you. Door is open." Break-up messages routinely get the reply the first four did not, because they remove pressure.

Two rules for the sequence. First, if they engage at any step, drop the sequence and have a human conversation, do not keep running the automation at someone who replied. Second, if a warm intro from a peer operator becomes available at any point, abandon the entire sequence and take the intro. The sequence exists only to manufacture the warm moment that a referral gives you for free.

Channel and partnership strategy

Direct sales is not the only motion, and in coliving the indirect paths are unusually strong because the buyer trusts peers and trusted intermediaries far more than vendors. Build at least one of these alongside direct outreach.

PMS and platform integrations as a channel. The PMS is the operator's system of record, so being a certified, well-documented integration in the PMS marketplace puts you in front of buyers at the exact moment they are configuring their stack. Prioritize deep integration with the two or three PMS platforms your ICP actually uses, and make the integration a selling point in every conversation. An operator's first product question is almost always "does it work with our PMS," and being able to say "we are a certified integration, here is the setup doc" ends the objection before it grows.

Referral and partner programs with adjacent vendors. Vendors who sell into the same operators without competing (a lock vendor and a community platform, a PMS and an insurance product) can refer each other. These referrals carry some of the trust of a peer intro because they come from a vendor the operator already chose. Build reciprocal referral relationships with two or three complementary vendors before you build another ad campaign.

Operator referral incentives. Because peer referrals are the highest-converting source, formalize them. A referral incentive that rewards an operator for a warm intro that closes turns your happiest customers into a channel. Keep it simple and generous enough to notice, and make giving the intro effortless.

Industry intermediaries and directories. Everything Coliving's Vendor Directory is where operators look first when shopping a category, which makes category presence a genuine top-of-funnel channel rather than a vanity listing. Being the credible, well-reviewed name in your category in the place operators actually check compounds over time in a way ad spend does not.

Conferences and closed communities. The National Co-Living Conference and the closed operator group chats are where reputation is made. You cannot buy your way into the group chats, but you earn your way in by being genuinely useful (a good podcast episode, a sharp guest post, a founder who shows up to the dinners and helps rather than pitches). The payoff is being the name that comes up in step two of the buying process, the informal scan, before any RFP exists.

In a category this small and this connected, distribution is trust, and trust does not scale through ad spend. It scales through integrations, peers, and intermediaries the operator already relies on. Build one real channel before you buy another impression.

Worked example: one deal from first touch to rollout

To see the motion end to end, follow one illustrative deal. The numbers are made up to show the shape, not to report a real customer.

The operator. A 240-bed operator across five buildings, master-lease model, US, three years old, transitioning from founder-buying to org-buying. Champion is a hands-on ops lead. Economic buyer is a COO. There is an invisible owner: the master landlord's rep who scrutinizes any recurring spend.

First touch. The vendor, who sells a resident-lifecycle CRM layer, notices the ops lead posted on LinkedIn about leads going cold between deposit and move-in. That is the trigger. The vendor sends the four-part message: trigger (the post), pain (deposit-to-move-in leakage), proof (a same-size operator recovered a measurable share of those leads), small ask (20 minutes, two named slots).

Discovery. On the call, the vendor runs the discovery bank, not a demo. They learn: current stack is HubSpot plus Notion plus a Google Sheet, the leak is real and roughly a dozen would-be residents a quarter, average rent is $1,150, leasing peak is late summer, budget sets in Q4, and the COO signs but the owner rep must bless recurring spend. The vendor now has the trigger, the committee, and the numbers.

The business case. The vendor builds ROI in the operator's numbers: a dozen recovered residents a quarter at $1,150, netted against realistic assumptions, is a materially larger number than the product's roughly $960 per month at $4 per bed. They label the hard ROI (recovered leases) for the COO and the soft ROI (a calmer handoff for the ops team) for the champion.

The pilot. They scope a 6-week pilot at one building, one workflow (deposit to move-in), one success metric (reduce the leak by a defined amount), signed scope doc, and a mutual action plan. Crucially, step 6 of the MAP has the champion book both the COO and the owner rep into the week-6 review. Weeks 4 and 5 get a Friday email: three numbers, one anecdote.

Internal selling. Between calls, the deal lives in a room the vendor is not in. The vendor has handed the champion a one-page kit: the ROI number, an owner-facing line on why the spend protects occupancy, and the pilot result to date. That kit, not the vendor, wins the internal argument.

Close and rollout. The week-6 review hits the metric. The vendor already has the production contract drafted (MAP step 8). They move from pilot pricing to standard $4 per bed across the five buildings, sequence the rollout building by building around each property's move-in peak, and name an operator-side rollout lead so the champion is not deploying five buildings alone. The rollout is priced for the estate, with a volume consideration, not anchored to the free pilot.

The whole thing took roughly 90 days and turned on three moves that this guide keeps returning to: arriving at a trigger, building the case in the operator's numbers, and equipping the champion to sell in the room the vendor never entered.

9. Where to go deeper + closing

If you're selling into coliving, there's more on the platform. The Vendor Directory at everythingcoliving.com is where operators look first when shopping a category. The RFP Generator helps operators write better briefs. Advisory partnerships pair vendors with operator panels for category-specific feedback before you ship. The newsletter is where the buy-side intent shows up first.

If you're stuck on a specific deal or category strategy, reach out. We've watched enough of these go sideways to spot the pattern early.

Sources

• Grand View Research (2025), coliving market size and forecast: roughly $7.8B in 2024, roughly $16.1B by 2030, about a 13.5% compound annual growth rate. Broader market definitions place the 2026 figure near $17B.
• JLL, European Coliving Index (2025): roughly 56,000 operational beds in Europe with roughly 75,000 beds in the pipeline.
• Coliving Insights (2025): more than 110,000 European coliving beds under a broader definition of the category.
• Savills (2025): 51% of surveyed investors plan to invest in coliving within three years.
• Everything Coliving 2026 Operator Survey (500+ operators surveyed across 40+ countries): source for operator behavior, buying patterns, and spend observations cited without an external attribution.

Market figures above are reported as ranges and approximations on purpose. Coliving is defined differently across reports, so treat any single precise number with caution and cite the range.