Co-living is an important tool in addressing the housing crisis

During tough times, the market often retreats from “for sale” homes and pivots to student housing as a way to make sites viable. The recent economic turmoil has led to another cycle in this familiar pattern. However, there has also been a notable rise in co-living as an alternative “go-to” product.

Over the last 18 months at PRP, we have seen a massive surge in student housing and co-living enquiries and planning applications. The question in our mind is: will co-living demand recede when the economic landscape reverts, or has it established itself in the pantheon of housing products as part of the mixed and balanced communities’ agenda?

The early days of co-living were a free-for-all in terms of design and standards, with many London boroughs suspicious that it was a way for developers to make huge profits at the cost of residents’ life quality. Now that the GLA have issued standards that define the minimums of what co-living should look like, we hope that more boroughs will start to turn to it as a way of providing another housing offer within a wide and diverse portfolio of residential tenure types.

These standards are welcome because they provide a demonstrable metric of quality that sets co-living far apart from the old homes of multiple occupancy (HMO) and shared housing offer, from which some people believe it had its roots. In fact, co-living may now start to, over time, free up the larger homes that were sub-divided by its ancestral counterpart and return them to much-needed family housing.

What is also exciting about the co-living tenure is the provision of quality amenities for residents, the focus on community creation and its curated nature. These aspects help address the potential loneliness that can occur when, for instance, one moves to a new city where there is no established friendship network, or when one is seconded to a place for a short period of time.

It also leads to an exciting lifestyle experience for residents and a building that is well-maintained and contributes to wider placemaking. When compared to “for sale” housing, co-living offers a positive cornucopia of facilities and amenities for residents, which are consistently looked after and replenished. We have to admit that some companies responsible for managing “for sale” homes could learn a thing or two about this from co-living.

Co-living also starts to resolve the challenges that we face around what to do with the ground floor environment. The “death of the high street,” along with Covid and huge cost inflation, has decimated the tenancy pool through high rentals and supplier costs against low footfall and demand. This has left good placemaking and the creation of safe streets at a crossroads.

Co-living, along with build to rent (BTR), can engage the ground floor with a variety of active uses, some of which the public can engage with. Despite the GLA guidance partially blocking cross-usage by residents and the local community, co-living operators tend to want to open up some of their facilities to the wider public. It’s obviously good for business but also for social cohesion and integration.

We do have to recognise what co-living is. It’s not for all, or even for the majority, and certainly will not overtake BTR any time soon as the main curated rental homes tenure. Co-living’s benefit is in providing a high-quality, stewarded lifestyle product that suits a particular age group, mindset or time requirement, and to that end we suspect that it will, and should, be around for a long time to come.