The implementation of the coworking model in Spain is paving the way for the next successful trend in other countries such as the United States or the United Kingdom, but it is still largely unknown in our country: coliving.
“Like almost all collaborative businesses, coliving originated in Silicon Valley when there was a housing shortage that collided with the multiplication of young professionals who came to San Francisco wanting to socialize. And that is when buildings began to appear in which the Tenants not only shared common areas but also their hobbies,” explains Gonzalo Zulueta, head of residential investment & land for Capital Markets at the real estate consultancy Catella.
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Thus, coliving is an extension or evolution of coworking in the housing market, which provides spaces for residents, generally related professionals, who in addition to sharing a workplace, share a house where they can continue exchanging experiences, work and vital. “In my opinion, the coliving model provides a completely revolutionary way of life in terms of shared spaces, in line with what millennials are currently looking for,” Zulueta points out, “because, as coliving companies describe , this generation values experiences much more than material possessions. For many of them, ownership is no longer the goal and they prefer to make the most of their life and experiences.” For this reason, this model is designed so that people can interact with others, providing them with common areas such as a cinema room, a games room -ping pong, billiards, darts, etc.-, a library, dining rooms that you can reserve for a private dinner with friends, gym, restaurant… In the end, everything is designed and built to share experiences within a community, highlights the manager.
“These spaces function as laboratories of ideas for young entrepreneurs, who come together to develop projects in a short time, coexisting both at work -coworking- and in their private life (coliving), and thus generating strong synergies between their projects. In this way, the process of creating the concept and its development and implementation is accelerated”, explains Patricio Palomar, senior investment consultant at AIRE Partners.
“Coliving continues to be a natural evolution of the booming that we are experiencing in the student accommodation sector in Europe. Young people between 22 and 30 years of age in the Anglo-Saxon world are accustomed to a higher level than ours in services and in the quality of the student residences where they have stayed during their university days, and demand complexes with similar characteristics for their first years after joining the labor market”, details the manager.
Slow implementation
Although more and more presence of this type of cohabitation can be found in countries such as the USA, Germany, the UK, Indonesia and Tokyo, in Spain its implementation is being slower. The first coliving companies emerged in 2015 in the coastal areas of our country, settling in the Canary Islands (Hub Fuerteventura and The Surf Office), Andalusia (Sunny Office), Barcelona, the Balearic Islands (Bedndesk) or Alicante (Sun &Co).
As for more urban projects, “in Spain some very low-quality approaches have been made in Barcelona and Madrid, such as alandingpad or UrbanCampus, but several projects are currently being developed, some of them very interesting and which will see the light of day at the end of this year and the beginning of 2019”, points out Palomar, who believes that “our country offers perfect conditions for the development of this type of product. Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Palma de Mallorca or Malaga are probably the cities that will experience the greatest development of this real estate model”, he specified.
“At Catella, investors are beginning to show interest in this property model,” explains Zulueta, who believes that “real estate, as an investment and promotion product, is and will be interesting. During these months we have seen large-scale transactions investment funds in the purchase of student residences and we have also seen how a significant number of socimis have been created dedicated to the purchase of profitable residential -Vivenio, Fidere, Albirana, Testa Residencial, Vitrubio…-. In the end, these funds will positively value this new residential product in profitability”.
Returns close to 7.5%
In this sense, Patricio Palomar points out that “at the real estate level, this type of project can offer returns close to 7.5% when we add what is billed for different services, which is very attractive compared to more traditional residential leasing formulas. , in which net returns of more than 5.5% are rarely achieved.
This spread of 200 basis points and the high demand that is expected for an innovative real estate product is undoubtedly what is leading developers to develop a product and investors to try to create portfolios that allow economies of scale to be obtained in the management of international platforms. current ones, which are still in the startup phase”. Although living in a coliving can be more expensive than sharing a flat, “many people are not looking for a cheap place but a place where they have access to many services and interact with many people with the to share experiences,” points out Palomar.
The differentiating offer offered by these spaces is key, as Zulueta explains, since “they use avant-garde technology to improve the experience of the people who live in these buildings, who connect and create a community. One thing is that these buildings run community managers, who are in charge of channeling the activities of the Colivers.
In addition, some companies have designed their own apps where people can, for example, order food at the reception, book rooms for private events, report maintenance problems in their apartments, see who is in the building and connect with them to prepare any joint plan.