Coliving Is a Financialized Niche That Disrupts Housing Markets

The Apartment That Wasn't Built for You

In a renovated townhouse in Brussels, a young professional from Milan pays €850 a month for a private bedroom smaller than a shipping container. She shares a kitchen with five strangers, a living room with a couch that looks like it was chosen by a hotel procurement algorithm, and a cleaning schedule managed by an app. The building itself was once a single-family home. Now it is a machine for extracting rent from a specific kind of person: young, mobile, childless, and willing to pay a premium for the illusion of community.

This is coliving. It is not a dorm. It is not a commune. It is a financial product dressed up as a lifestyle.

According to a 2023 study by Charlotte Casier in Housing Studies, coliving is not just a new kind of rental housing. It is a carefully engineered niche within the private rental sector, designed to attract both tenants and investors in ways that older housing models could not. Casier took Brussels as her case study, combining quantitative mapping of coliving establishments with qualitative interviews of operators, investors, and tenants. What she found is a market that is reshaping urban housing from the inside out, not by building new towers, but by slicing up old houses and selling the pieces as an experience.

The paper is titled "The coliving market as an emergent financialized niche real estate sector: a view from Brussels." It has 30 citations and counting. It should unsettle anyone who thinks the housing crisis is just about supply and demand. It is about what kind of supply gets built, for whom, and why.

Who Actually Lives in a Coliving Building?

Coliving operators do not advertise to families. They do not target retirees. They do not even target local students. Casier found that the Brussels coliving market is aimed at a very specific demographic: young international professionals, often working for the European Union institutions, NATO, or the multinational corporations that cluster in the city. These are people with decent salaries, no local roots, and a willingness to pay for convenience over space.

The pitch is not about square footage. It is about experience. Operators promote "community events," "curated living," and "flexible leases." Tenants are sold a lifestyle, not a home. In practice, this means a private bedroom with a lock, a shared kitchen, and a calendar of optional wine tastings. The rent is high, but the commitment is low. You can leave in a month. You can arrive with a suitcase.

Casier found that this model works because it solves a specific problem for a specific worker. International professionals in Brussels often stay for one to three years. They do not want to furnish an apartment. They do not want to navigate Belgian rental contracts in French or Dutch. They do not want to be lonely. Coliving offers a frictionless entry into the city, at a price.

But the price is not trivial. Casier's data shows that coliving rents in Brussels are often higher per square meter than comparable studio apartments in the same neighborhoods. Tenants are paying for flexibility and community, not for space. And they are paying it to a landlord who is not a person, but a fund.

How a Townhouse Becomes a Financial Asset

The key insight of Casier's paper is that coliving is not just a response to tenant demand. It is a response to investor demand. The private rental sector has been financialized over the past two decades, meaning that housing is increasingly treated as an asset class, not a social good. Investors want stable returns, low risk, and assets they can scale. Single-family homes are hard to scale. Apartment buildings are easier. But coliving offers something in between.

Here is the mechanism. A coliving operator identifies a large old house in a desirable neighborhood. They lease it or buy it. They renovate it, turning a six bedroom family home into a nine bedroom coliving unit. They install a keypad lock, a high speed internet router, and a cleaning service. They market it to young professionals. The rent per room is higher than the rent for the whole house would have been, but the total revenue is much higher. The operator then packages this revenue stream into a financial product that can be sold to investors.

Casier writes that the Brussels coliving market illustrates "the creation of new products shaped so that investors of various scales can easily inject their capital." This is not about building housing for people who need it. It is about creating an investable asset.

The scale is important. Casier found that most coliving establishments in Brussels are small. They are not purpose built towers. They are renovated old single family houses, often in neighborhoods that were already gentrifying. This makes coliving a kind of stealth financialization. It does not require massive new construction. It just requires buying up existing housing stock and converting it.

A single investor can buy one house and turn it into a coliving unit. A fund can buy fifty. The product is the same. The returns are predictable. The risk is spread across many small units. This is why Casier calls coliving an "emergent financialized niche real estate sector." It is a niche, but it is growing. And it is growing because it works for capital.

The Geography of Extraction

Casier mapped coliving establishments across Brussels. The pattern is not random. Coliving clusters in specific neighborhoods: the European Quarter, Ixelles, Saint Gilles, and around the main train stations. These are areas with high property values, good transit connections, and a concentration of international workers.

But here is the paradox. These are also neighborhoods where local residents are being priced out. Coliving does not create new housing in underserved areas. It concentrates in areas that are already desirable, and it extracts more rent from the same square footage. A single family home that might have housed a family of four now houses nine young professionals, each paying a premium. The total rent collected from that house is higher, but the neighborhood does not gain a family. It gains a transient population.

Casier's analysis suggests that coliving contributes to the "financialization of the private rental sector" by integrating "new geographies and housing types into capital accumulation." In plain language: coliving turns parts of the city that were previously residential into zones of extraction. It does not build new housing. It repurposes old housing for a new kind of tenant, one who is willing to pay more for less space.

This has real consequences. When a house becomes a coliving unit, it is removed from the stock available to local families. The supply of family sized homes shrinks. The demand for those homes does not disappear. Prices go up. The city becomes less livable for people who want to stay, and more optimized for people who pass through.

What Coliving Does Not Prove

Casier's study is careful and specific. It is also limited. She studied Brussels, a city with a unique mix of international institutions and a tight housing market. The findings may not apply to every city. Coliving in Berlin, London, or San Francisco might follow different patterns.

The paper also does not prove that coliving causes gentrification or displacement. It shows a correlation between coliving clusters and high value neighborhoods, but it does not track whether coliving operators are buying homes that would otherwise be occupied by families, or whether they are buying homes that were already vacant or underused. The direction of causality is unclear. Do coliving operators move into neighborhoods that are already gentrifying, or do they accelerate the process?

Casier also does not measure the long term effects on tenants. The paper interviews operators and investors, but not many tenants. We do not know whether coliving tenants feel exploited or satisfied. We do not know whether they stay in the city or leave. The paper is about the structure of the market, not the experience of living in it.

And there is an open question about scale. Most coliving in Brussels is small. If it stays small, it might remain a niche. But if it scales up, if purpose built coliving towers start appearing, the impact could be much larger. Casier's paper is a snapshot of an early stage market. What comes next is unknown.

The Machine Behind the Lifestyle

What makes coliving different from a boarding house or a shared apartment? The answer is the financial infrastructure behind it. A group of friends renting a house together is not coliving. A landlord renting rooms in a house is not coliving. Coliving is when the housing is designed from the start to be a financial product, with standardized contracts, centralized management, and a pitch to investors.

Casier's paper shows that coliving operators are not just landlords. They are asset managers. They create a product that can be sold to investors of various scales, from individual angel investors to institutional funds. The product is the lease, the renovation, the brand, and the tenant. The building itself is just the container.

This is why coliving matters beyond the housing crisis. It is a case study in how financialization works in practice. It is not about building new things. It is about reclassifying old things. A house becomes a coliving unit. A tenant becomes a customer. A neighborhood becomes a portfolio.

The language matters. Operators do not call tenants "tenants." They call them "members." They do not call it "rent." They call it a "subscription." This is not just marketing. It is a legal and financial restructuring. A subscription is easier to raise the price of. A member is easier to evict. A community is easier to sell.

What This Actually Means

• ▸Coliving is not a solution to the housing shortage. It is a financial product that extracts more rent from existing housing stock. If you want to increase housing supply, build apartments for families, not dorm rooms for professionals.

• ▸The term "community" in coliving marketing is a feature, not a bug. Operators use it to justify higher rents and shorter leases. The community is the product. It is not a gift. It is a premium service.

• ▸Small scale coliving in renovated houses is harder to regulate than large purpose built developments. It flies under the radar. Cities need to track conversions of single family homes into coliving units and consider zoning restrictions that protect family sized housing.

• ▸Investors love coliving because it offers predictable returns from a diversified portfolio of small units. But those returns come from squeezing more people into less space at higher prices. The risk is social, not financial.

• ▸Tenants should understand what they are buying. A coliving lease is not a home. It is a temporary arrangement optimized for capital, not for human life. If you sign it, know that you are the raw material, not the customer.