About the site

Purpose

This site was created as a side project to document primarily destinational colivings across the globe — with the goal to become a platform co-op directly serving the needs of both users and operators:

• making spaces easy to find for users
• accurately representing spaces to users
• promoting spaces on behalf of operators
• assisting in making space operations efficient
• …and identifying trends†

†Did you know that of all the spaces listed, 20% have closed down. Not ideal encouragement for anyone starting out with the idea of creating their own coliving — yet isn't actually too terrible! Or that only 5% implement fixed move-in days, something that greatly eases operation.

→ Read about what coliving is and is not.

Origins

At a now defunct coliving in the Canaries where polaroids (yay!) were taken upon arrival and strung up with pegs.

Hi! I'm Jacob, not only did I create this site and its database (manually!), I founded probably the first ever blended+hybrid coliving space back in 2010.

Before this there were really only intentional communities (quite niche), then with the rise of tech in SF, hacker houses (still quite niche!) — whence emerged lifestyle design, leading to the rise of digital nomads. This was the turning point for destinational spaces (purposeful and inclusive!) even though they don't actually represent so much of the market.

I was myself a semi-itinerant digital nomad long before this, so having an interest in emergent lifestyles and the hospitality industry, running one myself and making an attempt to categorise all the different types, seemed like a worthy exercise which I stand by to this day.

Having visited quite a few spaces at perhaps the wrong times even wearing the same shirt, I've ended up on their webpages.🙈

After 4 years I left my experiment in hospitality behind returning to tech as digital nomading was really starting to take off. Thus it occured to me it'd be nice if it were easier to find and more accurately identify their features. So of course I created a very basic version of this directory, slowly building it out to what it is today.

Continuing my experiments in the sector, I started a coliving crowdfunding campaign specifically (and unusually) offering coownership and reoccuring use as a co-operative instead of just investments, this received suprisingly robust reponse, but was just before the pandemic and I never really properly picked it up again having already spent enough. I do however hope to open up my next property acquisition project to backers using a mix of investment and use stakes.