In 2005, a software developer named Brad Neuberg rented space inside a feminist collective in San Francisco two days a week and invited a handful of independent workers to join him. He called the experiment coworking. According to Coworking Resources, that room at Spiral Muse was the first coworking space anywhere. Most commercial real estate professionals at the time saw it as a curiosity for freelancers, not a category worth underwriting.
Less than 20 years later, coworking is a recognized asset class. Allwork.Space reported that the number of coworking spaces worldwide passed 41,000 by the end of 2024, up from roughly 16,000 in 2018. The global flexible office market is now valued at around $21 billion and is forecast to keep growing at double digit rates into the early 2030s.
Coliving is not at its starting line. Its first spaces opened years ago, and the category has been growing quietly ever since. What it has not reached is the point coworking hit about a decade into its own life, when institutional capital, shared standards and recognizable brands turned a loose movement into an asset class. By that measure, coliving is still early, and the flexible space industry is mostly watching.
It matters for the same reason coworking did, because it is where remote workers are increasingly choosing to live.
What the footprint looks like now
The clearest way to size a young category is to count it, and Europe is where the picture is sharpest. According to FindYourColiving, Europe alone now holds nearly 400 active coliving spaces across more than 160 cities in close to 30 countries. Because the platform tries to list every space it can verify rather than a curated selection, the count reflects the real spread of the market, not one operator’s portfolio.
The concentration tells its own story. Spain leads by a wide margin with 93 listed spaces. Germany and England follow with 44 and 43, then France, Italy and Portugal each between 23 and 29, and Belgium with 19. At the city level, Barcelona is densest with 31 spaces, followed by London, Berlin, Madrid, Valencia, Brussels and Paris. That is a wide base for a category many operators still treat as a side project.
Why the demand keeps growing
Remote and hybrid work moved from fringe to mainstream over the past two decades. Roughly 5 million people now work from flexible environments, according to industry counts compiled by Allwork.Space. That freedom arrived with a cost. Work is more solitary now than it has ever been, done from home offices, rented desks and kitchen tables rather than shared rooms full of colleagues.
This is the same problem coworking set out to solve. Neuberg started the first space because he wanted independence and the community a job provides at the same time. Coliving carries that impulse from the workday into the rest of the day. The “co” in coliving stands for community, and for people who work remotely and often alone, community is the part that has become hardest to find.
Coliving supplies it directly. A furnished room, utilities and a workspace come bundled with a built-in group of people in the same situation. For a remote worker spending three months in Lisbon or Mexico City, it removes the friction of setting up in a new place and provides the connection that working alone takes away. The stay is flexible, but the draw is the community around it.
What operators should take from the comparison
Coliving and coworking are close neighbors in business terms. Both sell flexibility and community rather than square footage, and both live or die on occupancy, retention and the quality of the in-person experience. Many coliving buildings already include coworking areas, and some coworking operators have begun adding rooms upstairs.
The operators who read coworking early, before it was obvious, gained years of positioning. The same window is open in coliving now, and the people who already understand flexible workspace have a head start on it.
Where the clusters are forming
The location data points to a pattern that tracks the map of remote work itself. Southern Europe is the center of gravity, with Barcelona, Madrid and Valencia all dense and the Canary Islands drawing spaces to Las Palmas and Santa Cruz de Tenerife.
The Portuguese coast anchors another cluster around Lisbon and Ericeira, while London, Berlin, Paris and Brussels carry Northern and Western Europe.
These are the same places digital nomads already gather, which suggests supply is following the workforce rather than trying to manufacture demand from scratch.
The capital cycle has already started
Investment has found coliving once already, and the first wave ended badly. Selina, a hospitality brand built around coliving and coworking for remote workers, went public through a SPAC in 2022 at a valuation above $1 billion. By July 2024 it had collapsed into insolvency, its market value down more than 95%, and its operations were sold off. The company grew faster than its balance sheet could carry, and rising interest rates did the rest.
That looks like a verdict on coliving, but it is closer to a verdict on overexpansion. Capital is still arriving, more selectively now.
In late 2023, Outsite, a remote work coliving network, secured a 300 million euro commitment from real estate funds to expand across Europe. Investors are more cautious after Selina, but the demand underneath the category has not moved and the money is following it back in. The first wave proved coliving can be built badly. Whether it gets built well is what the next wave will decide.
The honest caveats
Coliving is not a finished category. It is fragmented, lightly branded and uneven in quality, with polished, professionally run spaces sitting alongside places that are little more than a shared flat with a website. There is no accepted standard for what a resident should expect.
The same description fit coworking in 2007. Fragmentation at this stage marks a category that is early rather than one that is failing.
The takeaway for the future of work
Coliving is following the same maturation curve coworking climbed, roughly a decade behind. The industry can treat that as noise or as a map of where flexible living is heading. The European footprint, nearly 400 spaces across more than 160 cities, already argues for the map.
The people who redefined how we work are now reshaping where we live. The operators, investors and landlords who noticed coworking first have every reason to look closely at what could be happening one floor up.
