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What you need to know about staying at a co-living space in Spain

Co-living spaces are growing in popularity in Spain along with the influx of digital nomads and startups, offering much more than regular flat shares. Here's where you can find them, what average monthly rates are and other useful information.

Published: 6 November 2023 13:39 CET
What you need to know about staying at a co-living space in Spain
The co-living concept is gaining in popularity in Spain. Photo: Kelsey Chance / Unsplash

Co-living spaces are much more than just a fancy way of saying flat share, they have evolved as places to both live and work, as well as socialise with like-minded people, often featuring co-working spaces and other facilities more like that of a hotel.

One of the reasons that many are drawn to co-living is the flexibility it offers too – enabling you to sign up for the amount of time you wish instead of being locked into a one-year or more contract.

Units are typically offered for stays starting from three months, a situation which is not possible for many places to rent in Spain. 

For these reasons, co-living spaces are particularly popular with digital nomads – allowing them to meet other nomads, have a quality working space and the flexibility of being able to move on to their next destination whenever they want. There are also benefits such as wi-fi already being installed and all bills included. 

But it’s not just nomads that are attracted to this way of living, it’s also popular with students, those working in startups and people who regularly travel for work to other cities who don’t want to have to stay in a hotel every time.  

Experts say that the typical profile is usually that of young professionals around 30 years old (although in recent months, ages have increased to 40 years old), who work in startups, and consultancies, and are digital nomads.

READ ALSO: How to find temporary accommodation in Spain when first arrive

In recent years the average age of a person staying in this type of accommodation has grown due to high rental prices, which in the last ten years have increased on average by more than 50 percent, according to a study by the Fotocasa portal.

In the first half of 2023, investment in co-living spaces reached close to €75 million and the number of beds available has quadrupled in the last three years.

According to data from the consulting firm CBRE, co-living represented 31 percent of the investments made in the first half of the year within Flex Living, a subsector within the residential industry that groups new temporary housing solutions under the concept of flexibility. In 2022, the sector turned over of €433 million with a total of 8,000 beds and expects another 2,000 more by the end of the year.

By 2025, Flex Living will double to almost 20,000 beds.

READ ALSO: Which is the cheapest municipality to rent a property in Spain?

Currently, 75 percent of these co-living spaces are in Madrid and Barcelona, but there are growing projects in Valencia, Málaga and the Basque Country, according to CBRE.

Some Spaniards are angry at the increase in co-living spaces – as they are with the proliferation of short-term holiday rentals – believing that the use of this anglicism (el coliving in Spain) is only meant to make it sound ‘cool’ to camouflage the fact that people cannot afford to rent their own place and are being forced to share with others.

While the rise in co-living spaces may potentially be contributing to the lack of traditional properties for rent as landlords are able to make more money from the short-term market, the reality is that most of these are in fact more expensive than regular flat shares.

Therefore, they’re not necessarily a viable alternative for those struggling to pay rent. These low-pay tenants are more likely to go for traditional flat shares to help save on money rather than opting for a fancier co-living space.

According to stats from Pisos.com, the average price for renting a room in Spain is €405 per month.

This price rises in some of Spain’s most expensive cities with flat share website Badi stating the average rental price per room in Barcelona is at €500 per month and news site Catalan El Nacional saying it’s up €631 per month.

In Madrid, according to Badi, the average is around €450 per month.

Just a few examples of popular co-living spaces in Spain include Urban Campus Coliving and Kanso Coliving in Madrid, Attico Living in Barcelona. 

When The Local Spain took a look at some of the prices of rooms in these co-living spaces we found the average price for a room in Kanso Coliving to be around €625 per month, €175 more than the average price for a traditional flat share in Madrid. 

At Attico Living in Barcelona, many rooms were above €900 per month, which far exceeds the €500-631 you would pay in a regular flat share.

READ ALSO: The changes to how rent can be paid in Spain

Of course with the higher price tags, come more benefits than just flexibility, for example, some coliving places even add cleaning services, while Kanso Coliving founders say they want to give even more benefits such as gym, co-working and even a relaxation or meditation room.

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DIGITAL NOMADS IN SPAIN

Cafés in Spain on war footing against remote workers hogging space

Bars and cafés in Valencia, Santiago and Barcelona have started to take action against lingering remote workers and digital nomads by cutting off the Wi-Fi during peak hours, with some even banning remote working on their premises.

Published: 10 May 2024 11:02 CEST
Cafés in Spain on war footing against remote workers hogging space

Increasingly in recent years, a trend has emerged: someone arrives in a café, orders a coffee, opens his or her laptop and then spends the whole day working without buying anything else.

For many digital nomads and remote workers, it seems spending a couple of euros on a coffee is a fair price for occupying a table for an entire morning or afternoon.

Some might say they are contributing to the local economy and supporting local businesses, but clearly, for a small business owner this isn’t a profitable arrangement, and many are now fighting back.

In Valencia, posters have appeared at some cafés banning remote working during peak hours: 8.30 to 12.30.

One Valencia café owner told La Vanguardia: “Our place is small and between 10 and 11.30 in the morning it’s impossible, we need all the tables.”

Raquel Llanes, boss at the Departure Café in the Raval area of Barcelona, explained to Barcelona Secreta that the situation has gotten out of control: “We’ve had customers who have ordered an espresso and sat for eight hours, people who have asked us to turn the music down so they could have meetings, customers who took out their Tupperware to eat… At first we adapted the space with sockets and to work, but after two years we realised that the numbers weren’t working out.”

Some have opted for less friendly, but equally effective methods: turning off the Wi-Fi network of the premises during peak hours.

“The owner has got rid of the Wi-Fi to avoid precisely these situations. People sat down and didn’t leave,” one waitress told La Vanguardia.

Similar sentiments have arisen in the Galician city of Santiago, where one café owner told La Voz de Galicia: “We prefer them not to come. If someone comes in and opens a laptop we don’t tell them anything, but if they’ve been there for a long time and we need space for a group, we ask them to please move”. 

When a remote worker in Valencia posted a negative comment about a café where the owner had asked him to leave, their reply went viral, as they stated “we can’t lose regular customers so that you can work”. 

Remote working (teletrabajo in Spanish) has exploded in popularity in Spain in recent years, particularly in the post-pandemic period, and often the people taking advantage of this flexibility are foreign digital nomads and remote workers. Many of them choose to work from local bars and cafés.

It should be said that not all people working remotely in Spain are foreigners. Many Spaniards also have flexible or remote working arrangements and will no doubt occasionally work in a local bar or café. Equally, many digital nomads take advantage of the abundance of ‘co-working’ spaces popping up around Spain, which are exactly for this purpose.

There are even café owners who promote the ‘work friendly’ environment as a means of establishing a loyal customer base.

Other hospitality businesses have preferred to allocate an area for remote working while keeping the bar area and certain tables for regular customers who stop by for a quick bite or coffee. 

READ ALSO: The best co-working spaces for digital nomads in Spain

The row over remote working in traditional Spanish bars and cafés is yet another chapter in the current debate over the influence mass tourism and gentrification is having on Spaniards’ standard of living. 

In the increasingly online, post-pandemic world, the change has been stark in some parts of Spain. Take a stroll through the Raval or L’Eixample neighbourhoods of Barcelona, or the Ruzafa and El Cabanyal areas of Valencia in 2024, and you’re likely to see buildings plastered in Airbnb lockboxes and possibly even hear more fluent, non-native English than you do Spanish in certain parts.

Tourists and wealthy remote workers, the logic goes, visit or move to a trendy city they’ve seen on an international ranking, say Málaga or Valencia, which causes rents to rise because landlords in the area convert their properties into short-term tourist rental accommodation to meet the growing demand, which in turn turfs out locals or shuts down local businesses. 

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