Coliving Pulse #009 — A Canadian Town Puts a Price on a Coliving Bed: CA$16,693

Squamish Council is scheduled to adopt new development and amenity charges for coliving on 6 October — tomorrow, as this issue goes out. The proposed development cost charge is CA$11,603 per private sleeping unit and the amenity cost charge is CA$5,090, for a combined CA$16,693 per bed. The development cost charge covers contributions toward transportation, drainage, sewer, water, parks, and solid waste and recycling. Both bylaws received their first three readings in July, and the Inspector of Municipalities approved the development cost charge amendment on 11 September.

The accompanying definition is the part worth copying into your own files, because it is unusually specific. The bylaws define coliving as long-term residential accommodation with private sleeping units and access to shared amenity space that may include kitchens, dining areas or living rooms. Occupancy must be intended for continuous residential use of at least 90 days. A private sleeping unit may have bathroom facilities but cannot include a kitchen sink or cooking facilities — which is the line that separates coliving from a cluster of studio flats in planning terms, and the line most operators argue about.

A zoning amendment on the same agenda would permit coliving in the R-1, R-4 and R-5 residential zones subject to conditions: up to six private sleeping units per coliving dwelling unit, at least 25 square metres of shared indoor amenity space, communal laundry, and an active business licence. Parking is set at a minimum of one space per two sleeping units and a maximum of one per sleeping unit, with one secure Class A bicycle space for every sleeping unit.

Read that list as what it is: a complete small-scale coliving regime, priced. A six-bed coliving dwelling in Squamish would carry roughly CA$100,000 of combined charges before anything is built. Whether that is proportionate is a local argument. What is not arguable is that the number is now public and underwritable, which is more than operators get in most jurisdictions.

Over three issues the same question has now appeared in three forms, and setting them side by side is more useful than any one of them alone.

London proposes a trade: provide conventional affordable housing on site and take the Fast Track Route, skipping the viability-tested process. Nottingham could not settle the obligation at committee and delegated the Section 106 decision out of the room, consenting the scheme with the number unresolved. Squamish skips the negotiation entirely and publishes a fixed charge per bed.

Negotiated, deferred, or priced. Each has a different consequence for how you underwrite. A negotiated obligation is a range you carry as risk until consent. A deferred one is a number that lands after the decision that depended on it. A fixed charge is the only one of the three you can put in a model on day one and trust.

If you are choosing between markets, that difference is worth more than a few points of rent. Certainty about the obligation is certainty about the development margin, and in a year where developers are describing viability as incredibly tight, it is the variable most likely to decide whether a scheme happens at all.

Knight Frank's UK Build to Rent Market Update for Q3 2026 reports £1.6 billion invested in Q3, taking year-to-date investment to £4.2 billion. Single-family rentals accounted for 67 per cent of Q3 investment across eleven deals, more than £1 billion of capital. Operational investment totalled £600 million in Q3 — 38 per cent of the quarter, and 61 per cent of spend so far this year.

That 61 per cent is the number to keep. Lizzie Breckner, head of build-to-rent research at Knight Frank, attributes the rising share of operational transactions to investors focusing on assets and operating platforms capable of delivering immediate scale, income and future growth. Capital is buying buildings that already work, and the thing that makes a building work is the operation running inside it.

For an operator this is the clearest commercial argument available for the unglamorous work. RevPAB history per building, a documented cost split, a compliance register that is current — these are not reporting hygiene. In a market where most of the money is going into operational assets, they are the asset.

Arada London, part of the UAE master-developer Arada, has submitted plans to Southwark for a mixed-use scheme at 101 Newington Causeway, the former Salvation Army UK and Ireland headquarters. Designed by PLP Architecture, it would deliver 720 coliving homes across two buildings as a "vertical village", alongside a 404-bed hotel for business and leisure travellers and more than 9,000 square feet of coworking. It is Arada's first coliving scheme globally and forms part of a 17,000-home London pipeline.

Two things are worth noting. The scale — 720 coliving homes in one application is at the top end of anything consented in the UK. And the pairing: coliving and hotel in the same development, under one developer, sharing a site and a ground plane. The operating models for the two have been converging in amenity and in technology for a while; this is them converging in planning.

Issue seven covered Telford and Wrekin revoking an additional HMO licensing designation in full after a challenge to how it consulted, and we have been watching since for a second council doing the same.

Two more weeks, and still nothing we can stand behind. The NRLA's newsroom — which carried the Telford case — shows no second designation withdrawn. Two headlines ran this week pointing the other way, describing councils stepping up HMO enforcement rather than retreating from it, but we could not open sources for either that we were willing to cite, so we are not going to characterise a direction on the strength of headlines.

The honest state of it after three issues: one council reversed one designation on procedural grounds. That remains a precedent worth knowing and not a trend worth planning around. The date still in the calendar is 15 December 2026, when the West Midlands becomes the first region required to join the national landlord database.

Whether Squamish adopts the charging bylaws on 6 October as the agenda recommends, and whether any other British Columbia municipality copies the per-bed charge structure. A published number is the easiest thing in planning policy to borrow.

The 15 October close of the draft London Plan consultation — ten days from this issue.

Whether the Nottingham Section 106 lands at a figure that still supports the scheme's underwriting.