Coliving Guide / Deep Dive

Coliving Events & Conferences 2026

Contents

Conferences are one of the few places where the coliving industry is actually legible. The sector is small, fragmented across markets, and most of the operators worth learning from do not publish. At a good event you can compress six months of cold outreach into two days: the lender who actually understands shared living, the FF&E supplier three other operators already stress-tested, the city official who decides whether your next scheme gets consented, and the operator one size bigger than you who will tell you over coffee what their churn really is. For a small operator, one well-chosen event a year usually beats ten webinars.

This page lists every 2026 event we could verify against the organizer's own site — dates and locations only as the organizers publish them. Nothing here is scraped from third-party aggregator lists, and we do not list events we could not confirm. Where an annual event has not yet announced its next edition, we say so explicitly rather than guessing a date. Past 2026 editions stay on the page: they tell you the annual rhythm, and most of these events open registration for the following year within weeks of closing.

We refresh this page quarterly. If you run an event that belongs here and can point us to an official page with published dates, tell us via our contact page at /contact/ and we will review it for the next update.

Q1 2026 — the year opens at Cannes

MIPIM 2026 — 9-13 March, Palais des Festivals, Cannes, France. The world's largest real estate gathering, and the place where the living sector's capital conversations happen: institutional investors, developers, and city delegations all in one harbour town for a week. Coliving is a small tent inside a very large festival, but if you are raising institutional money or courting a developer partner, this is where they all are. Official site: mipim.com. The 2027 edition typically opens registration in autumn.

Q2 2026 — student living, ULI, and the UK BTR set piece

Smart Student Living 2026 (The Class Foundation) — 23 April, The Social Hub Belfiore, Florence, Italy. A deliberately non-sales, practitioner-format day where student housing operators, investors, and technology leaders work through real case studies. Worth watching even if you run coliving rather than PBSA: the tech and operations problems are nearly identical, and PBSA is usually two years ahead on tooling. Official page: theclassfoundation.com.

ULI Europe Conference 2026 — 1-3 June, Berlin, Germany (main conference day at the Grand Hyatt Berlin). The Urban Land Institute's flagship European gathering, where the living sector — BTR, coliving, student, senior — is discussed at the capital-allocation level. This is where you hear which way institutional sentiment on shared living is actually moving, from the people moving it. Official site: europeconference.uli.org.

Build To Rent Annual Conference (BTRAC) 2026, by Bisnow — 11 June, London, UK. The UK BTR sector's operational set piece: NOI protection, resident retention, and portfolio scaling, with coliving appearing mainly through office-to-coliving conversion stories and operators who straddle both products. If your investors benchmark you against BTR — and in the UK they do — you want to know what that room is saying. Official page: bisnow.com.

Q3 2026 — Manchester, London, Madrid

UK Rental Living Summit 2026 (Property Week) — 16 July, Science and Industry Museum, Manchester, UK. One of the few UK conferences that names co-living explicitly alongside BTR and single family rental in its remit, with the investor-developer-operator mix to match. The 2026 edition has passed; Property Week has already opened registration of interest for the 2027 summit. Official site: rental.propertyweek.com.

Urban Living Festival 2026 — 14-15 September, Mary Ward House, London, UK. A two-day stay-live-work festival in London's Knowledge Quarter spanning architecture, sustainability, and social innovation across the urban living spectrum. Less transactional than the investor conferences — this is where you sharpen your product thinking and meet the design and placemaking people the capital events skip. Official site: urbanlivingfestival.com.

Student Living Spain 2026 (The Class Foundation) — 29 September, Micampus Wynwood, Madrid, Spain. Spain's student living forum, bringing public and private stakeholders together on policy, planning, and investment in one of Europe's fastest-moving shared-living markets. If Iberia is on your expansion map, this is the cheapest way to meet the whole ecosystem in a day. Official page: theclassfoundation.com.

Q4 2026 — the coliving industry's home fixture, then Amsterdam and Paris

Coliving Conference 2026, by Coliving Ventures — 14-15 October, Hoxton Docks, London, UK. The event on this list that is actually about coliving, wall to wall: two days of operators, investors, developers, and service providers, plus site tours of London coliving schemes and the Coliving Awards ceremony on the evening of 14 October. The 2026 programme covers AI in coliving operations, Gen Z and Millennial housing expectations, and secondary-city development. If you attend one event this year, this is the one. Official site: colivingconference.com.

The Class Conference 2026 (The Class Foundation) — 4-5 November, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Europe's largest annual student housing conference, where operators, city leadership, and universities meet. The overlap with coliving is structural, not cosmetic: the same investors, the same operational stack, and increasingly the same buildings switching between products. Official page: theclassfoundation.com.

Coworking Europe 2026 — 5-6 November, Pullman Paris Montparnasse, Paris, France. The largest international coworking conference. Flex work and shared living keep converging — live-work products, shared amenity economics, community operations as a discipline — and the coworking industry solved community programming at scale years before coliving did. Worth it for operators building work-forward products. Official site: coworkingeurope.net.

ARL Annual Conference 2026 (Association for Rental Living) — November 2026, exact date and venue to be confirmed by the ARL. The UK rental living trade body's 10th-anniversary conference, expecting 500+ professionals across BTR, co-living, and single family housing — the ARL runs a dedicated Co-Living committee, so the sector has a real seat at this table, and the policy sessions matter for anyone operating under UK regulation. Official page: thearl.org.uk.

On our watchlist — not yet announced

Co-Liv summits and gatherings — 2026 edition not yet announced — based on annual pattern. Co-Liv, the global coliving industry association, has historically run summits and its Housing Matters! conference partnership at MIPIM, but its events page currently lists no confirmed standalone 2026 dates. We check quarterly and will move any announced edition into the calendar above. Official page: co-liv.org.

How we curate this list

Every event on this page was verified against the organizer's own website or official event page before publishing — name, dates, and location exactly as the organizer states them. We do not copy from aggregator round-ups, we do not list cancelled or dormant events, and we do not invent dates for annual events that have not announced. Where only a month is published, we print only the month. A maximum of two clearly-labelled 'not yet announced' entries are permitted on the watchlist, and each one says so in plain text.

We refresh the page quarterly: confirmed dates move up, passed events stay for the record until the year closes, and next-year editions replace them as organizers announce. Past editions are deliberately kept visible through year-end — the annual rhythm is itself useful planning information for operators budgeting travel and sponsorship a year ahead.

Run an event that belongs here? Point us to an official page with published dates via /contact/ and we will review it in the next quarterly pass. We list events on merit for operators — there is no paid placement on this page.

Go deeper

Coliving Community Building — the operator's framework the best events keep debating

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Coliving Fundraising & Investment — what the investors at these events underwrite

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Newsletter — quarterly event updates land here first

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UK Coliving Market Note — the market context behind the UK conference agenda

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Book a call — ask us which event fits your stage

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Sources

Every statistic in this guide is attributed. If we can't source a number, we don't publish it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which coliving conference is the biggest in 2026?+

For coliving specifically, the Coliving Conference in London (14-15 October 2026, Hoxton Docks) is the sector's largest dedicated gathering, now in its fourth edition, with the Coliving Awards attached. For the wider shared-living capital ecosystem, MIPIM in Cannes (9-13 March) and the ULI Europe Conference in Berlin (1-3 June) are far larger events in which coliving is one track among many. The Class Conference in Amsterdam (4-5 November) is Europe's biggest student housing event and shares most of its investor base with coliving.

Are coliving conferences worth it for a small operator?+

Usually yes — for one or two carefully chosen events, not five. A single-city operator gets the most value from the event closest to their capital and regulatory reality: for a UK operator that is the Coliving Conference and, if policy exposure matters, the ARL Annual Conference. The maths is simple: if one conversation leads to a lender, a site, or a supplier who saves you a mistake, the ticket paid for itself. What rarely pays is attending everything and working none of it.

How do I get real value from a conference as an operator?+

Book meetings before you arrive — the attendee list and sponsor list tell you who will be there, and the people worth meeting have full calendars by day one. Go with three specific asks (a debt contact, a comparable operator, a supplier category), skip sessions ruthlessly in favour of conversations, and do the site tours — walking a competitor's building teaches you more than any panel. Then actually follow up within a week, which is where most of the value quietly dies.

Do the StartColiving team attend these events?+

We attend selectively — typically the dedicated coliving events and the UK living-sector conferences, since that is where our operator and client base is. If you want to compare notes at an upcoming event or ask which one fits your stage, book a call and we will tell you honestly which tickets we would buy in your position.

How often is this events page updated?+

Quarterly. Each pass re-verifies dates against organizer sites, promotes newly announced editions, and flags anything cancelled or moved. Dates and locations are only ever printed as the organizers publish them — if an organizer has only announced a month, we print the month. If you spot a change we have missed, tell us via /contact/.

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