How we know what we publish
Most coliving content does not tell you where its numbers came from. This page tells you where ours come from, what we refuse to publish, and how to make us fix something we got wrong.
Every figure here is one of three things
We used to promise that every statistic on this site carried a source. That promise sounded rigorous and was quietly the wrong rule: it meant the only things we could tell you were things somebody else had already published, and it pushed our own operating experience — the part nobody else has — off the page. So the rule changed on 3 September 2026. What we owe you is not a citation on every sentence. It is that you can always tell which of these three you are reading.
Third-party figures always carry a named, clickable source
Market size, occupancy rates, rents and yields, licence fees, statutory thresholds, dates, named transactions — anything we did not measure ourselves. These carry an attribution you can click and check in under two minutes. If we cannot find a source we trust, the sentence comes out of the draft. It does not get published with a shrug.
Because you spend money on these numbers. An operator who reads the wrong HMO threshold here pays for that mistake, not us.
Figures from our own buildings and brands are labelled as ours
Planning ranges, what lease-up actually cost us, which tactics worked and which burned budget, patterns we have seen across the coliving brands we have built and the marketplace we run. These have no external citation — the attribution is us. So we say so in the sentence: “in the buildings we have run”, “our planning assumption”, “across the brands we operate”.
Because pretending our experience is published research would be dishonest, and hiding it behind a missing citation would waste the most useful thing we have.
Argument and judgement are labelled by being written as argument
Why we think the sector over-indexes on amenities, what we believe good operating looks like, where we think the market goes next. No citation, no hedge. You can disagree with these, and the writing should make it obvious that they are positions rather than findings.
Because a page that footnotes its opinions is not being rigorous; it is being evasive.
There is exactly one thing we treat as unacceptable: you being unable to tell which category a number belongs to. Passing someone else's data off as our research, or dressing our own observation up as sector data, is the failure this page exists to prevent.
What that adds up to, counted
We ran the count on our own published content on 4 September 2026 — every guide, blog post, city page and Pulse issue — and pulled out every outbound link that was not to a site we own. You can verify any of them by opening the page and clicking.
Third-party citations across published content, by source type
legislation.gov.uk, gov.uk, ONS, london.gov.uk and other official bodies — 8 domains.
Savills, Knight Frank and comparable research publishers, plus listing-platform rent data.
Trade press, academic and industry publications, operator sites, and primary company filings.
365 outbound citations in total, across 136 separate domains, on 34 of our 45 published content pieces. The 11 without citations are opinion and practitioner pieces that make no third-party factual claims — the second and third categories above.
Method: automated scan of every published content file for outbound URLs, excluding links to startcoliving.com and rentser.com, deduplicated by domain. Counted 4 September 2026; the figure moves as we publish.
What we will not publish
A methodology is mostly a list of things you turn down. Ours costs us pages we would like to have.
Statistics we cannot trace to a first source
The coliving sector recycles numbers across blog posts until nobody can find where they started. If a figure only leads back to another blog post, it does not go on this site — regardless of how many times it has been repeated.
Our own performance numbers without the client's sign-off
We have run growth for coliving brands with results worth publishing. They stay unpublished until the client approves the specific figures. This is why our case studies are thinner than they could be.
Rankings where we are the product
We do not publish a comparison that ranks our own service first. Where our work appears in a comparison at all, it is disclosed in the page, not in a footer.
Survey findings without a disclosed method
A percentage from a survey means nothing without the sample size, who was asked, and who chose not to answer. Where we cite survey data, we say what we know about how it was collected — including when the answer is “not disclosed”.
Our calculators show their working
Every free tool on this site prints the formula it used underneath the result. Not a description of the formula — the formula, with your inputs in it. If a calculator will not show you its arithmetic, you cannot check it, and a number you cannot check is worse than no number at all.
None of the tools ask for an email before showing a result. If we ever find one that does, treat it as a bug and tell us.
See the tools →When we get something wrong
We will. When a factual error is confirmed, we correct the page, note the correction and its date at the point where the error was, and add it to the log below. We do not quietly edit a number and leave the page looking as though it always said that.
Where a figure has simply gone stale rather than being wrong — a rent that has moved, a licence fee that has been uprated — we update it and change the review date on the page rather than logging it as a correction.
Correction log
Opened 4 September 2026. Newest first.
11 September 2026
Coliving Compliance in Boston
Published on 10 September, this page said that a four-bedroom house let room by room is inside Boston's lodging house regime from the first tenancy. That was stated with more confidence than the law supports. In City of Worcester v. College Hill Properties, LLC, 465 Mass. 134 (2013), the Supreme Judicial Court held that apartments let to four unrelated students were not “lodgings” under the Lodging House Act, and drew the line at the occupant's property interest — a tenant has one, a lodger does not. We had read the statutory threshold without the case law that construes it. The page now sets out the distinction, adds Boston's separate student-housing registration and the 2008 zoning amendment on the definition of a family, and says plainly that which side a given structure falls on is a question for a Massachusetts attorney. Caught in our own review the day after publication, not reported to us.
7 September 2026
Coliving Pulse #005
The first version of this issue said we could not verify a single new UK coliving transaction that week, and made the quiet week the story. That was false — Downing refinanced its Manchester coliving cluster at around £250m on 2 September, among other items we missed. The cause was method: we were assembling Pulse from web searches, which mix current and archived results and miss trade coverage. The same sweep offered us a 2020 article as current news. We rebuilt the sourcing on dated feeds, rewrote the issue the same day, and explained the change inside it. Caught in our own review, not reported to us.
4 September 2026
Coliving vs HMO · United Kingdom market dossier
Both pages cited the “Renters' Rights Act 2024”. The Act is the Renters' Rights Act 2025 (c.26), and section 21 and assured shorthold tenancies were abolished on 1 May 2026. Corrected on both pages the same day, and the dates added to our regulation tracker. Caught in our own review, not reported to us.
Found a number you think is wrong?
Tell us which page, which figure, and what you think it should be. If you are right, we fix it and it goes in the log above with your correction credited unless you would rather it were not. If we disagree, we will tell you why rather than ignoring it.
Challenge a figure →Who writes this
The guides, city pages and data on this site are written by Hüseyin Şanlıtürk, founder of StartColiving, drawing on eight-plus years in hospitality and growth marketing and the coliving brands and marketplace we have built. Where a piece leans on our operating experience, that is whose experience it is. Every article carries a publication date and a byline for the same reason.