Best Coliving Experts and Consultants Worldwide

(The following content is written by Mayank Pokharna. You can reach out to him in case you want to chat more about all things coliving)

Would you like to create a coliving space or improve it?

2025 has seen the emergence of new initiatives - namely, dedicated coliving experts and consultants in the coliving industry .

The term might sound old-school, but all of them have done a pretty cool job. From creating their own coliving benchmark models or touring the world of coliving spaces, meet the go-to-people that will help you come up with your space concept, build out your idea, and help you with operations.

Here are the current coliving consultants that can bring projects forward and into life.

Mayank Pokharna, Founder, Everything Coliving

Website: everythingcoliving.com

Location : Remote

Mayank Pokharna and Everything Coliving leads in empowering coliving entrepreneurs to set up, launch and scale their businesses through marketing and custom software development agency, and advisory. Everything Coliving provides dedicated programs, mentorship, marketing agency, and advisory services to coliving companies. On the knowledge front, Everything Coliving, the industry's largest coliving newsletter with 35,000+ subscribers, and Coliving Masterminds, a series dedicated to each step of the coliving entrepreneurship journey. Mayank and Everything Coliving has worked and advised more than 100+ coliving companies in last decade. Get in touch to grow your coliving venture.

Check out Everything Coliving here.

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Groundinn Innovation

Website : https://www.groundinn.world/

Location

: Spain

GroundInn is a workplace community design agency that helps companies build connected, thriving teams through intentional workspace strategy and community-led growth

. From startups to large enterprises, GroundInn supports clients with tailored consultation, strategic implementation, and hands-on guidance to transform work environments into collaborative, high-performing hubs. Their three-step process, consult, customize, implement, ensures each solution is rooted in the company’s unique needs. GroundInn also offers a rich collection of learning resources, events, and tools to empower teams and leaders in fostering community, innovation, and workplace well-being. Backed by a cross-functional team of experts, GroundInn is redefining how organizations grow, through people, purpose, and connection.

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Conscious Coliving

Website: consciouscoliving.com

Location: London, UK

The Conscious Coliving collective was formed more than a year ago. Initially, their team of five came together to create the Conscious Coliving Manifesto, a masterpiece for where coliving should be heading in terms of outcomes, value systems, and pillars of focus. Today, they help with conception and feasibility analysis up to operational advice.

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Sandra Abrouk, UX/UI Coliving Consultant

Website:

https://linktr.ee/sandraabrouk

Location

: Nomadic

Sandra Abrouk is an Experience Strategist dedicated to the future of living and work, helping coliving boost retention, build standout brands, and scale effortlessly. Passionate about community, wellbeing and human psychology, she blends design thinking with deep insight into human connection to shape spaces and journeys where belonging is designed into every interaction. The result: thriving communities where people experience fulfilling, meaningful and transformative lifestyles.

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Space & Pepper

Website: spaceandpepper.com

Location: Berlin

Founded by Hana Ahriz and Franziska Heuschkel, Space & Pepper started as a community facilitation and consultancy initiative which quickly moved towards coliving. As advisors, the team now helps with market research, space culture, interior design, user experience, and event programming. Space & Pepper also organizes local coliving events in Berlin and recently partnered up with The Factory Berlin to open the Space Lab, an organization to host coliving events and prototype coliving spaces in physical form.

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Bond Works

Website: bondworks.co

Location: Nomadic

Brittnee Bond, who founded Bond Works originally as a consultancy for coworking spaces and company culture, has been exploring the coliving scene and been a coliving consultant for several brands. After advising on different subjects such as ideation and operational improvements (with a focus on technology), she’s currently touring the world of coliving spaces and creating a documentary.

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Happy Working Lab

Website: happyworkinglab.com

Location: Barcelona

The team from HWL labels themselves as “the first European coworking and coliving consulting agency”. Being around for more than 8 years in the coworking sector, their consultancy services are now including the coliving sector and help with concept creation to operations.​

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Anything I forgot?

If you want to mention your consulting agency, leave a comment below or write me at mayank@everythingcoliving.com

How to evaluate a coliving consultant

The coliving consulting market has grown faster than the operator base, and from the EC operator interviews, the variance in quality is extreme. The most expensive consultants are not reliably the best; the cheapest are not reliably the worst. The factor that predicts outcomes most consistently is whether the consultant has operated a property themselves through at least one full cycle, pre-opening through stabilization to either ramp-up or wind-down.

A useful evaluation framework from operators who've hired well looks like this:

• Operating history. Have they actually run a property? For how long? How many beds? What was the outcome? If they can't answer all four crisply, downgrade them.
• Bias check. Do they have an undisclosed relationship with a PMS, furniture supplier, or capital provider? Some bias is fine; undisclosed bias is disqualifying.
• Specific written deliverables from prior engagements. Ask for sanitized examples. Consultants who can't produce them are usually selling a personality, not a method.
• References from clients whose engagements ended at least 12 months ago. Recent references are flattering. Old references tell you whether the advice actually compounded.
• Pricing structure. Day rates suggest a senior generalist; fixed-scope projects suggest someone with reps. Revenue share or equity-aligned models can work but often distort incentives if the consultant is wrong about your trajectory.

What good consultant scopes look like

From the EC operator dataset, the consulting engagements operators consistently report as high-ROI cluster into five archetypes:

1. Pre-opening operational design. 6-12 weeks. Scope: SOP buildout, hiring plan, PMS selection, opening day playbook. Typical fee: $15,000-50,000. Highest leverage engagement in the sector.
2. Stabilization audit. 4-6 weeks, run 90-180 days after opening. Scope: gap analysis against operating plan, recommendations across pricing, community programming, staffing. Typical fee: $8,000-25,000.
3. Pricing and revenue optimization. 3-5 weeks. Scope: room-type repricing, length-of-stay incentive design, ancillary pricing. Typical fee: $6,000-20,000. Usually pays for itself in 2-4 months.
4. Capital-stack and underwriting support. Variable. Scope: financial model build, broker package, debt sourcing. Typical fee: $15,000-75,000 or success-fee structures.
5. Brand and positioning. 4-8 weeks. Scope: archetype work, naming, visual identity, copy system. Typical fee: $12,000-60,000. Quality variance here is the highest.

The consultant red flags operators learned the hard way

From the EC operator interviews, operators who'd hired badly consistently flagged the same patterns in retrospect:

• "Strategy first, ops later." Consultants who want to start with a 60-page strategy document before touching operations almost never deliver implementable work.
• Frameworks before specifics. If the first three meetings produce frameworks and no concrete numbers, the engagement won't produce concrete numbers later either.
• Templates lightly customized. Some consultants run a template-heavy practice. That's fine for $5,000 engagements; it's not fine for $50,000 ones. Ask to see what's been changed for you specifically.
• Founder-only client list. Consultants whose entire client list is pre-revenue founders haven't been tested by operators with real P&Ls. They may be excellent at decks; they're often weak on operations.
• Reluctance to put work in writing. If the deliverable is "a series of conversations," there's no deliverable.

Internal hires vs. fractional vs. full consulting engagements

An under-discussed alternative to consulting is the fractional operator, someone who comes in as fractional COO or fractional head of community for 6-18 months at 1-2 days/week. From the EC operator dataset, fractional arrangements at the 50-200 bed scale consistently outperform pure consulting engagements on long-term outcomes. The mechanism is obvious in retrospect: the fractional is on the hook for outcomes, not deliverables.

Typical fractional COO arrangements for coliving operators in the 50-200 bed range run $4,000-12,000/month for 1-2 days/week. The math works when the operator is at the inflection point where they're past founder-led operations but not yet large enough to support a full-time COO at $180-280k all-in.

The advisor structure that actually adds value

Many coliving operators accumulate advisors casually, 5-10 names on a website, equity granted, quarterly emails sent, advice rarely solicited. From operator interviews, the advisor structure that consistently delivers value looks completely different:

• 2-4 advisors maximum, each with a specific domain (operations, capital, brand, legal)
• Monthly 60-minute calls, agenda set by the operator 48 hours ahead
• Specific projects, not general counsel, "review next month's pricing experiment" beats "be available to talk"
• Equity grants tied to engagement vesting, not time vesting
• An explicit annual renewal moment, does this still make sense?

Operators who run this structure report 5-10x the value-per-advisor compared to the loose-affiliation model, mostly because the advisors actually pay attention.

When not to hire a consultant

Three situations consistently produce regret from operators who hired consultants: (1) before signing your first property, when you don't yet have the operational reality to react to advice; (2) in the middle of an active crisis, when the consultant's lead time is longer than the crisis allows; (3) when you're avoiding a hard internal decision and using the consultant as a referee. In the first case, read more and operate first. In the second, fix it yourself and consult after. In the third, make the decision.