Opinion: co-living broke through in planning. Now it has to stack up.

2026 is the year co-living broke through in planning. That fight is largely won. Across London and beyond, local authorities that once viewed co-living with suspicion are now granting consent. The arguments have been made, the precedents set, the policy language has shifted. We should acknowledge that, briefly, then move on.

Because winning planning is not the same as getting built.

A consented co-living scheme that cannot attract capital, cannot be exited by its investors, and cannot be operated day-to-day is just a permission sitting on a shelf. The planning victory becomes academic. And right now, too many schemes risk exactly that fate.

Investable, exit-able, service-able

When we talk about deliverability in co-living, three questions cut to it. First: can you raise the money? Investors have become more sophisticated about co-living, but they remain cautious. A scheme has to demonstrate a credible income model, a realistic stabilisation period, and a clear comparison with competing asset classes. If the numbers do not work at the point of funding, nothing else matters.

Second: can investors get out? Exit-ability is the question funders ask before they ask anything else. Who is the buyer in five or ten years? Is there a liquid secondary market, or is this a one-way door? Co-living has made real progress here, but it is not yet solved. Until there are enough comparable transactions to give buyers confidence, the exit question will weigh on funding decisions.

Third: can the scheme actually be run? This is where co-living lives or dies operationally. The product is not four walls and a bed. It is a managed environment: cleaning rotas, event programming, maintenance, community management, concierge, the works. Bad operations destroy the product fast, and bad operations come from schemes that were not designed with operations in mind from day one.

Community is the product, not an amenity line

All three of those tests matter. But there is a fourth, and it is the one that should sit at the top of the brief: does the scheme work for the people who live in it?

Co-living sells community. Residents choose it because they want connection, not just convenience. That is a serious promise. Meeting it requires more than a nice shared kitchen and a few sofas. It requires decisions about mix, scale, room size, acoustic separation, the placement of shared spaces, how residents are onboarded and supported. These are design decisions, not operational afterthoughts.

If the community does not work, residents leave. If residents leave, occupancy falls. If occupancy falls, the income model breaks. Everything traces back to the lived experience.

The industry sometimes treats community as a feature, something to add late in the design process to distinguish one scheme from another. It is not. It is the product. Design it as such from the start, or the rest of the business case falls over.

Best practice, written down

At Ackroyd Lowrie, we have been working on co-living schemes for several years, running roundtables with planners, politicians, developers and consultants through our Breakfast Club Briefings, and watching the sector navigate each of these questions in real time. What we have learned, and what the people we work with have learned, should not stay locked in individual organisations.

That is why we are updating our How-To Handbook for Co-Living for 2026. The updated version brings together voices from across the industry, focused on setting best practice for how schemes should be designed so they are investable, exit-able, service-able, and genuinely liveable. We will be publishing the white paper in the coming weeks.

The planning argument is won. The next argument is harder: building schemes that actually work, for capital and for communities. That is the conversation the industry needs to have now.