Sustainability in Coliving: 3 SDGs to Start
Real estate carries a real climate cost, and coliving operators are in a better position than most to do something about it, which is why a sustainable coliving strategy comes up so often in my conversations as Head of Living at UrbanPay. The UN Environment Programme's 2025-2026 Global Status Report for Buildings and Construction puts the sector at around 37 percent of global CO2 emissions and nearly half of global material extraction. Real estate has also earned a fair share of criticism for driving gentrification and, through the way most housing is designed, for reinforcing isolation rather than connection.
Coliving is one of the few models built to push in the opposite direction on both counts, but that only happens if operators are deliberate about it rather than assuming density and shared space do the work automatically.
Why the SDGs are a useful operator framework
The UN's Sustainable Development Goals are a useful framework for thinking this through, for a practical reason: they are already the language investors, lenders and corporate clients use when they ask about ESG, so mapping an operation against them saves having to invent a framework of your own. Three of them come up again and again when I talk to operators about where to focus first.
Decent work: the staff are part of the community
Decent work sits underneath everything else. Getting working conditions right is not only the socially responsible choice, it also determines whether a coliving building actually feels like a community, since the staff running it day to day are as much a part of that community as the members. In an industry where retaining good people has become one of the harder problems for any service business to solve, this is not a side issue.
For an operator, the practical questions are concrete. Are community managers on stable contracts or rolling temporary ones? How much of their week goes to the work they were hired for, building community, versus chasing late payments and re-checking documents? A team that spends its afternoons matching bank transfers to rooms has less left for the residents, and that shows in the building. I wrote about this trade-off in the five C's of coliving: the back office either funds the community work or eats it.
Sustainable cities: where the model does the heavy lifting
Sustainable cities is where coliving's core model does most of the heavy lifting on its own. Just over half of the world's population already lives in urban areas, a share expected to keep climbing toward two-thirds by 2050, and coliving's basic principle, more people sharing space efficiently in the same building, is well suited to that reality.
Done well, it also integrates into the neighbourhood around it through local, proximity-based commerce rather than sitting apart from it, and the same shared spaces that make a building more efficient tend to double as the antidote to the loneliness that dense cities are otherwise known for. This is also where city regulation increasingly meets the model; the Amsterdam coliving market shows how a city's housing rules shape what operators can build and for whom.
Responsible consumption: the back office counts too
Responsible consumption is the one that shows up in the smallest daily decisions. Encouraging members to recycle and consume more thoughtfully is part of it, but so is how an operator runs its own back office. Paper contracts, printed KYC documents and physical paperwork add up across hundreds of onboardings a year: each move-in that requires a printed contract, a photocopied passport and a signed inventory produces a folder that then has to be stored, and often re-printed when a member extends or moves rooms.
It is one of the reasons operators moving to KYC verification and eIDAS-compliant signing through UrbanPay often mention the reduced paper trail as a real, if smaller, part of the sustainability picture, alongside the collection and reconciliation benefits of account-to-account payments. The environmental gain is modest per contract; the operational gain, a searchable digital record for every member, is what makes it stick.
Where to go from three
None of these three are the whole picture, and depending on the business model there are other SDGs worth mapping against as well: energy efficiency in the building itself, or how a concept for corporate relocations handles the emissions of frequent travel. But decent work, sustainable cities and responsible consumption are a solid starting point for any coliving operator serious about building something that holds up, for its members and for the world they are going to be living in longer term.
I would genuinely like to hear how other operators are approaching this. If you are starting a concept from scratch, how to start a coliving business covers where sustainability sits among the foundations.
FAQ
Which SDGs are most relevant to a coliving operator?
Decent work (SDG 8), sustainable cities and communities (SDG 11) and responsible consumption and production (SDG 12) are the three that map most directly onto how a coliving building is staffed, located and run.
Does a digital onboarding really count as sustainability?
It is a small piece. Removing printed contracts and photocopied documents across hundreds of onboardings a year reduces paper, but the bigger gain is operational: a clean digital record for every member.
Where should a coliving operator start with sustainability?
With the people running the building. Decent working conditions decide whether a coliving actually feels like a community, and retaining good staff is one of the harder problems in any service business. Sustainable cities and responsible consumption follow from a model that already shares space efficiently.
Talk to Óscar
If you run a coliving, flex living or student housing operation and want to see how collection, verification and contract signing fit together on your volumes, book 20 minutes with me or write directly.
Book 20 minutes with Óscar · [email protected] · Contact UrbanPay