The case for flex living – and the technology that can make it work

Whether you’ve already bought a flex living asset or are still weighing one up, you’ve probably spent plenty of time thinking about the numbers. Long-stay residents give you base occupancy. Short stays give you yield upside. One building, two revenue engines, and the potential to generate returns from both.

What tends to come next is the question that can make or break your success: who actually runs this, and on what?

The investment case for flex living is compelling, but making the operating model work is another matter. It rests on one assumption: that short and long stays can be managed together, by one team, from one set of data. And for that, you need the right technology.

The influx of investment in flex living

Three things are pulling more capital into flex living at the same time.

The first is the return model itself. Living sectors are attracting growing attention from real estate investors, with Savills forecasting further growth in European investment volumes in 2026. Flex is where a growing share of that capital wants to go, because it blends residential stability with hospitality-style returns.

The second is regulation. In the UK, the Renters' Rights Act brought a new tenancy framework into force on 1 May 2026, reshaping the private rented sector and increasing interest in flexible, professionally run living options. Student housing is seeing a similar pressure, as cost-of-living concerns push more students to commute rather than commit to a full year of accommodation.

The third is demand that isn't going anywhere. A growing cohort of European workers need somewhere to live without a 12-month contract or a local guarantor. Habyt has built its model around this gap: 70% of its residents are internationals relocating for work or study. It's a sign of a wider shift towards housing that fits the way people move for work and education.

The opportunity is clear. The question is whether operators have the right setup to make the most of it.

Where the model breaks

Flex living brings short and long stays under one roof. But too often, the operating system that runs the building hasn't caught up. Operators rely on software built for a different purpose, whether that's a residential lettings system or a hotel-only PMS. Neither was designed to handle both kinds of stay.

Some operators run two systems side by side, with a residential system for leases and a hotel system for nightly stays. Others, particularly across the UK and Europe, outsource short-stay operations to a third-party agent while managing long stays themselves.

Both are understandable, but neither is a flex operating model. With two systems, short-stay and long-stay data never meet. With an agent, fees eat into short-stay revenue, and control of the guest relationship moves outside the business.

The alternative is to manage both stay types in-house, through one operating system.

What fragmentation costs

None of this is a people problem. It's a technology problem. When systems can't handle both kinds of stay, teams have to bridge the gaps themselves – with very real costs.

You can't price short-stay inventory dynamically against what's happening on the long-stay side when the two don't share a timeline. You can't automate the tenant lifecycle from inquiry to renewal to move-out when half of it lives somewhere else. And you certainly can't produce a single P&L across short and long stays without someone stitching two exports together in a spreadsheet.

So, teams build workarounds. This may hold up at one building, but it starts to strain at five. By the time you scale to ten or twenty buildings, you're hiring people to manage the gaps between systems rather than to run the buildings. The mix of short and long stays was supposed to make your assets more efficient. Instead, it's making them more expensive to run.

The model that works

Mews has one inventory. One timeline. One team that can treat a two-night stay and a nine-month residency as the same kind of booking, with different terms attached.

The Boost Society runs 38 properties across France and Spain under two brands, Kley for students and Hife for co-living, with €1.2 billion raised and a target of 20,000 residents by 2030. With Mews, they manage short, mid and long stays in the same buildings, with separate inventory, pricing and contracts for each stay type and one operating system underneath. It's what flex living looks like when the operating model is built to support it. Read The Boost Society’s story.

Similarly, The Social Hub brings together students, extended stays and hotel short stays in the same building across cities including Amsterdam, Barcelona and Rotterdam. CEO Charlie MacGregor has spoken about the benefits of this model, where a mix of stay types helps diversify demand. If tourism dips, the students are still there. When the students go home, the travelers arrive. You can hear the full conversation on Matt Talks Hospitality here.

In both cases, the operating system is built to manage hourly to monthly stays in one place, from the start, rather than long-stays being bolted on later.

Decide early, because you only get one go

It's important this key technology choice is made early, usually before the second or third asset goes live. Once the portfolio is growing, it's harder to undo. It leads to a lot of time spent unpicking workflows, integrations and reporting processes that are already part of how the business runs.

The operators building an advantage now aren't necessarily the ones with the most buildings or rooms. They're the ones making these integral infrastructure decisions before they scale. Ultimately, whether your buildings deliver on the investment comes down to the system you run them on.

Want to see this in practice? Read how Truliving approaches flexible living with Mews.