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Most of the apartments under our care are classic units rented to a single person or family. A lease agreement, monthly settlements, minor day-to-day matters, occasional tenant turnover. But there are also different apartments – the kind where a dozen or so people live on any given day, each with their own lease, their own daily schedule, and their own expectations of their flatmates. Managing a property like that is not simply “rental management” – it is closer to community management.
This article is about exactly that kind of apartment. An attic in one of Łódź’s historic tenement buildings, over 200 square meters, 11 rooms rented out separately, a common area designed for coliving. We have been managing this apartment since spring 2023 – first for the investor who launched it, and now for the new owner who bought it from him. Along the way we saw everything: excellent architectural execution, an ambitious investor vision, tenant conflicts resolved with midnight phone calls, operational problems that simply do not exist in standard apartments, and a situation that required a fast response from the manager. The conclusion from this story is concrete: room-by-room rental at scale generates disproportionately more work than managing classic apartments, and therefore requires a completely different level of professional service.
An investor reached out to our company right after finishing the preparation of a property for rent and looking for a management firm. We scheduled a viewing, submitted an offer, and agreed on the terms of cooperation. While formalizing the agreement, we learned something we had no idea about beforehand: we were not the only company the investor was considering. He was checking several firms in the industry and running an internal competition, one element of which was a “mystery shopper” procedure – someone from his team contacted each company as a potential tenant and evaluated the response, speed, and quality of communication.
News like that is always welcome – not only because winning the competition confirms the quality of our work, but also because it shows who is on the other side: an investor who selects a manager this methodically clearly takes their own investment seriously. We knew from day one that the cooperation would be professional, transparent, and demanding. The choice of selection method itself was not accidental – the investor understood that an unprofessional manager could simply “wreck” a property like this within the first few months.
The attic of the tenement building, over 200 m² in size, was divided into 11 separately rented rooms plus a shared common area. Just from the description, that many rooms sounds like profit maximization at the expense of residents’ comfort. In reality it was different – the architectural execution showed that someone had a real vision.
The rooms varied in size. Smaller, cheaper ones – for people on a limited budget. Larger, comfortable ones – the kind of size that would not be out of place as a bedroom in many single-family homes. The common area was spacious, with a large dining table, a relaxation zone for watching TV or playing console games, and two wide dishwashers in the kitchen. A separate room by the entrance was set aside for waste sorting. Walking into this apartment, you could feel it had been designed with the comfort of a dozen or so people in mind, not just occupancy density.
We set room prices in the range of PLN 900-1450 per month including fees, depending on the size and standard of the specific room. That amount included PLN 450 in fees per room (utilities, internet, cleaning of common areas). The all-inclusive model, popular in coliving, was a deliberate decision: the target tenant (a student, a young professional, often from abroad) does not want to deal with electricity, gas, or internet bills. They want to know the amount they pay each month, and that is it.
The investor had a specific vision of the tenants. International students coming to Łódź for a semester or an academic year, sitting together at that large table, exchanging experiences, enriching each other culturally. A beautiful vision. Our experience from other room-rental apartments suggested the reality would be more mundane: young people in room-rental apartments rarely spend time together, usually staying in their own rooms. On top of that, with 11 rooms we were also worried about something else – social conflicts. Our practice showed we were right on both counts.
Three flatmates who knew each other personally (one moved in first, then recommended the apartment to two colleagues from work) took three neighboring rooms. Between two of them – literally through the wall – was the room of another tenant who never quite clicked with the group. The flatmates visited each other like friends do. They walked from room to room, talked in the evenings. The neighboring tenant found this bothersome – he felt they were loud, constantly walking past his door. They, in turn, claimed they did not visit each other that often, that some of the movement simply came from using the kitchen and bathroom, and that when they did visit, they respected quiet hours.
The conflict escalated in a classic way. The tenant decided to teach the flatmates a “lesson” – he started playing loud music in the evenings to make it harder for them to fall asleep. His reasoning: if they make noise, so can he. The situation reached a point where one of the flatmates called one of our staff members at midnight, asking for help because her flatmate was not responding to her requests to turn the music down. Our staff member called the tenant playing the music, spoke to him calmly, reminded him of the lease clauses on quiet hours, and asked him to turn the music off. It worked.
The whole matter resolved itself for good about a month later, when the tenant in conflict with the flatmates did not renew his lease – he decided to move in with his partner instead. Had it not been for that change in his personal life, the conflict might have dragged on longer. It was resolved by an external circumstance. Our job came down to “keeping the temperature under control” until one of the parties left the apartment on their own.
This is exactly the aspect of managing a room-rental apartment that does not exist in classic rentals. The owner of an apartment rented to a single family does not need to mediate conflicts between flatmates. In an 11-room coliving setup – someone has to. Without that, the apartment would turn into a place tenants would flee from on their own.
Beyond the big conflicts, there are also small ones – the kind that do not end in midnight phone calls but add up to a daily erosion of the apartment’s quality. Cleaning the common areas is a classic example. From the start we assumed that a “cleaning rota” – typical for smaller-scale student flats – would not work with 11 tenants. We hired a cleaning company that regularly took care of mopping floors, vacuuming, and disinfecting the bathrooms.
That solved most of the problems, but not all of them. Some tasks – like taking out the trash – still fell on the tenants. A separate room for waste sorting, theoretically an elegant solution, in practice meant tenants did not see the trash on a daily basis – and so they forgot to take it out. The room only reminded people of its existence once an unpleasant smell started coming from it. We had to close off access to that room and move waste storage to the kitchen. Visible trash equals remembered trash. A similar mechanism applied to dishes – the kitchen was equipped with two wide dishwashers, but dishes still often ended up unwashed in the sink, and some tenants started taking their own clean dishes back to their rooms in response. Solving situations like these is not dramatic, but it requires the manager’s constant attention: restocking missing items, reminding tenants, checking the house rules. It is work that looks like small stuff, but at the scale of 11 rooms it adds up to a dozen or so hours a month.
Room-by-room rental at scale carries a risk that practically does not exist in classic rentals: relationships between the tenants themselves can turn serious. During one period of managing this apartment, we had a situation in which one of the tenants seriously violated the rules – he violated someone else’s property and used the access he had as a flatmate for unlawful purposes. We will not go into the details of this situation out of respect for the privacy of everyone involved. What matters is how we responded as the manager.
We established direct contact with the person who violated the rules and with their family. We negotiated compensation for the damages caused to the affected parties. We arranged for the lease to be terminated and the tenant to move out as quickly as possible. We cooperated with the relevant authorities, to whom the matter had been reported independently of us – we provided documentation, confirmed facts, and supported the clarification of the circumstances. The entire situation was closed in a way that was satisfactory to the affected parties. The property owner suffered no financial loss. The remaining tenants were able to continue living in the apartment without disruption.
This is a scenario that cannot be predicted when signing a lease. Tenant screening before move-in covers debtor registries, documents, and references – but there is no way to predict in advance how a specific person will behave in specific circumstances. A manager has to be prepared for situations that never occurred in any previous apartment.
The investor for whom we started managing the apartment had a business plan from the very beginning: prepare the space for coliving, launch the rental, reach stable profitability, and sell at a profit. Room rental for students is not a “buy and hold for decades” investment – it is more of a “prepare, stabilize, sell” model. And that is exactly what happened.
The sale process took a long time. The pool of potential buyers for an 11-room coliving property is quite limited – it is a specialized investment asset whose price and way of operating are understood only by a narrow group of investors. But the sale eventually went through. What matters to us is that the new owner took over the apartment along with our management. The previous investor, satisfied with our cooperation, recommended us to the buyer. The experience we built over the first years of managing the property is a value the new owner received essentially built into the price of the transaction.
We have the impression that the following months of management are calmer than the first ones. We know the specifics of this apartment – we know which situations require immediate intervention, which can be handled routinely, and how to match tenants to rooms in order to minimize the risk of conflicts. There is no longer an element of discovering reality. It is work built on knowledge of this specific place, gathered earlier, and it continues to this day.
If you are considering investing in large-scale room rental, planning to buy a property with coliving potential, or simply want to understand how managing an apartment like this differs from classic rentals – here are five takeaways from this story:
1. The same capital invested in room-rental apartments generates far more management work than in studio flats. An 11-room coliving unit is not one apartment to manage – it is eleven leases, eleven screenings, eleven tenant relationships, and dozens of potential conflicts between them. A manager can handle the same amount of capital invested across several studio flats far more calmly. Choosing between these models is not just a question of potential return – it is also a question of the level of management work an investor is willing to accept.
2. Good architectural design alone is not enough – operational procedures are needed. The apartment was beautifully designed: large rooms, a spacious common area, two dishwashers, a separate room for trash. And yet some of the theoretically elegant solutions did not hold up in practice (trash hidden behind a door equals forgotten trash). Managing a room-rental apartment requires continuously adjusting procedures based on residents’ actual behavior.
3. The vision of “exchanging experiences at a big table” rarely matches reality. Coliving in practice means a dozen or so people living in one place, but not necessarily sharing a communal life. Most tenants, after a day of work or classes, stay in their own rooms. An investor building a coliving project should take this into account when planning the investment – a “community of residents” does not create itself.
4. Conflicts between tenants require active mediation from the manager. In a classic rental, an apartment has a single tenant or family – there are no internal conflicts. In coliving, any two people are a potential axis of conflict. A manager has to be ready for phone calls at unusual hours, negotiations between parties, and difficult conversations with tenants breaking the rules. Without that readiness, an apartment quickly becomes a place tenants flee from on their own.
5. Selling a specialized asset requires patience. An 11-room coliving unit does not sell at the pace of an ordinary studio flat. The pool of potential buyers is much smaller, the due diligence process is longer, and the negotiations are more complex. An investor planning this business model (“prepare, stabilize, sell”) should assume from the start that the sale stage may take many months.
Coliving at the scale of 11 rooms is an extreme case of rental management. Standard single-apartment service packages are not enough here – solutions tailored to the specifics of specialized properties are needed. For this type of apartment we usually work under individual terms, based on our top-tier Platinum service layer – with rent guaranteed through Rendin, coverage of unpaid utility bills, full legal support in eviction matters, and notarial powers of attorney for client portfolios. On top of that comes an expanded scope of day-to-day service: mediating conflicts between flatmates, ongoing coordination of the cleaning company, and room allocation and occupancy optimization.
For smaller-scale room-rental apartments (2-4 rooms), our Gold package works well – extended tenant screening across BIK, KRD, BIG InfoMonitor, and Erif registries, monitoring of payments across multiple leases in parallel, and premium marketing at every turnover. The choice between packages always depends on the scale and risk profile of the specific apartment.
Large-scale room rental is a model that makes sense for the right investor, but it is definitely not for everyone. It requires a conscious acceptance of a specific risk profile, the involvement of a professional manager from day one, and patience in building a stable tenant base.
If you are considering an investment in coliving in Łódź or Warsaw, you have inherited a large property with the potential to be divided into rooms, or you are already running an investment like this – book a free consultation. We will analyze your situation, show you the real numbers, and point out risks that are not visible before the first lease is signed.
The apartment from this story is one of the most demanding projects in our portfolio. Every assignment like this teaches us something new – and every one is proof that good management has far more to do with working with people than with working with property.
Author: Adrian Pajor
The description above is a case study of a specific property under our management and does not constitute investment advice, legal advice, or tax advice. All situations described in the text have been anonymized in a way that protects the privacy of everyone involved. Some elements of the narrative have been simplified to make the description more readable, without changing the actual sequence of events. Large-scale room rental (coliving, apartments divided into 5+ rental units) involves specific formal, tax, and administrative requirements that go beyond the standard rules of private rental. The scale of an undertaking like this may qualify it as a business activity, with consequences for VAT settlement, social security contributions, and reporting obligations. Any decision to invest in a coliving model should always be preceded by a detailed consultation with a lawyer and a tax advisor, as well as an analysis of local regulations on multi-unit rental. The rental rates given in the text apply to a specific apartment in a specific period and do not guarantee similar results for other properties.
