This coliving company is launching in Philly — fueled by a $300M funding round

A company called QUARTERS, currently offering coliving hubs in Chicago and New York, plans to expand its national presence to cities such as Miami, Boston and Philadelphia with fuel from a $300-million funding round.

QUARTERS, owned by Berlin-based parent company MEDICI LIVING Group, told Technical.ly through a spokesperson it expects to announce the Philly location within the first six months of 2019, and though a location hasn’t yet been selected, it will likely “be consistent with other QUARTERS locations which are in the downtown areas of their respective cities.”

Over the next three years, QUARTERS will be developing 1,300 total units across the U.S., all in metro areas of 1 million residents or more. By 2021, MEDICI Living Group, which owns multiple coliving brands, says it will have grown its overall portfolio from the current 1,800 rooms it now operates to a total of 9,000 rooms.

But wait, what is coliving again? Think of coworking but for apartments: Each resident has a private room, but shares bathrooms, kitchen, living room and other common areas. Typically, utilities and access to common working areas are bundled into a single monthly price.

“Philadelphia is a must-go for us,” said Gunther Schmidt, CEO of QUARTERS and its parent company. “It is a vibrant city full of culture, history, and diversity with a rapidly developing tech scene, and it is also a magnet for Millennials. Philadelphia is one of our main target cities where we will establish ourselves in as soon as possible in 2019 in order to become the WeWork of co-living.”

Our sister site Technical.ly Brooklyn extensively covered a local company called Common, which offered similar setups in Brooklyn and a handful of other tech hubs around the country. The coliving trend also has local echoes in a 2011 project from Indy Hall called K’House (pronounced like “kaboom”) which is no longer active. As of last year, a European company called Startup Home — through its U.S.-based counterpart, Startup Home US — was still in talks to make coliving happen in Philly after announcing an expansion here in 2016.