Jamestown Building Short-Stay Flex Living Units in Atlanta

Remote work, which expanded exponentially during the pandemic, has evolved into hybrid work, primarily the three-days-in-the-office model that has resulted in office footprints being “right-sized” into smaller spaces and office vacancy rates at record levels across the U.S.

It remains to be seen whether another pandemic-related phenomenon, remote workers migrating around the country sampling various locations during short stays, will have the same kind of staying power in the post-pandemic economy.

Numerous players, including real estate developers and start-ups, two years ago unveiled plans to develop short-stay “flex living” buildings, plans that in 2024 are coming to fruition. (You can rent them for a day or up to a year, but don’t call them apartments. They offer hospitality services, but don’t call them hotels.)

Jamestown said this week that it expects to deliver this year the first building designed for its Scout Living hospitality concept, a 405-unit project under construction at Atlanta’s Ponce City Market.

Scout Living will feature fully furnished one- and two-bedroom units that will be available to rent for flexible lengths of stay that can be as short as a single night or up to a year. The units will average about 390 SF.

The units, which will be equipped with full kitchens as well as washers and dryers, also come with concierge-like hospitality room service that will deliver food, goods and services including dry-cleaning, housekeeping and “restocking of necessities.”

Michael Phillips, Jamestown’s president, who calls the Scout Living concept “a more meaningful integration of live, work and travel,” said the firm is aiming for young tech-savvy workers who are highly mobile.

If the Atlanta version is a success, Scout living will be expanded to other U.S. cities as well as Europe. Jamestown has dual headquarters in Atlanta and Cologne, Germany.

The Scout Living building is the part of the second phase of development for Ponce City Market, a mixed-use development that was built on the site of a multi-story Sears warehouse in the Old Fourth Ward neighborhood of Atlanta in 2015.

The Scout Living building is rising next to an 85K SF mass timber office building at Ponce City Market. The Scout Living building will include 12K SF of ground-floor retail. A courtyard common area will provide walkable connectivity between the historic Ponce building, Scout Living, and the Atlanta BeltLine.

Sentral, a flex-living pioneer launched in 2021, is managing more than 10,000 units in 15 cities on its platform for short-term rentals.

In 2022, WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann secured $350M in backing from Andreessen Horowitz for the start-up Flow, which will offer concierge and management services to an estimated 4,000 units that Neumann has purchased in Nashville, Atlanta, Miami and Fort Lauderdale.