Streamlining utility management in flexliving: An essential guide for operators
Angela Martínez
7 min
·
April 23, 2025
Before we begin…
What is flexliving and why is it trending?
Flexliving merges the best aspects of traditional rentals and temporary stays, offering fully furnished homes with inclusive services for flexible durations. It’s the Netflix of urban housing: you pay for what you need, for as long as you want.
The growing demand for hybrid housing—known as Flexliving—is revolutionizing Spain’s real estate market. This innovative model is especially appealing to digital nomads, students, relocated professionals, and people in transition, all of whom seek comfort and efficient management.
According to Innomads Proptech Hub, investment in Spain’s Flexliving sector reached €974 million by Q3 of 2024, representing 39% of all Living sector transactions. Furthermore, 70% of Flexliving beds are in Madrid and Barcelona, with Málaga, Valencia, and Bilbao on the rise.
Utility management in the flexliving model
Unlike traditional tourist rentals, where turnover is rapid, Flexliving relies on continuity and service quality. Tenants staying for weeks or months expect stable services with no interruptions or billing surprises.
In Flexliving operations, utility management is one of those essential but often overlooked tasks. When flexibility and tenant experience are everything, efficient control of utilities can mean the difference between operational chaos and resounding success.
And utilities? They’re not a problem... until they are. A mismanaged bill, an unexpected outage, or a delayed activation can cause complaints, penalties, and negative reviews.
To prevent this, Flexliving needs digitized administration capable of coordinating multiple essential providers—electricity, gas, water, internet, and telecom—across many properties.
A decentralized approach can lead to errors, high costs, operational incidents, and ultimately, a poor tenant experience. Lack of visibility into consumption and active contracts also makes decision-making difficult and impacts profitability
Key challenges in utility management
Major challenges in managing Flexliving services include fragmented providers, difficulty in cost allocation among multiple tenants, and lack of control over consumption. Frequent tenant turnover in flexible stays further complicates payment tracking and active service monitoring.
Manual operations
A common issue is the lack of automation. Many operators still rely on spreadsheets, phone calls, or emails to manage incidents.
Complex and unclear billing
Utility companies are not known for clarity. Each bill is a puzzle, and managing dozens or hundreds of properties multiplies the time invested.
Difficulty accessing data
Adapting rates to different usage models, such as daily, weekly, or monthly stays, becomes a mountain of manual tasks without intelligent solutions.
Variability in consumption
This complicates cost allocation. Frequent tenant turnover makes it harder to track payments and consumption.
Ownership changes
Each check-in and check-out should involve contract reviews, but this is often slow and tedious in practice.
Activations, deactivations, and contract changes
Setting up utilities in a new apartment can take weeks. What if a tenant moves in during this time? Bad news.
Multiple providers, multiple problems
Each utility is a different world—water with one, electricity with another, internet with three. Management becomes chaotic.
These obstacles cause unnecessary operational strain and can harm user relationships if not managed professionally
Best practices for managing utilities in flexliving
Tech-savvy Flexliving operators stand out by implementing the following strategies:
1. Centralized systems
A centralized platform to manage contracts, invoices, consumption, and statuses across all properties avoids chaos and scattered manual tasks.
2. Process automation
Automate utility activations, deactivations, invoice tracking, and incident alerts to save time and reduce human error. This frees up your team to improve the tenant experience and grow the business.
3. Real-Time data sync
When utility costs are unclear, conflicts arise. Clear agreements backed by real-time data foster transparency. Having updated consumption data allows early detection of inefficiencies, spikes, or anomalies.
4. Transparent provider communication
Managing dozens of providers? A centralized support system improves issue resolution and ensures professional service, sparing you from endless customer service calls.
Polaroo: Smart utility management for flexliving
This is where tools like Polaroo come in—combining technology and expert support to centralize, automate, and optimize utility management for properties with rotating tenants or multiple occupants.
What does Polaroo offer?
Consolidates all utilities into a single invoice
Centralizes and digitizes your invoices, allowing you to manage all services linked to all properties. This reduces administrative workload and simplifies financial analysis.
Digitizes invoice data and divides costs among tenants
One of Polaroo's standout features is automatic cost division. You can configure the split based on the number of tenants or customized criteria aligned with contract clauses. This ensures transparency in operator-tenant relationships and eliminates potential misunderstandings or disputes.
Monitors costs and consumption
Polaroo provides visual tools to monitor consumption and costs of all utilities—energy, water, gas, internet. It even includes alerts for anomalies or deviations from usual patterns. This enables problem anticipation, leak detection, future cost estimation, and maintains a predictable and healthy cash flow.
Periodic evaluation of rates and contracts
Beyond technology, Polaroo offers a team of experts who regularly review contracted rates and terms. They analyze each property's consumption profile to seek better options that maximize savings without compromising service quality. This ensures you're always operating under the most competitive market conditions.
Incident and operations management
Polaroo's value proposition extends beyond financial control. They also handle all operational tasks with utility providers—activations, deactivations, claims, ownership changes, among others. This allows operators to forget about repetitive tasks and focus on providing a better tenant experience.
Conclusion
The Flexliving model demands a modern, proactive, and digital approach. Utility coordination shouldn’t be a burden—it should be a growth enabler. With tools like Polaroo, operators can turn complexity into simplicity, delivering a frictionless experience for both tenants and teams.
FAQs on utility management in flexliving
- Which utilities are hardest to manage?
Electricity and internet, due to their importance and frequent issues. - Can operators manage utilities on behalf of owners?
Yes, if there’s contractual authorization. - What if a tenant doesn’t pay their share?
Use systems that log usage and allocate costs fairly. - Can I switch providers often to save?
Yes—but use platforms like Polaroo to manage comparisons and changes.
- Does automation really save money?
Absolutely—fewer errors, less admin time, and better decisions = higher profits.