Badi and Caterina's €250m merger signals Flex Living is going global

Badi and Caterina, two of the best-known names in Spain’s flexible rental market, announced this month that they’re merging.

The combined platform will manage more than €250 million in assets and is targeting over 7,000 operational units within four years, concentrated in Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia.

The deal is backed by a capital increase led by Meridia and Barlon Capital; Meridia is already the majority shareholder in Caterina since 2023.

On paper it’s a straightforward consolidation story: Badi brings a consumer-facing marketplace with five million registered users and 350,000 monthly actives; Caterina brings institutional-grade building management and a book of relationships with long-term capital.

Together, the plan is to offer investors a single point of entry that covers the full cycle: sourcing, capital deployment and day-to-day operation; for what the merged company calls “flex living”.

It’s not an isolated move. In the same few weeks, BGO and Stoneweg launched Welco with €500 million earmarked for flex living in Spain, Gmp broke ground on a 195-unit flex living complex in Sanchinarro and Hercesa allied with Buenavista on a similar scheme in Alcalá de Henares.

Flex living has become, by most accounts, the most sought-after residential asset class for institutional capital in Spain since the pandemic. Understanding why, and where the model is headed next matters for anyone managing property professionally, not just in Spain.

A Spanish label for a global shift

“Flex living” as a term is largely a Spanish and European real estate coinage, used to describe fully furnished apartments let on flexible terms of roughly one to eleven months, bundling utilities and services in a hotel-adjacent way.

Outside Spain, the same underlying product goes by other names: serviced accommodation in the UK, extended-stay or corporate housing in the US, mid-term rental (MTR) more generically.

Operators like The Flex (UK-founded, now trading across London, Paris, Barcelona and beyond), Blueground and Habyt occupy the same space under different branding.

The label varies; the economics and the operating model are converging everywhere: professionally managed, tech-enabled, deliberately positioned in the gap between a traditional long-term lease and a hotel room.

Regulation is the accelerant, not the obstacle

The timing of this consolidation wave isn’t coincidental. Short-term rental regulation is tightening across Europe and beyond: Barcelona’s Constitutional Court has upheld a 2028 deadline after which all existing tourist-use licences could expire with no renewal, effectively phasing out roughly 10,000 licensed units.

The UK’s incoming Renters’ Rights Act reshapes obligations around short lets. California’s SB 346 and various EU-level data and registration requirements are adding compliance overhead across the board.

The property managers absorbing the brunt of this are the small, informal short-term operators. The professionally managed mid-term segment is structurally different; typically planning-compliant, registered and built for stays of 30+ days, which sidesteps much of the tourist-rental regulatory net.

That’s precisely the segment Badi-Caterina, Welco and their peers are consolidating into. Regulatory pressure isn’t killing flexible rental; it’s sorting it, pushing capital and professional operators toward the compliant, hybrid end of the market and squeezing out the informal end.

The Heimby model: stop choosing between short and long

If Spain is showing what happens when capital piles into flex living as a category, Norway’s Heimby is a useful preview of where the operating model goes next.

Heimby, founded in 2022, manages around 160 apartments on behalf of owners and doesn’t treat short-term and long-term as separate product lines, it treats them as two settings on the same dial.

Its own data shows that a property let short-term year-round can now generate only 50–75% of the income of a well-run long-term lease, because long-term rents have climbed sharply in Norway’s tightest markets while nightly rates have stayed comparatively flat.

So Heimby’s pitch to owners isn’t “Airbnb management” or “long-term letting”, it’s “continuous reallocation toward whichever structure produces the best return at a given moment”, all run through one owner portal, with the legal and tax handling abstracted away.

That’s a meaningfully different mental model from the Spanish deals, which are still largely about building scaled flex living portfolios as a fixed asset class.

Heimby’s version treats “flex” as a property management capability rather than a category of building, arguably closer to where the industry is heading once the current wave of institutional flex living portfolios matures and operators start optimising unit-by-unit rather than building-by-building.

The numbers back the shift

This isn’t just sentiment, it shows up in the data.

In the US, bookings of 28 nights or longer grew 136% between 2019 and 2025, and monthly rentals now account for 19% of total rental demand, scaling twice as fast as nightly short-term bookings.

In Europe, investor appetite for serviced apartments rose 22% in 2026 alone, with combined UK and Spanish transaction volumes reaching roughly €1 billion across 2024–2025.

The serviced/flex product is now framed by advisors like Savills as structurally distinct from — and lower-risk than — classic short-term rental, precisely because of its planning compliance and longer stay profile.

What it means for property managers

For professional property managers, the read-through is fairly direct. The industry-wide squeeze on informal short-term letting isn’t a threat to flexible rental as a business, it’s redirecting demand and capital toward exactly the operators who can run compliant, hybrid stock at scale.

The winning position isn’t picking a lane between short-term and long-term management; it’s building the operational and legal infrastructure to move properties fluidly between them, the way Heimby does at a small scale and Badi-Caterina is now trying to do at a much larger one.

Expect more consolidation, more institutional capital, and increasingly, flex living tools and terminology showing up in markets that have never used the phrase before.