The Coliving Tour Checklist: What to Look At When You Visit

A tour is a sales environment. That is not a criticism — every building shows itself at its best, and there is nothing dishonest about tidying up before a viewing. But it does mean the default tour tells you about the room and almost nothing about the year.

Most of what follows is about deliberately looking at the parts nobody is showing you.

Book the visit for the wrong time on purpose

The single highest-value decision you make about a tour is when it happens.

Buildings are usually shown mid-morning on a weekday, which is the hour they look most like the photographs and least like your life. Almost everyone is out. The kitchen was cleaned after breakfast. The street is quiet.

Ask for early evening on a weekday instead — around 6 to 8pm. That is when you find out what you are actually renting.

If a building will only show mid-morning, that is not automatically a red flag. Ask why, and listen to whether the answer is about staffing or about the building.

The shared kitchen is the whole test

In coliving, one room decides your daily experience more than the room you sleep in.

At a realistic hour, look at:

• Counter space that is free. Not total counter space — free counter space. Appliances live on counters permanently.
• Whether there is anywhere to put food. Fridge and cupboard space per person, and whether it is allocated or first-come.
• The state of it at 7pm. Not whether it is spotless, which nobody’s kitchen is. Whether it looks like a place where people cooperate or a place where people gave up.
• How many people share it. Ask for the number, then look at the hob and decide whether that number can cook.

At Dover Quarters the shared kitchens have a stove and granite counters, and Studio Jr suites have their own kitchenette. Which of those you need is a question about your cooking, and it is worth answering honestly before it becomes a question about your evenings.

Things a photograph cannot tell you

Work through these physically, in the room:

• Run the shower. Pressure and how long the hot water takes. Fair to ask of any older conversion — this is a 1907 building, though with a new high-efficiency boiler and updated plumbing.
• Check your phone signal standing inside the room, not in the lobby or the corridor. Thick older walls do things to reception that no listing mentions.
• Open a window. What comes in — street noise, a courtyard, an air shaft?
• Find the heat control and ask who operates it. In older buildings with central systems, the honest answer is sometimes “the building, on a schedule”. That may be perfectly fine; you should just know before you sign rather than in January.
• Look for somewhere to work. Not floor space where a desk would fit. A desk.
• Ask where a bike, a suitcase and winter coats go. Storage is the quiet variable that decides whether a compact room works.

Four questions that reveal how it is run

The building tells you about the room. These tell you about the operator.

1. “Is the lease individual or joint?” The most consequential answer of the tour. Individual means you sign for your room and nobody else’s rent can become yours. If the reply is vague or takes a while, it is joint.

2. “Which utilities are included — all five?” Water, electricity, heat, garbage, internet. Make them enumerate. All five are included here; a building that includes three is a different price than it advertises.

3. “Who do I share with, and how are they chosen?” Managed matching and “whoever is left” are different products at the same price. Dover Quarters handles suitemate matching for shared-kitchen suite types.

4. “What happens if I need to leave early?” Ask about the exit while you are still outside it. The answer, and how readily it comes, tells you a lot.

Watch how staff talk about current residents

This one is unscientific and it is reliable.

Listen to how the person showing you around refers to the people already living there. Warmth and specifics suggest a building where issues get handled. Weariness, or a joke at a resident’s expense, suggests a building where they do not — and you would be the next resident.

Ask a plain question and watch the response: “What do people here complain about most?” Every building has an answer. The useful signal is whether you get one, or get told there are no complaints.

Before you leave, walk out the front door and time something

Pick the trip you will actually make most — to work, to campus, to the station — and walk part of it. A map estimate on flat ground is not a Seattle estimate.

For context, 901 6th Avenue is about 4 minutes on foot from Seattle Central Library, about 7 from Symphony Station, and about 10 from Harborview Medical Center, with the I-5 on-ramp two blocks away. Those are the kind of numbers worth checking with your own feet rather than taking from a page — including this one.

If you are touring by video

Same checklist, with three additions: ask them to walk the route from the front door rather than starting inside the room, ask them to stand still inside the room so you can judge the signal, and ask them to open the storage and pan slowly. Sweeping hides wear; a slow pan does not.

For how the format works and how to compare operators against each other, see coliving in Seattle.