Why is long-stay accommodation for project teams so hard to find in Europe?

If sourcing crew housing feels harder than it did three years ago, it is not your imagination and it is not your buyer. The supply and the demand are moving in opposite directions, and the gap is now large enough to measure.

The numbers behind the squeeze

Savills counted 86,911 long-stay rooms across 26 European gateway cities in April 2026. That is around 8% of total room supply in those cities. Meanwhile demand for that segment has been growing at a compound rate of 5.9% a year, against 1.1% for hotels.

Read those two figures together. The fastest growing category of accommodation demand in Europe is being served by the smallest slice of the stock. Occupancy tells the same story: HVS put the segment at 81.9% in 2026, with an average daily rate of 145 euro. Occupancy in the low eighties across a whole segment means there is very little slack anywhere in the system.

Why the shortage is structural

Three things are pushing demand up at once. Project work has lengthened, so more stays cross the one-month line. Cross-border posting has become normal rather than exceptional in construction and industrial work. And regulation has removed a chunk of the informal supply that used to absorb the overflow.

That last one accelerated this year. Regulation (EU) 2024/1028 has applied since 20 May 2026, requiring platforms to display and verify a registration number on short-stay listings and to suspend listings without one. Paris alone lost 12,696 active listings in twelve months, a fall of 22.9%. The beds did not disappear, but the easily searchable pool did.

Supply cannot respond quickly. A new long-stay building takes years. Demand shifted in months.

The part the market reports miss

Every figure above describes gateway cities. Project teams frequently are not in gateway cities. They are at an industrial site outside a town of thirty thousand people, an hour from anywhere with a market report written about it.

In those locations the segment share is not 8%. It is often zero. There is no long-stay stock, no platform pool worth searching, and a handful of owners who have never let to a company before. That is where sourcing actually breaks, and it is invisible in the national numbers.

What our own bookings show

Across our bookings the median stay is nineteen nights and the mean is fifty-two. Half of what we book sits in the awkward zone that is too long for a hotel to be sensible and too short for a residential tenancy to be practical. The median lead time between enquiry and check-in is four days, and the median party size is three.

Four days, three people, nineteen nights, frequently in a town with no long-stay stock. That combination is the real sourcing problem, and no amount of searching a platform solves it, because the inventory is not listed on one.

What this means for how you source

The practical conclusion is that the method has to change before the market does.

For stays over a month, starting on short-stay platforms is now the wrong first move. Over that length you are usually in a different legal category anyway, contracted directly with the owner or operator. For secondary locations, availability has to be built rather than searched, which means someone has to hold relationships with owners in places that have no visible market. And lead time is the cheapest lever available: the difference between four days and three weeks of notice is often the difference between housing a crew together and splitting it across three towns.

The shortage is real and it is not going to ease soon. What can change quickly is how early you start and who you ask.