Why is there no contractor accommodation near our project site?

The supply map and the project map have come apart

There is no shortage of investment in long-stay accommodation. HVS reports around 19,800 branded rooms due to open across Europe in the next five years, and Savills counts 12,533 rooms under construction or in advanced planning across 26 European gateway cities. The problem for anyone mobilising a crew is where those rooms are going. Germany takes 23% of the pipeline, concentrated in Berlin, Munich and Hamburg. The UK takes 22%, and 57% of that is London.

Meanwhile the projects have moved. Power availability, not fibre or land, now decides where large industrial and digital infrastructure gets built: 67% of European data centre operators rank access to power as their biggest constraint for the next three years, and demand is forecast to rise from 96 TWh in 2024 towards 236 TWh by 2035. Dublin, Frankfurt and Amsterdam are congested or capped, so the work is being distributed into the Nordics, Central and Eastern Europe and tier-2 regions. A 550MW campus announced in Seinajoki, Finland alone carries more than 1,500 construction jobs in its first phase.

So the beds are being added in the ten cities where they were already easiest to find, and the crews are being sent to places that appear in no accommodation dataset at all.

Why the searchable pool is also smaller

The visible layer shrank at the same time. Regulation (EU) 2024/1028 has applied since 20 May 2026, obliging platforms to display and verify host registration numbers and to transmit monthly listing data to national portals. Enforcement is uneven: Spain, France, Italy, Greece and Portugal have live portals, Germany and the Netherlands do not. Spain ordered 86,275 listings removed in a single February 2026 sweep, and Paris has shed roughly 13,000 active rentals in twelve months. None of that regulation created a single new bed, and none of it removed one either. It moved supply out of search.

There is also no slack to absorb a mobilisation. Savills puts 2025 extended-stay occupancy at 79% with average daily rate around EUR 136 on CoStar data, against 75% for the wider hotel market, and HVS operator survey responses sit near 80% occupancy with average rate around EUR 145. At those levels a 30 bed requirement in a secondary market is not a booking problem, it is a sourcing problem.

More mobilisations, longer distances

The demand side is not easing either. FIEC estimates the EU construction sector needs around 2 million additional workers by 2030, with member federations reporting shortages from 20,000 blue collar workers a year in Belgium to roughly 100,000 a year in France. When local labour cannot be found, crews travel: around 1.5 million posted workers generated about 4 million postings in a single reference year across the EU, an average of 2.7 postings per worker, with Germany, Belgium, France and Austria the main receiving countries. Every one of those postings is an accommodation requirement, and increasingly at the thin end of the map.

How sourcing has to change

Across our own bookings we see the shape of this clearly. In aggregate, Bonjour Residences has booked in 47 cities across 16 countries, the median stay is 19 nights and the median lead time from enquiry to check-in is 4 days. Four days is not a planning horizon, it is a scramble, and in a gateway city you can usually get away with it. In a project town you cannot.

Three practical changes:

• Separate the length of stay question from the platform question. Over roughly a month you are normally not in the short-let regime at all, but in a direct contract with an owner or operator. Better terms, no suspension risk, no registration exposure.
• Ask for the unlisted layer explicitly. In secondary markets the usable stock is owner held: whole apartments, small blocks, worker-suitable units that were never on a platform. It is reached by relationship, not by search.
• Brief accommodation at the same time as the site, not after mobilisation is confirmed. Where the searchable pool has thinned, lead time is the only lever left.

What to ask before committing

Is the property registered where registration applies, and can the number be shown? Who holds the contract, an owner or an intermediary? What happens if the project overruns, since overruns are the norm rather than the exception. And is the rate quoted for the actual length of stay, or a nightly rate that belongs to a different market entirely.