What 20 years taught me

I started Bizflats in 2004. Back then, “corporate housing” wasn’t really a category in Barcelona, it was hotels for short trips, or a friend of a friend’s apartment for anything longer. There was nothing built for the in-between: the person staying six weeks for a project, the relocation that hadn’t quite become permanent yet.

Two decades in, a few things have stayed true, and a few things I was completely wrong about.

What I got wrong early on

I assumed the product was the apartment. Get the right building, the right neighborhood, furnish it well, and the rest takes care of itself. It took a few years of guest feedback to understand that the apartment is just a fraction of what people are actually paying for. And in reality these are things you can’t photograph. Someone who picks up the phone when the wifi drops the night before a client call, a lease that a company’s finance department can actually process without three rounds of back and forth, a handover that doesn’t eat someone’s first day in the city.

We rebuilt a lot of our operations around that once it became clear. Less focus on the apartment as a product, more focus on the stay as a service.

What hasn’t changed

The core need is the same as it was in 2004: someone is in a city for work, for long enough that a hotel stops making sense, and they need their life here to run quietly in the background while they focus on why they came. The rise of remote work hasn’t shifted that, it’s just gotten more visible.

What actually changed

The traveler changed more than the market did. Twenty years ago our typical guest was relocating with a company handling the logistics. Now it’s just as often someone booking their own stay, self-employed, managing their own invoicing, deciding for themselves whether Eixample or Sant Gervasi fits better. The decision-making moved from HR departments to individuals, and the expectations that come with that are different, more direct, less patient with friction.

Barcelona itself changed too, and not always for the better if you’re trying to run a housing business responsibly. Tourism pressure and local housing costs have made this a more scrutinized industry than the one I started in, which I think is fair. Long-stay corporate housing serves a genuinely different purpose than short-term tourist rentals, but we’ve had to get much better at demonstrating that difference, not just assuming people understand it.

What I’d tell myself in 2004

Build the operational relationships before you need them. Cleaning, maintenance, a landlord you can call directly… The groundwork is invisible until the day it isn’t, and by then it’s too late to build it. Everything else, the market, the guests, the competition, will keep moving. That part won’t.

— Jaume Barberena, CEO, Bizflats