Growing a coliving, build-to-rent or serviced apartment portfolio puts every part of the operating model under pressure. Processes that feel manageable across a few hundred beds can become significant constraints when the business expands into new buildings and markets.
That challenge was the focus of “Shared Living at Scale: Breaking Through the Growth Plateau” at Coliving Conference, where our Managing Director, Europe, Giles Horwitch-Smith joined the discussion.
Drawing on his background in property operations and technology consulting, Giles’s perspective on coliving management starts with a practical question: can a business add beds and scale operations without increasing headcount and administrative work at the same rate as revenue?
The answer depends on how well its processes, people and technology work together.
“Growth magnifies the cost of every workaround you leave in place.”
Giles Horwitch-Smith, Managing Director, Europe, Software Answers
Small workarounds become substantial operating costs
At a smaller scale, capable people often compensate for gaps between systems. Someone remembers a resident’s extension, updates a spreadsheet and lets housekeeping know. A colleague checks the invoice and corrects the billing schedule.
The work gets done, but its success depends on people remembering each step and keeping several records aligned.
As the portfolio grows, those same tasks multiply. More employees become involved, handovers increase and exceptions become harder to track. What began as a manageable workaround can become the primary responsibility of an entire team.
Consider one recurring administrative task that takes ten minutes per occupied bed each month. Across 500 beds, it consumes approximately 83 hours. Across 5,000 beds, it takes more than 833 hours.
This is an illustrative calculation, but it makes the commercial issue tangible. An operator can grow revenue and absolute profit while carrying the same administrative cost per bed into every new building. The opportunity to improve margins remains unrealised.
Giles’s argument is that operators need to examine those working habits before they become embedded in a larger business. Headcount will naturally grow where service requires people, particularly in on-site and community teams, but routine administration should not have to grow at the same rate.
A scalable process connects the whole resident journey
One of the most useful ways to assess readiness for growth is to follow a resident journey from beginning to end.
A stay extension, for example, can affect the contract, rent, room availability, access permissions and housekeeping schedule. If employees must update each system separately, every change creates more work and another opportunity for information to fall out of sync.
A process may appear efficient within one department while creating unnecessary work elsewhere. The reservations team might complete an extension quickly, only for finance to spend time identifying the correct charges or the on-site team to resolve an access problem.
That is why Giles encourages operators to look beyond individual features when evaluating technology, particularly at the point where property management companies outgrow basic software. They need to establish where each core record is held, how changes reach other systems and who takes responsibility when something goes wrong.
Connected specialist tools can work well. The important test is whether property management system interfaces remove manual effort or still leave employees reconciling the information between them.
This becomes particularly important for businesses operating across coliving, build-to-rent, serviced accommodation and different stay lengths. Contracts, recurring billing and move-in processes need to reflect the commercial model without creating a separate workaround for every variation.
Growth requires numbers that leadership can trust
Operational gaps can also have a direct financial impact. For example, if a resident’s departure date changes but the billing schedule does not, the business may miss a charge.
Employees then need to find the discrepancy, recover the revenue and explain the correction to the resident. The original failure has created financial, administrative and service costs.
To illustrate the potential scale, a portfolio of 5,000 occupied beds generating £1,000 per bed each month would produce £5 million in monthly revenue. A hypothetical 0.5% loss through missed, unrecovered charges would amount to £25,000 a month, or £300,000 a year. These figures demonstrate how small control failures can become material.
Leadership needs visibility into these processes and manual checks while there is still time to act. To do this, a business must have consistent definitions and a traceable connection between management reports and the contracts, invoices and payments behind them.
Alongside occupancy and revenue, Giles flags administrative cost per occupied bed, building contribution and portfolio margin as useful measures to track and evaluate before trying to drive strategic growth. On top of this, service measures such as resolution times, repeat complaints and resident retention help establish whether efficiency improvements are sustainable.
AI should build on a process the business understands
These growth foundations can also shape whether AI can deliver a worthwhile return.
In our recent Serviced Apartment News webinar recap, Giles explored the importance of reliable information and measurable outcomes when introducing automation.
The same principle applies to scaling a portfolio. Before handing a task to AI, an operator needs to understand how the process works, what a successful outcome looks like and how exceptions should be handled.
If instructions are incomplete or employees regularly encounter conflicting information, introducing AI can reproduce those problems faster. Documenting and improving the workflow first is one of the most reliable ways companies prevent errors in workflow automation, because it gives automation a more reliable starting point.
“If you put a bad process into AI, you can end up doing the wrong thing faster.”
Giles Horwitch-Smith
Routine resident questions, maintenance triage and invoice processing are useful areas to assess for AI adoption. Each of these processes offers an opportunity to reduce repetitive work, provided the system has access to accurate information and a clear route to human review.
Some processes may need only straightforward rules-based automation. Scheduled billing and standard reminders, for example, do not necessarily require AI. Ultimately, the choice of technology should follow the operational need.
Time saved needs to translate into business value
Whether the question is if automating bill payments actually saves time and money or whether AI can handle resident queries, measuring the return starts before implementation. Operators should record how frequently a task occurs, how long it takes and where errors arise. After making a process change or implementing automation, those measures need to be reviewed alongside the quality of the outcome.
Software costs, implementation effort and the time spent checking or correcting outputs all belong in that assessment.
Using the earlier illustration, reducing a monthly task from ten minutes to two minutes across 5,000 occupied beds would release approximately 667 hours each month before additional review and other costs. That represents potential capacity and real-world workflow efficiency that can deliver business value.
The next stage of growth starts before the next building
Preparing for growth also means changing how decisions are made. A founder who remains the approval point for every routine exception can become a constraint on the business. Teams need clear responsibilities, reliable information and authority to act within agreed boundaries. Systems can support that delegation by making decisions and outcomes visible.
The same applies when portfolios come together through consolidation. Consolidation is a common driver of serviced apartment management company growth, but additional beds do not automatically create operating efficiencies. Shared processes and consistent reporting are needed to turn the potential benefits of scale into measurable improvements.
Giles’s central message for coliving management and serviced apartment teams is to prepare the operating model for the portfolio the business intends to become. That starts with identifying the manual work that will multiply and addressing it while the team still has the capacity to make changes.
“Design the process for the portfolio you are building towards, not the portfolio you have today.”
Giles Horwitch-Smith
For operators considering their next stage of growth, a useful starting question is:
If your portfolio doubled, which processes would need twice as many people, and which numbers would you stop trusting first?
Those answers can reveal where better processes and connected technology will make the greatest difference to growth, margins and the resident experience.
FAQ
How can coliving operators scale without increasing headcount?
By fixing manual workarounds before they multiply. Connect the systems that handle contracts, billing, access and housekeeping so one change updates every record, and track administrative cost per occupied bed so routine admin does not grow at the same rate as beds.
Why do manual workarounds become costly as a portfolio grows?
A task that takes ten minutes per occupied bed each month uses about 83 hours across 500 beds but more than 833 hours across 5,000 beds. Workarounds that one person absorbs at small scale can become a whole team’s job.
Which metrics should operators track before scaling?
Alongside occupancy and revenue, track administrative cost per occupied bed, building contribution and portfolio margin, plus service measures such as resolution times, repeat complaints and resident retention.
Should operators use AI to automate property management processes?
Only once the process is understood and documented. Resident questions, maintenance triage and invoice processing are good candidates, but tasks like scheduled billing and standard reminders often need only rules-based automation.
Planning your next stage of growth?
See how Software Answers helps coliving and serviced apartment operators scale without adding headcount.