Chester Automates Leases and Tenant Communication with Powerhouse

Get the operation right from the beginning

Before Powerhouse, the foundational challenge at Chester was data. Not a lack of it, but the absence of any real structure around it. Information lived in personal drives, in shared folders, scattered across colleagues without a shared system holding it together.

“Piet Van Poppel: Speed was the other side of the same problem. In co-living, your relationship with tenants moves fast. Questions come in, situations change and community needs attention. When your data is fragmented and your processes are manual, that speed works against you. I wanted to build an operation that could respond quickly and communicate clearly, both with individual tenants and across houses. That was not possible without the right foundation”.

Chester chose Powerhouse early, while the business was still taking shape. That timing was deliberate. “I did not want to build habits around manual processes and then try to automate them later. The goal was to get the operation right from the beginning, with a system that could carry the business forward as it grew.

"Now with Powerhouse, we have a place where we can store everything. A lot of that is being automated. And it is a very easy interface for our clients. Very helpful." Piet Van Poppel - Chester

The tenant communication side was just as important. Through the Powerhouse app, Chester can reach tenants individually, by house, or across the entire portfolio. For a co-living operator, that distinction matters. Community does not happen automatically. It has to be built, maintained, and sometimes nudged. Having a single platform that makes that communication easy, without creating extra work, is something Piet sees as central to what Chester is trying to be.

“On the operational side, the shift from manual to automated was immediate and concrete. Leases that used to be signed with red ink are now processed digitally. The back-and-forth that used to slow everything down is gone. Processes that required manual handling now run on their own.”

The power of automation: less operational, more strategic.

Piet is clear about what automation has done to his day. Not just to the business, but to what he actually spends his time on. The operational tasks that used to demand his attention are handled. That freed up something more valuable than hours: it freed up focus.

"Since we started using Powerhouse, efficiency has gone up quite fast. The processes are very clear. Before Powerhouse we were still signing leases with red ink. Now it goes through the automated process, digital signature. And that helps me to concentrate on the way forward. Strategy, new acquisitions, raising capital. Less operational, more strategic." Piet Van Poppel - Chester

For a founder building a co-living business in a market that is only going to get more competitive, that shift is not a small quality-of-life improvement. It is the difference between running the operation and building the company. “I can do both now, because the system handles what the system should handle.”

He sees the same logic playing out across the real estate industry, whether operators are ready for it or not. “Belgium is a conservative market. Real estate is a conservative sector. But the wave has already started. The question is not whether AI will reshape how property is operated. It is who moves early enough to benefit from it.”

"Every real estate investor who is not using AI at the moment is too late. The wave has started. The winners of tomorrow are those who implement AI in the best way and the fastest way." Piet Van Poppel - Chester

Chester is building on that belief. A co-living platform designed from the start to scale, to communicate, and to operate without the operational drag that slows most property businesses down. Powerhouse is the foundation they chose to build on.

About Powerhouse

Powerhouse is Europe's first agentic PMS for shared living operators. It automates the full tenant journey, from room selection to deposit settlement, enabling operators to deliver consistent, premium resident experiences across student housing, co-living, and senior living at scale. Do you want to know more about what powerhouse can do for you? Book a demo here.