How Diggit scaled to 3,000 units and built its operation on Powerhouse

Hundreds of tickets every week

Diggit started the way most property management businesses start: with whatever tools were available. Word documents turned into PDFs, PDFs became contracts, contracts went into Excel. For a while, that worked. But at some point it was impossible to manage and trust the data in Excel. Move-ins, move-outs, different contracts, different situations, different owners, all of it landing in the same spreadsheet. By the time you are managing thousands of students and their payments, it is not a system anymore. It is a liability.

“Tickets were the other pressure point. At scale, the volume of incoming requests becomes its own operational challenge. Without a system designed to handle them, tickets pile up, get lost, or take too long to resolve. Students notice. Owners notice. And the team spends its time reacting instead of managing.”

"Before Powerhouse we were using every tool possible. Word documents, PDFs, Excel. But once you have move-ins and move-outs, it’s not manageable anymore. You end up with long, long spreadsheets and that is not manageable anymore." Jelle - Co-founder & COO, Diggit

Diggit's relationship with Powerhouse started with a specific problem: pooling. Managing a building with a pooling system, where multiple owners share costs and revenues across a shared structure, is one of the more complex financial arrangements in property management. Getting that into a CRM in a way that actually worked was something nobody had figured out.

Jelle reached out to Floris, one of Powerhouse’s founders, who was building what would become Powerhouse. Together they worked through the pooling logic and got it running. That collaboration was the beginning of a longer relationship, and the reason Diggit became Powerhouse's first student housing customer.

Today, Diggit runs its entire payment operation through Powerhouse. Around a thousand students receive payment requests through the platform. When a payment comes in, it connects to the bank account and a matching engine links the payment to the right student automatically. Outgoing payments to owners follow the same logic, with fees deducted and the remainder paid out, including the complex pooling distributions that started the whole relationship.

"Once you put the XML file into the software, it links the student to a payment and it is done. For the owners it is the same. It just deducts our fee and pays the rest. What used to be the hardest part of managing a building is now handled automatically." Jelle - Co-founder & COO, Diggit

More free time to build the portfolio

Jelle is honest about what happens when you free up time with better software. “ I find more to do now. My entrepreneurial mindset does not switch off because the operational load gets lighter. It starts looking for the next problem to solve. The time that used to go on administration and chasing payments now goes on strategy, on new models, on thinking about where the business should go next. And for the team working in the buildings, the shift is just as real. Fewer tickets means less frustration, for staff and for students.”

On payments, the change has been straightforward. If a student does not pay, they get an automatic follow-up. Twice. Without anyone having to chase it manually. For the owners, it is transparent and fast. For the team, it is one less thing to worry about.

"Now that the payments go through Powerhouse, it is actually relaxing. If somebody is not paying, they get an automatic reminder. You can follow up faster, scale faster. For the owners it is easier and it is more transparent." Jelle · Co-founder & COO - Diggit

In the future, Jelle sees AI playing a bigger role in student housing than it does today. Not just in property management software, but in the buildings themselves. Smarter buildings that track how students use shared spaces, anticipate maintenance needs, reduce the number of issues that turn into tickets in the first place. Fewer tickets, he says simply, means everybody is happy.

“If someone tells me they are not using AI, I say just quit. If you want to grow and be a name in student housing or property management, and you want to keep it manual, you will get kicked out by every company that is using AI and software. Just quit.”

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.