How Quares runs a portfolio that actually scales

Every peak season brought a wave of tickets that buried the team

Herman, partner at Quares, has spent 35 years in real estate and has watched the industry evolve slowly. Too slowly for his liking. At Quares the vision has always been to deliver quality housing at scale while keeping operations cost-efficient. For a long time, those two goals pulled against each other. You either grew and hired, or you stayed lean and stayed small. There was no third option.

Louis, property manager at the Quares student residence in Liège, knew exactly what that looked like in practice. The building they had taken over from the university ran on processes dating back to 1967. Every contract was drafted manually. Every situation was different. Every peak season brought a wave of tickets that buried the team before they could catch up.

“At some point, there were more errors than things that went well. We constantly had to eliminate errors. It was so difficult to do it all manually. Drafting contracts, managing different situations. It was all prone to make mistakes.” Louis Demeestere - Property Manager, Quares

The hospitality manager at Quares was supposed to focus on people. Welcoming students, building a sense of community, making the residence feel like somewhere worth living. But she was buried in paperwork. Tickets piled up faster than she could process them. Louis would step in to help clear the backlog, and still it kept growing.

Every day Herman saw the operational cost and inefficiency this brought. A team spending most of its energy just keeping things from falling apart. Data that nobody fully trusted. Reports that required checking, double-checking, and checking again before they could go anywhere near a shareholder. This was not the kind of operation you could build a growing portfolio on.

The full tenant journey moved from manual to automated.

“In my career, I have seen property software come and go. Most of it digitised the same old processes without really changing them. When we evaluated Powerhouse, it felt different. Not just because of what it could do, but because of the direction it was moving in. Agile. Fast to respond. Built around the needs of operators, not the other way around.”

"With Powerhouse, we immediately had the feeling that this is the way forward on AI-driven operations. Very agile, very quick in response, and built for us and our clients." Herman Du Bois- Partner, Quares

For Louis, the shift was immediate and concrete. With Powerhouse, the full tenant journey moved from manual to automated. Bookings, contracts, onboarding, maintenance tickets, payments. All of it now flowing through one system, handled digitally, without someone having to chase it. The tickets that used to pile up were now routed and resolved before they became a problem. The data Louis needed for reporting was simply there, correct, ready to use.

“I see our PMS not as a tool added to an existing operation, but as the foundation you build around. When the operational layer is solid, growth stops being a cost equation and starts being a straightforward decision. You take on more units, you serve more residents, and the team you already have is capable of handling it.”

Same team. Cleaner data. A hospitality manager who finally does hospitality.

If you ask Louis what changed since introducing Powerhouse at Quares, he immediately talks about the hospitality manager. She walks the building now. She sits with students, checks in on how they are settling in, organises events, she does the job she was actually hired to do. That shift did not happen because Quares hired more people or changed their approach to service. It happened because the work that was keeping her at her desk simply stopped being her problem.

“"It’s a totally different job. She’s coming to work with a smile every day because she doesn’t have the workload she had before. From a desk job to moving through the building, speaking to students. The real hospitality came forward." Louis - Property Manager, Quares

For Louis, the change is just as real. “With Powerhouse, I now know the data is correct. I don’t have to verify it three times before I trust it. When shareholder reporting comes around, I run one fact-check and send it. That is not a small thing when you are managing a complex portfolio with different contract types and a lot of moving parts.”

Herman is clear about what this means for the industry as a whole. “The operators who will still be standing in a few years are the ones who figured this out early. Not by cutting corners, not by replacing people with machines, but by removing the operational drag that was preventing their teams from doing anything meaningful in the first place.”

I"If you don’t use AI, you are dead in three years. The operators who leverage AI for their operations are the ones who will be able to scale without a payroll explosion and still deliver quality." Herman - Partner, Quares

At Quares, that future is already here. The team is the same size. The operation runs cleaner. The data is reliable. And the people who work there are spending their time on the things that actually matter to residents. That is what Powerhouse makes possible.

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.