AI’s place in real estate is no longer really in question – the question now is how quickly operators adapt to it. Investment is following the shift, with capital increasingly flowing toward AI-driven infrastructure across the sector. What is unfolding is a fundamental rewiring of how the industry operates, competes, and creates value rather than a passing software trend.
Powerhouse Co-Founder and CCO Bart Meylemans has a front-row view of this shift, and a clear opinion on the sector’s challenges in this space. He tells GSL News why the future of property technology is less about replacing people and more about freeing them to focus on residents, and why he believes real estate’s biggest blind spot is still treating technology as a cost rather than a growth lever.
Technology as a growth lever, not a line item
Bart believes one of the sector’s most persistent blind spots is treating technology purely as an expense. The commercial consequences are clearest in the booking journey. A cumbersome, single-language application process can deter international students before they ever become residents.
“We still see operators with as many as 17 steps in an application procedure, which is horrible,” he says. “You lose conversion, which means you lose revenue and occupancy drops.” Even in undersupplied markets, poor digital journeys can affect which operator captures demand, the quality or timing of applications, staff workload, brand perception, or performance when supply eventually expands.
That friction is not just an internal inefficiency – as AI-driven search and discovery tools increasingly shape how residents find and compare places to live, the operators whose booking and information flows are hardest to navigate risk losing visibility before a prospective resident even reaches the application stage.
The answer is not technology for its own sake. It is about identifying the points where friction is costing the business the most and deliberately using technology to remove it. As Bart puts it: “Which process in your business can technology help to elevate?”
Where AI helps, and where humans still matter: inside Powerhouse’s AI
That principle of automating routine tasks runs through Powerhouse’s approach to access, maintenance and resident communication. Digital access can remove the need for staff to issue or replace physical keys. A tenant app can reduce the burden on tenants by making it easier to report a broken sink, a stuck lift or recurring noise, while ensuring the request reaches a central system rather than disappearing into an inbox.
This is where Powerhouse’s AI actually makes the difference. It is not a chatbot bolted onto the front end of a leasing website. Because Powerhouse is built specifically for real estate, its AI agents sit directly on top of the same records staff already work from: bookings, tickets, payments, and resident communication. Instead of staff searching through those records looking for problems, the system works through them continuously in the background, and only surfaces something to a human when a genuine decision is needed. A missed payment gets traced back to whether a resident actually received the right reminder or reference before anyone has to chase it manually. The AI agents can also answer routine questions around the clock – such as where to find a Wi-Fi code – and escalate urgent issues to staff. Bart sees even greater potential in their ability to connect incidents over time.
“If it’s the seventh time on a certain floor that there’s a water leak, the agent will know that and alert staff”, he says. Rotating teams may not recognise the pattern, but a continuously monitoring system can flag that a different intervention is needed.
Positioning Powerhouse as an AI-native platform in a sector built on physical space and human relationships raises an obvious question: where does AI genuinely add operational value, and where can’t it replace a person? In Bart’s view, having someone physically on site is always going to be important. A small five-room co-living building may not need a receptionist, but a 300-plus-room PBSA building does, or at least needs someone reasonably reachable. The bigger shift Bart describes is in how roles might change: staff spend less time hunting for the problem and more time acting on it once the system has already flagged it.
“We’re not there yet,” he cautions. “Real estate is a conservative, quite traditional sector, and it’s not an AI-first sector,” though he sees tech-savvy operators adopting the model faster than the rest.
The drivers creating a sense of urgency around the shift, he argues, are macroeconomic as much as technological. The financing and development advantages that used to cushion operators- cheap debt, low-cost local development- have both largely disappeared as interest rates and construction costs have risen, pushing the industry’s attention onto operations. However, technology has limits here too: it cannot manufacture value that isn’t there. The economics of the underlying asset still have to hold.
The case for an open tech ecosystem
Bart expects more consolidation as operators grow across asset classes and geographies, but he does not believe the future lies in one platform performing every function. He points to hospitality, which he describes as five to 10 years ahead of student housing partly because it has developed a more open technology ecosystem, where different systems can connect and share information.
“I don’t think one system will do it all in the future,” he says. “We need the ecosystem to open up and integrate with different tools so you can deliver that end-to-end experience.”
For Bart, however, the challenge is not only technological. Operators are also under growing pressure to achieve sufficient scale to make buildings economically viable. At a recent senior-living conference, he heard that developments with fewer than 100 beds may no longer be feasible under current financing and construction conditions – whereas smaller schemes could still work five or 10 years ago.
The example comes from senior living, but Bart believes the underlying pressure applies across shared living. Scale is increasingly important, but it cannot be pursued in isolation: operators still need the right combination of service, product and brand to grow successfully. “It’s not easy,” he says.
Changing an old-guard mindset
When asked what belief he most wants to dismantle in the real estate sector, Bart doesn’t hesitate – the idea that technology is an expense rather than a strategic amplifier. He describes hearing that view repeatedly in conversations with investors and operators, a belief he sees as deeply embedded, and one he thinks will leave those who hold onto it behind. “We really want to change that mindset, because if they do not embrace it, they will lose in the end.”
Bart says that trying to change this mindset plays a big role in how Powerhouse works with its customers. Powerhouse wants to be seen as helping operators grow their business, not as another cost centre competing for budget. “We always look at it from an operator-first perspective, not a tech-first perspective. We do not want to push our tech into a business that doesn’t believe in it. We want to look at their processes, their strategy, their business plan, and really help them.”
Freeing staff to focus on people
For Bart, the most important outcome is ultimately about people. Traditional property management systems act mainly as systems of record – staff search lists of buildings, rooms, residents and transactions, then solve problems one by one. In the agentic model Powerhouse is pursuing, software works through those records continuously and seeks human involvement only when genuinely needed.
Bart illustrates the point with an intentionally mundane example: the coffee machine in a large office building that is repeatedly out of beans. It is rarely serious enough for anyone to report, but it still chips away at the daily experience of building occupants. Catch and act on enough of these small frustrations, he argues, and the cumulative effect can be significant – particularly when staff are also freed from routine administration to spend more time with residents.
“If you can move away all the boring stuff – tickets, payments, applications to follow up on – staff have time to be present in the building and interact with students,” he says. “That’s the goal.”
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About Powerhouse: Powerhouse is an AI-native property management system and operating platform for real estate operators, built natively on Salesforce. Founded in 2022, it runs bookings, payments and tenant operations end-to-end for operators across student housing, co-living, senior living, build-to-rent and serviced apartments, and is live in nine countries. For more information about Powerhouse, visit usepowerhouse.io.
