Colony Living is a specialized real estate agency based in Swansea that manages Houses in Multiple Occupation (HMO) properties. What began as managing their own portfolio evolved into filling a market gap for high-quality HMO property management, primarily serving the student accommodation sector with a lean team of six.
The Challenge: Chaos in Compliance and Communication Across a Distributed Team
Before Process Street, Colony Living faced the classic scaling problem: its processes couldn’t keep pace with its growth ambitions. With team members working remotely as virtual assistants and others operating on the ground, communication became fragmented across multiple platforms, WhatsApp, Asana, Google Calendar, and various spreadsheets.
The housemate onboarding process exemplified these challenges. Morgan Roberts, Co-founder of Colony Living, explains: “Housemate onboarding is a really complex and repetitive process, and there are a lot of compliance elements that come with that, the referencing, issuing the contracts, the charges that we need to facilitate for the landlords, etc.”
Each application required approximately five days of manual work across multiple team members, with information scattered across disparate systems. The existing property management CRM, Arthur Online, proved overly complicated for their specific needs and lacked the flexibility to support their unique workflows.
Compliance (the lifeblood of any letting agency) was particularly vulnerable. Critical documents could be missed, deposit registration deadlines could slip, and there was no systematic way to ensure multiple team members verified essential steps.
What did things look like before Process Street?
“It was multiple spreadsheets, communication in all different channels, WhatsApp, Asana, Google Calendar. Everything was just all over the place.”
Colony Living
The Solution: Building a Command Center for Property Operations
Colony Living implemented Process Street in December 2023, assigning Rhelvin Cenidoza, their Maintenance & Operations specialist, to architect comprehensive workflows with support from Process Street’s customer success team member, Guillermo.
The transformation centered on creating what Morgan calls “how we do things in Colony Living”; fully customized workflows that weren’t dictated by generic property management software limitations. Their flagship housemate onboarding workflow now orchestrates every step from initial application through move-in, with automated triggers, conditional logic, and intelligent task assignments ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.
Key implementations included:
Automated Compliance Checkpoints: Stop tasks prevent team members from proceeding until critical compliance steps are verified by multiple people. For example, admin assistants cannot issue contracts until maintenance confirms property readiness.
AI-Powered Calculations: Rhelvin explains their innovative use of AI Task Math function:
How are you utilising AI Tasks in your workflows?
“We use it as a rent calculator, especially for working out pro-rata amounts. It helps us calculate rent accurately during onboarding, which we then pass on to the new tenant. The computation is based on several different factors: tenant type, tenancy details, contract, deposits, guarantor, holding fee, and whether the term is standard or pro-rata, which is why it can sometimes be confusing if we do it manually. It’s really helpful because we no longer need to work everything out by hand.”
Colony Living
Integrated Documentation: Google Sheets integration allows team members to edit financial tracking documents directly within workflows, with changes automatically reflected in shared folders that landlords can access.
Zapier Connections: The team connected Process Street with their existing tech stack, creating seamless data flow between systems.
Centralized SOPs: Process Street Pages house complaint procedures and other reference documentation that doesn’t require workflow automation but needs to be easily accessible.
Morgan emphasizes the value of this customization: “You’re not dictated by how Arthur Online will deem a tenant onboarding process to go, whereas actually, we’ve looked at what works, looked at what doesn’t work, what nice touchpoints do we want to put in. We want to keep the landlords updated with communication via email, automatically triggered emails, once we’ve received an application, once that application is passed through referencing.”
The Results: Turning Fragmented Processes Into Scalable Growth
Process Street transformed Colony Living from a struggling startup into a systematized, scalable operation ready for growth. The impact has been measurable across multiple dimensions:
Time Savings
- Reduced housemate onboarding from 5 days to 2 days per application
- Eliminated manual pro-rata rent calculations that were error-prone and time-consuming
- Automated repetitive document generation and communication touchpoints
Compliance & Quality
- Implemented multi-person verification for all critical compliance steps
- Eliminated missed deposit registration deadlines through automated triggers
- Ensured consistent execution across 90-100 onboarding processes during peak seasons
Team Efficiency
- Reduced noise and confusion for distributed team members
- Created clear accountability with automated task assignments
- Enabled bird’s-eye view management oversight without micromanaging
Business Viability
- Built a foundation for scaling from internal portfolio to external client management
- Currently managing 98 active workflows across the business
- Created job security through improved business operations
How has Process Street helped your business?
“It has absolutely game-changed our business, because everything… if it’s not automated, it’s triggered then for the right team member to do, so it automatically gives that accountability and that delegated work tasks. From me, to take a bird’s eye view of where we’re at with a certain housemate onboarding application, for example, it just gives me that instant access to it. It is fundamental, really, in us being able to scale up.”
Colony Living
The impact extends beyond metrics. When Morgan shares their workflow with other property investors, he reports: “They just can’t believe it. That should tell you everything you need to know.”
From Property Management Dream to Reality Through Systematic Execution
Building a Scalable Property Management Business Without Drowning in Admin
Colony Living’s journey illustrates a fundamental truth: growth without systems creates chaos, but the right systems create opportunity. By investing time upfront to build comprehensive workflows in Process Street, they transformed their most critical process—housemate onboarding—from a five-day administrative burden into a two-day streamlined operation that actually improves compliance and quality.
Morgan’s advice to others considering Process Street captures the essence of their experience: “My honest advice would be, absolutely go for it, but spend the time understanding… don’t underestimate the time it will take to get it set up and implement. But once that is done, it’s like a stitch in time saves nine, so actually put the time and effort in initially, and then that’ll pay you over dividends over and over again.”
For Colony Living, that investment has proven invaluable: “Essentially, what it’s doing is making the business in a much, much stronger position, much more viable, allowing us to scale up. It’s like creating job security, then, for the people in the team around us, because the business is just generally more viable.”
What began as Rhelvin’s recommendation and “only like a dream” has become the operational backbone enabling Colony Living to deliver exceptional HMO property management at scale—proving that in property management, as in real estate itself, location matters less than having the right foundation.
Scale your portfolio, not your admin workload.
Scale your property operations with confidence using Process Street.
Note: Our solution is powered by AWS and uses these AWS services: Amazon Bedrock, Lambda, SQS, API Gateway, S3, CloudFront, Elastic Beanstalk, WAF, ELB, RDS Multi-AZ, EC2 and ElastiCache for Redis.
The post Colony Living Transformed Tenant Onboarding Process and Increased Efficiency by 75% with Process Street first appeared on Process Street | Compliance Operations Platform.
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