Colony Living Cuts Tenant Onboarding Time by 60%

Colony Living is a Swansea-based real estate agency specializing in Houses in Multiple Occupation (HMO) property management, primarily for student accommodation. What began with its own portfolio grew into a service for landlords who needed consistent, high-quality property operations.

Colony Living cuts tenant onboarding time by 60% with Process Street, turning a fragmented housemate onboarding process into a controlled workflow. The team reduced each application from about five days to two while improving compliance checks, accountability, and visibility across a distributed team.

The challenge: Distributed work made compliance harder

Before Process Street, Colony Living coordinated remote virtual assistants and on-site staff through WhatsApp, Asana, Google Calendar, and several spreadsheets. At the time of the interview, the company operated with a lean team of six. Each housemate application required roughly five days of manual work, with details and decisions spread across separate systems.

Housemate onboarding was especially demanding because every application combined repetitive administration with referencing, contracts, landlord charges, deposits, guarantor details, and property-readiness checks. Arthur Online, the team’s property management CRM, was too complex for the way Colony Living wanted to work and did not provide enough flexibility for its particular process.

The fragmentation created real compliance risk. The team reported that critical documents and deposit-registration deadlines could be missed, and there was no dependable way to require more than one person to verify essential steps before work continued.

The solution: One command center for property operations

Colony Living implemented Process Street in December 2023. Rhelvin Cenidoza, Maintenance & Operations specialist, led the workflow architecture with help from Process Street customer success team member Guillermo. The goal was to capture what Morgan calls “how we do things in Colony Living” instead of accepting a generic process imposed by property software.

The flagship housemate onboarding workflow coordinates the journey from application to move-in. Automated triggers, conditional paths, and task assignments route work to the right team member and make the application’s current state visible without chasing updates across channels.

• Controlled compliance checkpoints: Stop tasks prevent work from moving forward until required evidence is verified. For example, administrators cannot issue a contract until the maintenance team confirms the property is ready.
• Automated rent calculations: The team uses the AI Math Operator within AI Tasks to calculate pro-rata rent from tenancy and payment details.
• Connected financial records: A Google Sheets integration lets staff update financial tracking from the workflow while reflecting changes in folders landlords can access.
• System connections: Zapier carries information between Process Street and the team’s existing tools.
• Governed reference material: Complaint procedures and other SOPs live in the Docs capability area, where the team can find controlled guidance alongside operational workflows.

Morgan says that flexibility lets the team keep the touchpoints that matter. Landlords receive automatically triggered emails when an application arrives and again after referencing, while employees follow the process that Colony Living has tested in practice.

The results: Five days became two

Colony Living reduced housemate onboarding from five days to two days per application. Manual pro-rata calculations were removed, recurring document and communication steps were automated, and every critical compliance action gained a clearer owner and verification path.

During peak seasons, the system supports consistent execution across 90 to 100 onboarding processes. Automated assignments reduce noise for the distributed team, while a bird’s-eye view lets Morgan see the status of an application without micromanaging individual handoffs. At the time of the interview, Colony Living was managing 98 active workflows across the business.

The operational effect extends beyond speed. Multi-person verification strengthens quality, automated triggers address the missed deposit deadlines the team had experienced, and a shared workflow makes the business easier to scale from an internal property portfolio to external client management.

When Morgan shares the workflow with other property investors, he reports: “They just can’t believe it. That should tell you everything you need to know.”

Building a scalable property management operation

The implementation required deliberate setup. Morgan’s advice is: “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 improved the company’s ability to grow without multiplying administrative work. Morgan says: “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.”

Process Street is a single Compliance Operations Platform with Docs and Ops capability areas plus built-in AI. For property teams, that means procedures, controls, task ownership, evidence, approvals, and execution can stay connected in one product. The same approach supports a broader property management system for small landlords when repeatable tenant work needs more structure.