The challenge
At around 100 properties, the business had reached the point where manual coordination was no longer sustainable. Enquiries from potential hosts were sitting unanswered for three or more days because follow-up ownership was unclear. Maintenance requests arrived simultaneously via WhatsApp, email, and phone, going to different team members with nothing tracked centrally, issues were being missed and hosts were chasing for updates. Tenant information was being manually copied between Gmail, a Google Sheet, and an invoicing tool, consuming hours every week. Leads that didn't convert immediately were forgotten entirely, with no follow-up workflow in place. The owner understood the business was losing time and likely revenue, but wasn't sure which tools made sense or how to connect them. They needed someone who could both diagnose the operation and build the solution, not hand over a slide deck.Approach
Having built and run operations at Hostmaker across Lisbon and Barcelona, I recognised the pattern immediately. These are the exact failure modes that emerge when a property management operation scales past what informal coordination can hold together. I started with a two-week discovery phase: mapping how enquiries, maintenance requests, and host communication actually moved through the business day-to-day, where handoffs broke, and what the team's real bottlenecks were. From there I designed an AI automation and workflow automation layer on top of HubSpot CRM, using Zapier to connect the existing tool stack and deploying agentic workflows to handle the repetitive, time-consuming tasks the team had been doing by hand. The goal was to make the system do the coordination work, so the team could focus on the parts of the job that actually required human judgment. An AI agent was deployed on the website to handle inbound FAQs, qualify leads before human contact, and surface the right information without anyone having to intervene.Key deliverables
Results
Skills applied