Overview
Floris Lauwerier is co-founder and CEO of Powerhouse PMS, a Ghent-based proptech startup building a modern property management system for real estate operators.
Floris Lauwerier is the co-founder and CEO of Powerhouse PMS, a role he has held since September 2023. He is based in Ghent. Since July 2022 he has also been the owner of Digishift, where he works as a Salesforce consultant.
Before that, Lauwerier spent from September 2017 to July 2022 at Cloud Innovation as a Salesforce project manager, and from September 2015 to September 2017 at ABSI as a Salesforce consultant. He worked in automotive product management at Gates Corporation between October 2013 and September 2015, and began his career at Calidat s.a./n.v., where he was a junior CRM manager from December 2011 to September 2013.
He studied applied economics with a focus on marketing at Ghent University, and completed a master's degree in international marketing at the Athens University of Economics and Business in 2011.
Career history
In the news
- Over the last months we tracked close to 200 market moves across the living sector. Acquisitions, openings, operator mandates, funding rounds and new schemes, across student housing, co-living, serviced apartments, build-to-rent and senior living. Reading them back, four patterns stood out to me: 1. Operators are consolidating. Scale seems to be turning from an ambition into a requirement. 2. The owner changes, the operator often stays. In quite a few deals the building was sold and the same operator kept running it. To me that
- You can buy a £50,000 car online and pick it up at the garage the next day. Signing a one-year lease on a flat still takes weeks. A leasing lead at a large build-to-rent landlord put it to me this week: "If you can go and buy a £50,000 car online and complete that process and then turn up at the garage the next day and pick up the car... that's the same as renting a flat for a year. So why is it taking us 3, 5, 10 days?" The tenant is rarely the reason. The wait sits in the gaps between steps: an ID someone still has to check, a
- Every time I talk about AI with operators, the same question comes up within five minutes: who loses their job? Here is what I see at our customers. Nobody got let go. What disappeared was the work nobody wanted to do: matching bank lines one by one, answering the same wifi question two hundred times in September, copying data from one system into the next. And these are not rules. A matching rule needs the exact reference; the Payment Matching Colleague also links the parent who pays for a student. A rules filter rejects whatever
- Before Powerhouse, I ran a coliving brand myself. Too much of my week went to routine work: chasing signatures, checking payments and tracking resident requests. That experience is where Powerhouse started. With Workspace now live at our customers, it feels like we are closer than ever to what we set out to build: a system where the team focuses on what needs their judgement, and agents handle the follow-through. The most rewarding part is seeing our first operators use it every day. They helped shape it by testing, challenging
- The Coliving Conference has quickly become one my favourite events of the year, so I'm especially looking forward to joining this panel, and to the conversation with Miguel, Johnny, Guillermo and Jennifer. In the conversations we have with operators, the question seems to be shifting. It is not only whether AI can be useful in shared living, but what needs to be in place for it to work day to day: clean data, connected systems, and teams who trust what it does. That is the part I hope we can get into on stage, with real examples.
- Who keeps the operation in their head? In most portfolios I speak with, the answer is a handful of people and spreadsheets next to the system. They know which move-ins are at risk, why a payment is still open, and when the usual process calls for an exception. At Powerhouse, we’re bringing that data, history and context together so AI colleagues can take on more of the work across booking, onboarding, payments and support. A resident’s move-in is scheduled for Monday. The contract is signed, but the deposit hasn’t arrived. The
- Operational alpha.” I must have heard that phrase four or five times today at PropTech Connect, both on stage and in conversations around the venue. The idea is simple: returns increasingly depend not only on the asset you own, but on how well you operate it. That puts operations in a very different light. It is no longer just a cost to control. Done well, it is where you can create real value. Two other things felt noticeably different from last year. First, the conversation around AI has become much more practical. Last year, it
- Representing Powerhouse PMS in London next week for PropTech Connect Europe, 9 and 10 September. Looking forward to two days of good conversations. Meeting people in person, catching up with familiar faces, and hearing what's really going on in the industry right now. Especially curious how far AI has actually made it across the industry into the day to day business, beyond the pilots and the panels. If you'll be there, reach out and let's grab a coffee!
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