- A system landlords and agents can build their business on.
- The company marked the launch by bringing together 165 landlords, letting agents, property professionals and industry speakers at an event to explore how AI is transforming property management.
One of the UK’s leading shared living property management software, COHO has ‘opened up’ its operating system with the launch of COHO Atrium, enabling landlords and letting agents to connect, build and shape their property management technology around the way their business works.
The company marked the launch at an event at the University of Warwick on 3 November, bringing together 165 landlords, letting agents, property professionals and industry speakers to explore how AI is transforming property management.
With Atrium, businesses can bring more of their day-to-day operations into one place, while having the freedom and flexibility to innovate and add tools that meet their specific needs. Users can connect the AI tools they already use, such as Claude and ChatGPT to their live COHO data, switch on ready-made apps from the Atrium Store, or build their own private apps with no developer or technical skills needed. Everything is hosted within COHO, so there’s no additional system, server or login to set up.
Vann Vogstad, Founder and CEO of COHO, said: “With Atrium, COHO is now the first third-generation property management software. It’s built on £4.5m of investment in the COHO platform as we’ve grown the business over the years. It is the biggest thing we have ever launched and, we believe, the most advanced platform of its kind on the market today for landlords and agents to build their business on.
“For years, if software didn’t quite do something the way a business needed it to, the answer was often another subscription, another spreadsheet or asking the provider to build a new feature. This left information and processes spread across different places. With COHO, customers can now manage more of their business from one place while tailoring the system to their specific needs.”
The launch comes as landlords and letting agents adapt to significant regulatory changes in the last 12 months under the Renters’ Rights Act from the need to register each property annually, to the requirement to switch all tenancy agreements to rolling contracts. When the law changes, COHO will also update for every customer.
Vogstad continues: “No two property businesses work in exactly the same way, but traditionally software has required businesses to fit around the system rather than the other way around. That increasingly doesn’t reflect how landlords and agents actually operate.
“What we wanted to do with Atrium was turn that around. The landlord or agent knows the way their business needs to work better than we ever will. They shouldn’t need to be a developer to shape the technology around it.”
For example, a larger HMO operator could build a tool for a task its team carries out every week, such as preparing rooms between tenancies, a landlord could pull up a financial report in seconds without a spreadsheet, while an agent could create an app to track and flag when properties need to be registered.
One letting agent, Tom Holliday from TWH Homes in North Yorkshire, has been using Atrium to turn three months of activity recorded in COHO into a ready-to-use landlord report.
Using Claude, it pulled together everything from maintenance and compliance to rent collection and tenant communications.
Holliday said: “It saved me having to go through everything manually. In minutes, I had a clear report showing the landlord everything we’d been doing behind the scenes to manage their property.”
Vogstad continued: “One aspect we considered when building Atrium was how easily landlords and letting agents, like Tom, could tailor the system to suit their particular business needs, without having to rebuild all the fundamentals underneath it.”
COHO handles the essentials, from tenancies and maintenance to compliance, while Atrium lets businesses build around them. Connected AI tools work from the same live property data, keeping everything connected in one place.
“We look after the things that have to be right every time, while landlords and agents can build the things that make their business different. The point of Atrium is to give them both in one place”, added Vogstad.
Every COHO customer can connect their AI tools through Atrium for free, with a monthly usage allowance included. Businesses can then choose to add access to apps from the Atrium App Store, or build and host private apps for their own use.
