IKOReno
Renovation site coordination for coliving operators
Client
- IKOAB
- Co-living
- 2017 -2023
Services
- BackEnd Development
- FrontEnd Development
- User management
- Site management and monitoring
- UX/UI design
IKOAB is the leading francophone coliving operator in Belgium. Their model: acquire buildings, fully renovate them, then manage them as coliving spaces for young professionals. Every house that opens involves dozens of trades, tight budgets and deadlines to meet.
Before IKOReno, IKOAB coordinated renovation sites via email and spreadsheets. With dozens of subcontractors to manage in parallel, growth had a ceiling: opening new sites meant proportionally growing the coordination team.
KERN-IT built IKOReno, a purpose-built site management platform connecting IKOAB teams, contractors and property owners. Unlike generic project management tools, IKOReno was designed for the real-world constraints of a property operator: renovation status tracking, contract management by trade, and configurable visibility for each property owner.
Active partnership since 2017. IKOAB has grown from 60 to 600+ rooms across 6+ Belgian cities, without proportionally scaling headcount.
The challenge
IKOAB operates a demanding model: every coliving house goes through a full renovation before welcoming its first residents. That means dozens of sites running in parallel, each involving multiple specialist contractors (heating, electrical, carpentry, facade...), contracts, budgets and deadlines to meet.
Before IKOReno, all of this coordination happened over email, phone calls and spreadsheets. The result: scattered information, budget overruns that were hard to catch early, and a capacity to open new sites limited by the weight of manual coordination. Scaling from 10 houses to 70 required a purpose-built tool.
Sites managed end-to-end
Each renovation site is created in IKOReno with its full details: address, owner, planned start and end dates, estimated budget, utility data (gas, electricity, water). On creation, the platform automatically generates a predefined set of tasks based on the renovation type, so recurring steps are never forgotten.
Site status progresses through three clearly visible phases: before works, in progress, after works. All site documents (plans, client mandates, handover reports) are centralised in the site record. IKOAB teams no longer need to search through their inbox to find a contract or invoice.
Request and contractor tracking
On any renovation site, dozens of work requests accumulate. IKOReno handles all of them with field-level detail: priority (urgent, high, normal, low), assigned contractor or supplier, requested delivery date from IKOAB and estimated date from the service provider, attachments and comment history.
Each subcontractor has a profile in the platform with their specialities, commercial status and intervention history. A configurable visibility feature lets IKOAB choose, task by task, what the property owner can see. Owners follow progress without accessing internal contract details.
Financial transparency per site
IKOReno tracks the financial side of every site without needing a separate accounting tool. Contracts are organised by trade category (heating, electrical, masonry, roofing, facade...) and follow a clear status cycle: new, sent, signed, in progress, completed.
For each contract, the platform tracks deposit vs balance separately and systematically compares estimated to actual billed amounts. A change log keeps a full history of every modification. At any point, IKOAB teams know whether a site is within budget or whether an alert is needed.
By the numbers
- 60 to 600+ rooms: x10 growth since IKOReno was deployed
- 70+ coliving houses across 6+ Belgian cities
- 500+ active residents
- Multiple sites managed simultaneously without proportional headcount growth
- KERN-IT partnership since 2017
