For housing: for purpose-built student accommodation

From freshers' week to final exams: automated support for every student touchpoint.

Students want repairs sorted fast, and manage their own living space, with minimal contact with the office. askporter Housing gives students a way to self-serve the routine, gives your team one system of record for the rest, and gives you the proof of scale to back the renewal conversation.

Book a demo

See askporter Housing

Your accommodation reality

Self-serve for students. Full visibility for the operator.

What operators ask for is consistent: an automated system that lets students raise their own tasks and manage their own living space, without a call to the office for something routine. What actually happens is different. Students don't always know how to use their boiler, or where an asset is located in a property they've lived in for six weeks, so the call comes anyway, usually to reception or the out-of-hours line, and someone still has to work out where the fault actually is.

The system underneath it is often an in-house tool, or a small, capable-looking system that becomes unwieldy the moment it's run at real capacity: a few hundred beds at move-in, a maintenance backlog at the end of exam season, a fire door inspection across every block at once. Operators want to be forward thinking, with minimal touch points, for a population that wants to feel free but also puts higher than normal footfall and usage on every component in the building. The platform has to manage both at once: independence for the student, and oversight for the operator.

97%

successful automatic diagnostic and supplier allocation on repairs triage, measured at Legal & General Affordable Homes.

4.7

resident satisfaction (CSAT) score, from the same L&G deployment. The same triage engine runs across every askporter Housing customer.

500,000+

assets under management across askporter, from single buildings to 200,000-home providers, on the same operating layer.

Sources: L&G Affordable Homes deployment data · askporter platform data.

What askporter delivers

Four outcomes for a PBSA operator

SELF-SERVICE

Let students raise and track their own issue

A student reports a fault the way they'd send a message, on WhatsApp, email or web, any hour, and gets a status update without calling reception to ask. Routine questions resolve themselves; only the exceptions reach your team.

LOCATION INTELLIGENCE

Stop the "which building, which flat" call

Every report is linked automatically to the right building, flat and asset, with guided questions for the issue type. A boiler reset or a stopcock location can be resolved by self-help before a job is even raised.

DURABILITY

Handle higher footfall without adding staff

Move-in weeks, exam-season backlogs and end-of-year turnaround all route through the same triage and SLA engine, so a spike in reports doesn't mean a spike in headcount.

PROOF

Show the scale and the time saved

Diagnostic accuracy, satisfaction scores and platform-wide volume give you the numbers for the renewal or budget conversation, without waiting for a PBSA-specific case study to exist first.

One platform, one trusted view

Built for everyone accountable for the halls

A facilities manager reviewing a task schedule on a laptop while a maintenance worker completes a job on-site, illustrating how askporter connects office-based task management with field operations.

Residents

Students

Want to raise their own issue and manage their own living space, on their own channel, without a trip to reception or a form to fill in.

Front of house

Building Managers & Concierges

Front of house, day to day. Needs every reported issue in one place, whoever raised it and whichever building it's in, without a shift spent relaying messages.

Welfare & support

Student Support / Welfare Officers

Need visibility of welfare-relevant reports and check-ins alongside routine repairs, not a separate system to monitor.

Portfolio oversight

Portfolio / Regional Account Manager

The commercial owner of the accommodation contract. Wants proof of scale and time saved across every site, not a site-by-site spreadsheet.

Simplicity is the goal.

One platform for all your communications and maintenance needs

One platform your building teams already know how to use, from a student's first message to a signed-off repair.

Illustration of a person reporting a ceiling water leak via chat, with askporter raising an urgent task and assigning it with an ETA

Resident Engagement

Students, on their channel, answered in minutes, not a trip to reception.

Students message on WhatsApp, email, web or phone, whichever channel they already use. askporter answers, triages the enquiry and confirms what happens next. Routine questions, bin day, parcel collection, a tenancy date, resolve themselves; only the exceptions reach your team. That's the minimal-touch-point experience students say they want, delivered without your team fielding every message personally.

24/7 Resident Support: any hour, any channel, no app or portal login required.
Tenancy & Property Guidance: routine questions answered instantly, freeing staff for the cases that need a person.
Maintenance Triage & Self-Help: guided self-resolution before a job is even raised.

See Resident Engagement

A facilities manager reviewing the askporter dashboard on a tablet, showing task response and resolution charts, total tasks over time, and a prioritised task list — with the AI assistant panel open alongside for real-time queries.

Smart Repairs

From "my boiler won't work" to a contractor briefed, without the "which building" call.

A student reports a fault from their phone, with a photo if it helps. askporter identifies the building, flat and asset automatically, so nobody has to ask "which block are you in?" Straightforward faults get a guided fix, a boiler reset, a fuse location, before a job is even logged. Everything else is triaged, matched to the right contractor, and dispatched, evidenced from report to close.

Smart Task Raising: reported once, in the student's own words, structured automatically.
Workflow Automation: triage and dispatch without manual re-keying.
Access & Appointment Management: appointments that work around lecture timetables and term dates.
Appointment & Repair Notifications: students told what's happening, not left to chase it.

See Smart Repairs

Proactive Care

Welfare check-ins and compliance outreach, without a separate system to run them from.

Move-in surveys, welfare check-ins and safety campaigns, fire door checks, gas safety reminders, run through the same platform as the reactive repairs. This isn't the entry point for most PBSA operators, but the data already lives in one place when you're ready to use it, so welfare and compliance outreach never need a bolted-on second system.

Welfare & Wellbeing Check-ins: proactive outreach at the points in the year that matter: move-in, exam season, end of term.
Compliance Outreach: safety and access campaigns delivered by building, with a dated record.

See Proactive Care

A facilities manager using askporter to send a proactive maintenance notification, composing a message about a planned lift inspection and selecting which service users and contractors to notify — all from within the task record.

PBSA examples

How it works across a team

Fits around lectures

Fix a problem while a student's at a lecture, or away for the weekend

A student reports a fault before their 9am lecture. askporter triages it, books an appointment for a time they've confirmed they're free, and sends a status update while they're on campus. They come back to a job that's already progressing, or already done, with no call needed either way.

Self-help first

The boiler reset that never becomes a ticket

A student doesn't know how to use their boiler. Instead of a call to reception, self-help guidance walks them through the reset, referenced to the exact model in their flat. If it doesn't resolve, the issue escalates as a job with the asset already identified, no "which building are you in?" needed.

Learning capacity comes first

A WiFi outage, reported and prioritised like any other issue

A student reports patchy WiFi in their block. It's logged, triaged and routed the same way a leak would be, with priority reflecting the impact on study time, not treated as a lesser issue because it isn't a repair in the traditional sense.

High footfall, same system

Move-in week and exam season, without extra headcount

Reports triple in the first week of term and again in the run-up to exams. The same triage and SLA engine absorbs the spike, so the team answering messages in week one is the same team running week twenty, not a temp desk stood up twice a year.

Illustration symbolising business growth and platform scale, alongside askporter's key performance statistics

"We can build this ourselves"

You can. The question is what it costs to keep building it.

It's a fair objection to raise: a student-facing chat interface isn't hard to prototype. What's hard to replicate is the diagnostic accuracy behind it, built on two-plus years of production AI data across real repairs, real compliance documents and real resident conversations, and the ongoing engineering cost of maintaining that in-house once term-time volume hits. An in-house build is a live product your team now owns forever. askporter is a platform that's already handled the peak.

Ready to give students a way to help themselves, and your team a full picture?

Book 30 minutes with us. Bring your current out-of-hours call log, one contractor SLA, and the week you dreaded most last term. We'll show you what self-service and one system of record look like for your buildings, without adding a member of staff.