Student accommodation software for residences and colegios mayores in Spain: criteria and alternatives (2026)

The short answer

No single product does everything, and a well-run residence usually combines two or three. The useful question is not which one wins, but which part of the building you want to solve first.

First: what type of tool you are looking for

The five families in the table do not compete with one another: they are combined. A PBSA operator with several buildings will almost certainly have a property management system, and on top of it can add an app, a maintenance tool or a customer-service layer. A small colegio mayor (a Spanish hall of residence with a formative programme) can start with customer service and keep its spreadsheet for places. What turns out expensive is buying one and expecting it to do the job of another.

• The property management system is the record: who occupies each room, on what contract and what they have paid. Changing it is a long project, because it touches invoicing.
• The resident app or portal works if the resident installs it and opens it, and with residents who change every academic year that has to be asked for again every September.
• The admissions CRM covers the stretch before arrival and often comes inside the property management system.
• Maintenance, or a CMMS, is used mostly by the technical team, not by the resident.
• AI customer service on WhatsApp sits in front of all of the above: it is the door through which the day-to-day comes in, on the channel residents and families already use.

The criteria for choosing the communication part, with their weights, are in the guide on how to choose communication software. They are not repeated here: the point is knowing what is on the market and what type each thing is.

The alternatives, one by one

Seven products that exist and that come up when a Spanish residence or a European operator looks for software. For each one we say only what its own website says, as read on 19 October 2026; what its website does not say, we do not claim here. We do not link to any of them.

StarRez

Its website presents it as "The Unified Platform for Thriving Student Communities": a housing management platform for universities, colleges and purpose-built student accommodation. It lists automated billing, room inspections from a mobile device, front desk and parcel management, conferences and events, and a self-service portal for the resident. It says it serves anything from a single property to a global portfolio.

Who it fits: universities and operators that need a complete property management system, with room allocation and several buildings.

Kinetic Software (Kx)

Kinetic describes itself as a partner for universities, PBSA managers and event professionals; several of its products carry the Kx prefix. Its PBSA page describes room allocations and room moves, contracts with digital signatures, payments, a mobile app and a portal from which the student reports repairs and talks to the team, and a record of wellbeing cases.

Who it fits: universities and PBSA operators that want property management, a resident app and wellbeing cases from a single provider. The customers its website names are UK universities.

Yardi (Student Accommodation)

Yardi's UK page for student accommodation brings several products together: Voyager Student Accommodation, "designed specifically for student accommodation portfolios"; RentCafe Student IQ, for leasing and operations built around the academic year; RentCafe CRM IQ, a CRM for the resident lifecycle; Maintenance IQ, for reactive and planned maintenance; and a student app carrying the operator's brand. Its main message is about operational efficiency and what investors expect.

Who it fits: PBSA operators with a portfolio of buildings and investors to report to, who want accounting, bookings and maintenance on one platform.

Plentific

Plentific presents itself as a property operations platform. Its student housing page talks about repairs, the summer turnaround, compliance and oversight of contractors. The student reports the repair and follows its status from their phone, operatives complete jobs from theirs, and it says it works alongside the systems the operator already has.

Who it fits: operators with a high volume of repairs and outside contractors, who need a proper CMMS. Its student housing page focuses on maintenance.

GCM

GCM (Gestión de Colegios Mayores) is a Spanish product whose website sums it up as "everything you need in a single ERP" (Todo lo que necesitas en un único ERP), from the application for a place to invoicing adapted to VERI*FACTU, the Spanish tax agency's invoice-record system. It lists an applications CRM, bulk room allocation, presence control with a biometric or RFID terminal, a dining room with the fourteen allergens, incidents through tickets, activities, a mobile app and integration with the Convivo app.

Who it fits: colegios mayores and university residences looking for a management system in Spanish, with Spanish invoicing taken care of.

Convivo

Its website describes it as "a mobile app for residents and a web platform for the management team" (una app móvil para los colegiales y una plataforma web para el equipo gestor). It covers notices and announcements, activities and events, incidents from the phone, booking of spaces, absences and permissions, and the dining-room menu with attendance confirmation. The app is downloaded from the app stores and can be integrated with GCM.

Who it fits: colegios mayores and residences that want their own app for residential life, above all activities and notices. It promises communication "without endless groups or lost chains" (sin grupos infinitos ni cadenas perdidas).

Campus Laude

Campus Laude presents itself as an app for running university accommodation, and its home page says "leave WhatsApp, Excel and phone calls behind" (Deja atrás WhatsApp, Excel y llamadas). It brings together absences with a notice to the kitchen, menus, allergens and packed lunches, announcements with read receipts, events, incidents with an owner and a status, booking of spaces and a map of rooms and residents. It also talks about families and guardians.

Who it fits: university residences and colegios mayores that want to move day-to-day management out of WhatsApp and into an app. It is the opposite approach to Bedel's, and it is worth seeing that clearly: some buildings prefer to move their people to an app, and others to stay on the channel those people already use and put it in order.

Bedel, with what it does not do

Bedel, which publishes this page, is an AI customer-service layer on top of the building's WhatsApp, for colegios mayores, student residences and colivings in Spain. It comes first in the table below because the page is ours, not because it is the answer for everyone.

• It answers what keeps coming up on the building's WhatsApp, from the house rules and the manual, in the language of the sender's last message.
• It turns a repair that arrives as text, a photo or a voice note into a work order with a category, urgency, deadline and owner, and puts it on the phone of the post on shift. Anything urgent that is overdue sounds again once a day and after three days goes up to Management.
• The technician handles the work order with buttons in their own WhatsApp and closes it with a photo; whoever reported it hears when it is accepted and when it is resolved.
• It handles meal cancellations and packed lunches with their cut-off time, the absence book, parcels, booking of spaces, enquiries about places and announcements, which go out as templates when the 24-hour window is closed.
• It reads the room rack spreadsheet and returns it up to date. The detail of each thing is in features.

What it does not do, said just as clearly:

• It is not a property management system: it does not allocate rooms, manage contracts or invoice.
• It has no group view: one account is one building, and an operator with several residences has one account per residence.
• It is not a CMMS: it does not record outside suppliers or operatives' hours, and it keeps no inventory of equipment.
• It does not control physical access: no QR codes, turnstiles or locks.
• It does not translate the messages the team writes through the direct chat, nor the announcements.
• It does not count people who do not say anything: if nobody says they are skipping dinner, the kitchen counts them in.

That is why Bedel is designed to sit next to a property management system, not in its place.

The table, tool by tool

No scores: each cell says what the provider's website says. "Not mentioned" means it does not appear on the pages we read.

How to decide in an afternoon

An afternoon is enough to rule out half the market if you do it in this order:

• Write down in one line what hurts today. "Repairs get lost", "we invoice by hand", "nobody opens the app". Each sentence points to a different type of tool.
• Look at which system of record you have. If there is already a system that invoices and allocates rooms, do not swap it for another that answers messages better: add what is missing on top.
• Count where people write on the building's phone and in last week's email. If almost everything comes in on WhatsApp, a tool that asks people to install an app has to explain how it will move them, and one that stays on WhatsApp has to explain how it will put order into what comes in.
• Ask each provider four questions in writing: what it does not do, whether it has a view across several buildings, where the data is (including where the AI runs) and in what format it returns your data if you leave.
• Ask for the demonstration with one of your own cases: the repair at eleven at night, the meal cancellation after the cut-off, or the resident who writes in English.

With that in hand, the weights in the criteria guide linked above help you score the two or three that are left. And if what you are missing is the front door for the day-to-day, look at Bedel's pages for student residences and colegios mayores.