Boston is a city of contrasts, where 1840s brownstones sit a few blocks from brand-new construction. Thatch, a property management company under the Boston Real Estate Collaborative, manages exactly that kind of portfolio: short-term rental and co-living properties spanning historic buildings on Charles Street and Newberry Street, a Cambridge property dating to the 1840s, a recent new build in Fenway, and mid-century homes in South Boston.

Keeping a portfolio this varied running smoothly could easily require a large on-site staff. Instead, Thatch runs it with a team of 15 and a deliberately staff-less model, powered by the integration between RemoteLock and its property management software, Streamline.

“We’re a staff-less operation,” said Sean Culkin, assistant operations manager at Thatch. “Our best days are when guests don’t really have to reach out to us.”

About Thatch

Thatch caters primarily to academics visiting Cambridge and Harvard, along with business travelers staying in Beacon Hill and Back Bay. These are guests who value a clean, comfortable, convenient place to stay over the amenities of a traditional hotel. They want to come and go as they please without checking in at a front desk or picking up a key.

Delivering that experience at scale means nearly everything has to happen automatically, from booking to access to checkout.

The challenge: manual codes and constant upkeep

When Culkin joined Thatch, the company had already moved on from its older approach to access, but the memory of that model still shapes how the team values what it has now. In those days, a property might have only one or two shared codes, and keeping them secure meant sending someone out to change them by hand, over and over, across a portfolio scattered throughout the city.

“Prior to RemoteLock, we had systems with one or two codes that you had to go in frequently to change for security reasons,” Culkin explained. “It created a whole lot more of a maintenance task and pressure around going to the properties and switching those codes.”

For a small team managing a geographically spread portfolio, that model simply could not scale.

How RemoteLock and Streamline work together

Today, the two systems handle the work behind the scenes. Streamline serves as Thatch’s central property management software, holding all reservation information. When a booking comes in, Streamline creates the reservation and passes the details to RemoteLock, which generates the access codes and sets them to the correct check-in and check-out times automatically.

“Reservations come in, they go to Streamline, everything’s created, and then everything’s sent to RemoteLock, all under our noses without us even knowing,” Culkin said. “We don’t have to check every minute. It saves so much time for us at an operations level.”

Because the platforms integrate directly, the team never has to jump between tools or manually confirm that codes are active. Guests who book directly through Thatch’s property websites receive a ten percent discount over Airbnb and Booking.com, and from there the automation takes over: Streamline handles confirmations and charges, RemoteLock provisions the doors, and the guest receives their check-in information without staff involvement.

Adapting modern access control to historic buildings

One concern with a portfolio full of 19th-century buildings is whether modern access control can be installed without major renovations. For Thatch, the answer was straightforward. The company uses the same commercial-grade lever locks across nearly every property, from its oldest brownstones to its newest builds.

“With RemoteLock, it makes it so simple,” Culkin said. “You need a Wi-Fi connection and some good doors. Keeping it that simple has been pretty easy for us.”

Standardizing on similar hardware across buildings of every era has simplified both operations and maintenance.

Managing staff and vendor access

Guests are only part of the picture. On any given day, housekeepers, maintenance teams, and other vendors need to get into the right spaces at the right times, and Thatch needs to know it happened. Unique codes for each vendor, combined with RemoteLock notifications and access logs, turn what used to be a guessing game into a clear daily record.

“Each vendor has their own codes, and we set up notifications through RemoteLock that tell us what door they went to and when they got there, sent right to our emails,” Culkin said. “I track a lot of that day to day to make sure everything that’s supposed to happen happens.”

Door groups let the team grant precise access to a front door, back door, unit door, or closet as needed, and doors can be locked or unlocked virtually without anyone driving to the property.

One platform, one account

As Thatch’s setup matured, the RemoteLock team helped consolidate what had been two separate accounts into a single platform, bringing both wired-door properties and standard smart lock installations under one dashboard.

“We used to have two different accounts, but the team has been really helpful in making everything into one usable platform,” Culkin said. “One property has a bunch of wired door situations, and the rest have the normal locks, and your team has been really good at making everything into one usable platform.”

The company is now working with RemoteLock on an Ecobee thermostat integration to bring heating and cooling into the same system, helping ensure every unit is comfortable and ready for the next guest.

The results: more reservations, same small team

The clearest measure of success is volume. Thatch managed just under 6000 reservations in 2024 and more in 2025, and the company had already passed 4000 reservations partway through this year, all without adding headcount.

“I don’t know all those people’s names, I don’t know where they’re staying, but RemoteLock and Streamline do,” Culkin said. “They have everything locked down. Its ability to handle a reservation without any human input is very impressive to me.”

Security, once a source of manual work and worry, is now a point of confidence. RemoteLock’s ability to refresh and manage codes consistently gives the team reassurance that access is always controlled, and Thatch complements that control with its own Ubiquiti camera coverage across its properties. Since implementation, the team has not run into a significant security issue.

Explore independent hospitality with RemoteLock

Asked what he would tell another property manager on Streamline considering RemoteLock, Culkin did not hesitate.

“Absolutely, 100 percent, do it. It makes your life easier,” he said. “I came to this company without much background in hospitality or property management, and learning the integrations between RemoteLock, Streamline, Breezeway, and Ubiquiti has been fairly easy to understand, and it works well.”