We sat down with Catherine Wells, a senior property manager at a large real estate agency on the NSW South Coast, to hear all about her team and renters’ experience using Ailo’s new paperless inspections.

The new paperless inspections experience has been a great addition to our agency! It has saved us a lot of time considering we would process all of the applications by hand before.

I think the best bit though is that inspections is embedded in Projects. I love how it shows whether the report is still with the team or if it’s been returned; it’s just one less thing the property manager has to chase. We’re not having to call the tenant and say, you haven’t returned your report yet. Ailo is taking care of it – just like they take care of arrears reminders and stuff like that.

And for the tenants, it’s all on their phones. They know exactly what to do and don’t need us to be there to talk them through the condition report in person. Having everything in the palm of your hand is just a lot more convenient than flipping through pages and pages.

We’re obviously also trying to save costs where we can in the office too, including when it comes to printing. The cost of paper has skyrocketed. It ends up costing at least $1.50 per report not to mention the ink and the bulldog clips that are used to tie it all together. Plus, the time that we’re using standing there waiting for them to print.

I recently moved into a property managed by our business, so I get to now see Ailo from the tenant side of things. I also got to do my own condition report with the new paperless experience!

Previously, condition reports were emailed to me and I had to print them off. But this experience allowed me to take my own photos and put them into the report. It’s easy, you follow through and click yes or no, and make your notes. It feels like they [property managers] want to hear your voice. They’re not just giving you this big document to fill out.

And I also now get to see the report throughout my tenancy, because there is a section in the renter app that has my entry condition reports. So if I ever go, was that chip already there?! I don’t have to panic, I just open the app and can see it was and it’s all good. Which actually is true – that just happened to me!

We'll have some tenants who will sign their lease electronically saying, “Look, we're not moving down officially until one week after the lease is signed.” And then you go, that's really not fair to them that they've only got seven days to return this report, and they wouldn’t have even been to the property yet! It's important that we can now edit the amount of time that they have to return that report, so they've got a fair chance of completing their notes. That’s really important to us.

One of my favourite things is the ability to zoom out when you’re taking photos! Like when you’re in a toilet… It's such an awkward and small space, and now you can zoom out and photograph pretty much the whole toilet in just a few photos. Definitely not as many [photos] as before where you were just click, click, click constantly to try and capture the tiny space!

My other favourite part is voice to text. You don’t want to stop and type away, you can click and talk and move on. Love voice to text!

Our previous one was just…fine. Functionality-wise it was okay, but it was very outdated looking. Today, property managers want to look at something modern and clean. The Ailo inspection app is clean and modern, which makes it more enjoyable to use rather than some clunky old tool that hasn’t been updated in god knows how long.

We used to use Inspections Express that linked up to our previous software we had in place before we came onto Ailo. But now we use Ailo inspections because it’s all connected, it’s all in the one place, and it’s modern and easy to use. Tenants get to have that inspection experience all in one place, and similar to owners.

We were one of the original pilot offices for Ailo Inspections, so we started with the very, very  basics and there were a lot of glitches back then. Now it's just smooth sailing. We haven't had any issues. So, we put in the hard work so that everyone else can enjoy the inspections experience today!

When we moved over to Ailo, we could see the direction they were heading and it’s been incredible to see how quickly the platform has evolved in the nearly three years that we've been with these guys.

It’s the same with inspections; they're keeping up with the times and looking into the future when it comes to new technology and legislation. For example, right now if we’re going to an NCAT hearing, it may be difficult to get video footage through but the members do look at the high quality photos we have on our reports from Ailo. They’re clear, laid out well and easy to follow – exactly what our NCAT members want to see. You can also download the photos separately if you want to look more closely on your desktop. Like, if you have a chip on your bench top, you have the ability to do that instead of scrolling in on a photo.

We spend up to 3 hours at a property doing an ingoing. Imagine if we can get that down to half an hour! Maybe via video? Depends on what the future holds. It would be really cool if through AI, you can send a robot in and they do the inspection for you! An Ailo robot maybe? But we [property managers] are control freaks, so I don’t know if we could hand that over. We can’t not be in control!