Take away the tedium, and what is left is the relationship

Parm Singh spent fifteen years in hospitality before he ever sold a house. It shows. Ask him what makes Wemark Real Estate different from the franchises around it, and he does not talk about fees or coverage or scale. He talks about picking up the phone.

Lavender

That instinct built a business. Since 2018 Parm has grown Wemark to more than 440 properties under management in Adelaide, every one of them won organically. "We've never bought anything," he says, and he means it as a point of pride. He signed the early managements himself, before he had a BDM to help him. He also runs teams in Dubai and India and flies out every couple of months, yet he still calls Australia home. "That's where my kids are."

A book like that, held by a small team across time zones, only works if the machinery underneath it behaves. For a long time it did not. The reactive burden of legacy property management has a sound, and every principal knows it: the phone ringing the moment a disbursement lands a day late.

"If the tenant was late for a day and missed our mid-month disbursement, and we've got a disgruntled landlord calling, where's my money? They think we are not paying them."

The money was there. The problem was that nobody outside the office could see it.

Parm is, by his own description, "a very big technology fan," the kind of operator who books software demonstrations for the pleasure of it. 

"I like to try out things which can improve the systems and provide a better service to the clients."

 He sat through several before he moved to Ailo, and what he was looking for was not a feature list. It was relief. 

"Ailo is user friendly. It's not complicated." 

He wanted less money sitting exposed in the trust account too, where Wemark once held hundreds of thousands at a time and now holds a small fraction of it.

The relief arrived on two fronts. His investors can now see when their money has been paid, and move it themselves when they want to, and the anxious calls have gone quiet. "Now they can actually see. It's much better that way."

And the tedium that used to sit between Parm and his clients has thinned right out. The manual transactions his team once processed by the hundred every day now run to ten or fifteen, and he expects to be rid of them entirely. Renters paying directly means fewer wrong references, fewer payments landing against the wrong account, and fewer of the quiet errors that fill a property manager's afternoon. 

"Less stress, less admin work, less reasons to make mistakes."

Put the pieces together and you arrive at the thing Parm actually wanted. His team is no longer doing the same work over again across several different programs, which means the hours they used to lose to administration are hours they can now spend on people. Ask him whether that is the real return, and he does not hesitate. "Exactly."

It is why he is not slowing down. The target is 500 managements by the end of the year, and to double the book within two to three years, still without buying a single one. And when the question turns to whether he would tell other South Australian businesses to make the same move, the hotelier answers the way he answers everything, personally and without a pause. "Yeah, of course."

Property management that stays personal as you grow

Maricel Rigoir spent her career on the trust accounting side of property management. Fifteen months after Paterson Real Estate moved to Ailo, the trust account sits empty, the SA Water bills take minutes, and she is going for her property management licence.

Not long ago, the arrival of the SA Water bills at the Reynella agency meant paper invoices counted by hand, scanned at the photocopier, and paid by cheque. 

"We're in the 21st century, and we are still writing cheques."

Maricel came up through trust accounting and runs the business side of the agency, one with landlords who have been with it for over 30 years. Her mornings ran to the same rhythm for most of that career. "My first thing in the morning is turn on the computer, download the file, and manually receipt," she says. The routine did not pause for holidays. "Even over the Christmas period, we're closed, but that still has to get receipted, because people need their money."

She was not the one arguing for Ailo. Her position when the agency changed platforms was healthy scepticism, and in Adelaide she had plenty of company. "I was someone that was in the beginning kind of anti-Ailo, only because not many PMs, particularly in Adelaide, were using it." The local market, she points out, has long belonged to one legacy platform.

Paterson went live at the end of March 2025. Fifteen months on, she describes the turnaround as a complete 180. 

Cloud

 In the early days she would raise South Australian compliance requirements on a call and hear the change was live a fortnight later. "That's something where I think lots of softwares probably aren't as good at."

Water is where the change bites hardest, because South Australia handles it differently to most of the country. The bill lands with the owner, the agency apportions supply and usage, bills the renter their share, and the owner covers the rest. Every property manager in the state knows what that means for their week. 

"The minute your SA Water bills start hitting your email, you're like, oh God, that's another week of my life gone."

 Now the platform reads the bill for her team. 


Council rates get the same treatment. Around 100 notices arrive in a single file, and because they share a due date, the batch is handled together. 

"You process 100 bills in under 15 minutes," 

she says. "In 120 seconds, you've already got 95 per cent of the information in there."

The bigger change is the one that makes property managers of an older vintage stare. Paterson has no one left in trust accounting. Every payment runs through Ailo, including for those long-standing investors, who she says nearly died at the news they would no longer get a statement in the post. It was written into new agreements as they came up, and the last holdout, an elderly client, recently came across. 


Peers still ask her how it can possibly work. It is the question every trust accountant asks, and her answer comes from the same discipline that once kept her receipting over the Christmas break. The agent is paid first, so the agency is never out of pocket, and rent is held the moment it lands. Supplier bills entered into the platform hold funds too, and owners who try to withdraw against a looming bill get an alert before they do. She recently walked an investor through a $5,000 air conditioning bill with $2,500 held against the property: log in, open the bill, enter the top-up, and the rest comes from the rent on hand. The whole exchange, she says, was a five-minute phone call.

Her bluntest observation is reserved for the industry she came up in. 


Charcoal


The hours the platform absorbed went somewhere specific. "You restructure your day to your relationship base, and from that you grow organically with getting new managements on." Everything sits in writing in the app, file notes are visible to the whole team, and a phone call gets a quick follow-up in chat so there are no grey areas. "You've got more time to then go out and do your routine inspections. It's all about relationship managers."

Ask her what deserves more attention and she does not hesitate. 


Adelaide clients, in her experience, ask a little more of their agents than most. "They don't call us the city of churches for nothing. We're not as transient as what your eastern seaboards are." It is a market that rewards steadiness, and one she expects to keep consolidating onto the platform. Inspections are the last piece Paterson still runs through a third-party provider, and she is watching that module's rollout with intent. "I can see where it's going. [Ailo is] going to build a one-stop shop."

The clearest measure of the change is what Maricel is doing with her own time. The receipting is gone, the cheque runs are gone, and the payments that do not match no longer eat her mornings. 

"People just don't understand how to let go,"

 she says of peers holding onto the old model. She has let go, and she has already decided what the time is for. 

"I said to Simon, I'm going to go get my PM licence. Because I've got time freed up now."

Life after trust accounting, for the person who spent her career inside it, turns out to be more property management, not less.

Life after trust accounting: a South Australian agency's story

Compliance is the risk most agencies never quite see. Luke Curran, Head of Property Management at Ray White Upper North Shore and Northern Beaches, saw it early and got ahead of it across 1,500 properties.

There is a risk sitting in most rent rolls that nobody talks about at conference. It does not show up in a monthly report, and it rarely announces itself until something goes wrong. It is compliance, and the reason it stays quiet is structural: a manual process only tells the truth as often as someone remembers to update it. Between updates, a property can drift out of step with its obligations while every report still reads as fine. Most agencies have run this way for years, which is exactly what makes the risk so easy to leave alone.

Luke Curran is one of the operators who did not leave it alone. Across roughly 1,500 properties at Ray White Upper North Shore and Northern Beaches, he ran compliance the way the industry did, by hand, and, being the kind of manager who would rather be certain than comfortable, he was not satisfied with what that approach could and could not guarantee. "A lot of manual work, a lot of risk to the agency," is how he describes the manual method. His concern was never that his team was doing too little. It was that no manual system, however diligent the people running it, can promise it is current at every moment. 

That concern is well placed, because when compliance slips it slips quietly, and the cost lands in two places at once. An investor who is paying for compliance assumes it is handled, so any silent gap chips away at the trust and the value an agency exists to protect. On the other side of any such gap is a renter, relying on a smoke alarm that everyone assumes has been checked. Those stakes are the reason Luke wanted the compliance side of his business to see his portfolio as it actually was, in real time, rather than whenever a person next had the hours to reconcile it. 


The change came through DC Compliance, whose embedded solution now sits inside the Ailo workflow and runs on live data. When someone moves in, moves out, or a new property comes on, the compliance side sees it without a person keying it in again. Luke used the move to consolidate as well, rolling his properties across from five or six separate providers into one. "We rolled them all into DC," he says.

He is just as quick to talk about how the change was handled as the change itself. Rather than a switch flicked from a distance, it was a series of meetings. Marco from DC came to the office, met the whole team, and kept them informed as properties moved across. "It just feels like a family business," Luke says. The same person comes to collect the keys each time, and when he needs something he reaches a person rather than a queue. "I don't have to call and wait for someone to call back in a few days. They're available. They'll look into it and get back to me." He has worked with larger providers before, where a business his size can feel like one account among thousands, and the contrast is part of why this has held. 

The embedded approach has also given his investors a choice they did not have before. Where there was once a single package, there are now three levels of cover, chosen when the management is set up rather than sorted out afterwards. An owner with no corded blinds can take smoke alarms alone, another can take the full cover, and the option simply sits on the agreement, with the setup following from it.

For most agencies, the hard part is not fixing the risk. It is seeing it in the first place, because a manual book rarely shows you the gaps you already have. That is why, as part of the Ailo business package, a complimentary compliance audit is run through the same embedded partner, mapping where a rent roll is actually exposed and setting out a clear path to close any gaps. It turns a question most principals have never been able to answer with confidence into a list they can act on.

None of this would matter without the volume behind it. Some months Luke's team leases forty or fifty properties, and in one recent month thirty new managements came in. "That's so much data entry, so much risk for error," he says. Keeping compliance records current by hand across that kind of movement would be a full-time job on its own, and it would not lower the risk, because the human error would still be there. 

So when competing providers call, as they do at least once a month, the answer does not change. "There's just too much risk," Luke says. 

"For a business our size, we won’t go back, absolutely not."

The quiet risk hidden in every rent roll

What changed at 200, 750 and 4,000 properties

Three property managers, at three very different stages, describe the same shift.

Kara Davoren, Allana Neale, and Felicity Apps sat on the same panel with almost nothing in common on paper. One is twelve months into her career. One built her portfolio from a single desk into one of the largest in Western Sydney. One runs a tight team that manages more per person than most principals would attempt. Asked what Ailo had changed, they described the same thing from three different distances.

Kara is the newcomer, and it shows in the best way. She has been a property manager for twelve months, all of it on Ailo, with no memory of how the job used to be done. 

She manages 200 properties and, twelve months in, is already certain she could hold more. 


What lands is not the ambition but the ease behind it. She admits she was frightened of property management before she started, having watched how the pressure sat on people. That is not how she describes her own week. 



 she said. For a room of managers who remember the old version of the job, a first-year property manager who goes home free and wants a bigger portfolio is a quietly radical thing to hear.

Allana is the growth story. She was the first property manager in her business, sitting on 200 properties. It has since grown to just over 4,000 managements and, by her account, the number one operation in Western Sydney. The teams are built in pods, each running around 400 properties with a senior, a property manager, a leasing officer, and an assistant. What made that scale possible, she says, was visibility. 

"Before Ailo, I had no idea how to manage a team," she said. Now, when someone takes leave or calls in sick, she does not spend the morning digging through an inbox to work out what is outstanding. She logs in, sees what was actioned and what is due, and handles the priorities before a landlord ever notices a gap. She is candid that she resisted at first, comfortable with what she knew. 



"Once we transferred over, the capacity and being able to give that good service, it changed everything,"

 she said. 

Her description of the old way is the one every principal recognises. 

Felicity is the established hand who did the hard yards early. Ben first visited her office three or four years ago and, by his own admission, did not convince her on the spot. She interrogated it, then moved. Her team is four people with three admin staff, and three of those property managers manage 750 properties between them, heading towards 250 each by the end of the year. The change she values most is not operational, it is human. 

"There was a lot of anxiety back in the day, people going home to think about work,"

 she said. That has gone. She mentions, almost in passing, that she forgot it was end of financial year that afternoon, and the reports had already gone out. What she remembers of the old life is Christmas. 



When she talks about the move itself, she is honest that the first weeks were rough, and warm about how they got through it, hosting an information night for landlords and taking cups of tea and biscuits to the ones who could not make it into the office.

Three businesses, three completely different areas, and the same sentence underneath all of it. They are each carrying more than they used to, with no more compromise.

White

We believe renters deserve more choice, control and visibility over their rent and bill payments. 

That’s why we’ve made it easier for agencies to offer a broader range of payment methods to renters, including the ability to pay by bank account, Centrepay, debit card or even credit card if you want to boost your rewards points.

Paying rent from your bank account is completely fee-free on Ailo — whether you pay manually or set up a recurring payment. Card payments carry a small service fee, always shown before you pay .

Broadly, there are two ways to pay rent if your agency uses Ailo:

By logging into Ailo via the mobile app or your web browser (what we call on-app payments); and

Through methods that don't require you to sign into your Ailo account (what we call off-app payments).

Rent payment options may differ depending on your agency. Please speak with your property manager – or sign in to the Ailo platform – to see the payment options available to you and any associated fees.

None

, there are three ways to pay your rent. You have the choice to make a bank account payment, or you can use debit card or credit card to manage your payments.


Traditionally, some property managers would ask renters to pay their entire rent and associated bills up to 6 days early to deal with clearing times. But when you use any of Ailo’s on-app payment methods, rent is considered paid the instant you tap “confirm” in your app – or, at 1am on the relevant day if you set up recurring payments on a schedule.

Simply type in your bank account details, and Ailo will debit your account for the amount you nominate. You can then choose to save this payment method for future rent payments or set up a recurring payment using the same bank account. You can update or cancel the payment schedule whenever you want through your app.

We’ve found most renters choose to set up automatic scheduled payments from their bank account, so they don’t have to worry about getting their rent in on time.

Some renters, however, prefer to manually initiate their own payments when it is convenient for them, while other renters do not pay their full rent in one payment and take advantage of the fact they can make as many free payments as they like in any amount. 

However you like to pay your rent, you can do it your way in Ailo. 

Because of the way the banking system works, funds will be debited from your nominated account between 7pm and midnight on the day you initiate the payment, and will take 2 days to clear. The clearing status is shown in the app. Importantly, this clearing time does not affect the date you are deemed to have made the payment.

2 & 3. Debit card or credit card payments

Credit cards and debit cards are instant payments, which means the transaction will be immediately authorised, and you will see the funds have left your bank account at the end of the next full hour.

You can either make payments on a one-off basis, or save your card details and set up recurring payments to pay on a schedule. If you set up recurring payments, you can manage or cancel the payment schedule whenever you want through the Ailo app.

Some renters use credit cards to earn points or to manage their own cash flow. Some use cards because they like instant payments.

There are also a number of ways to pay your rent and bills without logging into the Ailo platform via the web or mobile app. Some of these are facilitated by Ailo and some are arranged by your agency.

 is a voluntary bill-paying service which is free for Centrelink customers. Use Centrepay to arrange regular deductions from your Centrelink payment. You can start or change a deduction at any time. 

In addition to all of these payment options, your agency may offer additional methods including the option to pay directly into their 

Regardless of which payment methods you choose, your agency does not earn any commission or payments from Ailo. They simply want to give you a broader range of payment options that work for you.

How to pay rent with Ailo

Sky Gradient

Most people who run a property management business have had the thought, usually late, usually after a day that got away from them. There has to be a better way to do this. They look around at the systems they are holding together, the workarounds their team has quietly built, the things that fall through the gaps, and they wonder whether the businesses that seem to have it figured out actually have, or whether everyone is just holding on.

Some of them have figured it out. That is the part worth sitting with. The future is already here, it is just not evenly distributed. There are businesses in this industry that have crossed to the other side of that thought and are operating in a fundamentally different way to the offices around them. They are not theoretical. They are real teams managing real portfolios, and the gap between them and everyone else is widening. The question for the businesses still standing on the near side of the bridge is not whether the future exists. It is how you get there, and what the crossing actually involves.

That question is the reason Ailo runs study tours.

A study tour is not a conference session, a product demo, or a sales pitch. It is a small group of property management principals and operators spending an afternoon inside a business that has already made the change, hearing directly from the people who led it. No stage, no slides, no script. The host opens the doors, opens up about the process, and answers whatever the room wants to ask. The format exists because the most useful thing a business considering a significant change can do is sit in the room with someone who has already done it and hear, in full detail, what the journey actually looked like.

Recently, a group of some of the biggest and best independent and network operators on the east coast flew into Brisbane for exactly that. The host was Harcourts Solutions, and the people leading the conversation were Jodie Stainton and Jess Calvert.

Harcourts Solutions runs three and a half thousand managements across four offices with a team approaching a hundred people. In the twelve months prior to the study tour, Jodie and Jess had migrated the business onto Ailo, settled a one-thousand-property acquisition, and maintained a ninety-five percent staff retention rate throughout. Jodie described the acquisition as the easiest she had ever done. She said the decision had taken under fifteen minutes because everything was already in place. 


What made the afternoon valuable for the people in the room was not the headline numbers. It was the full journey laid out in front of them.

Jodie and Jess walked the room through every stage. How they first encountered Ailo at a study tour hosted by Ray White Canberra, and came back curious. How they brought the team along, first with a presentation, then with a visit to another business already on the platform, then with a team vote. How Charlene Amber, one of their most senior property managers, had told Jodie she would quit if they went ahead with the change. How the team trained together every Friday in the weeks before migration. How go-live was, in Jess's words, the easiest and fastest data migration she had ever dealt with. And how, five weeks later, Jodie turned to Jess and said something that landed with the whole room: 


The Charlene story is the one that stayed with people after the event. Charlene had been the most resistant voice in the business. On Friday, she walked into the room to talk to the group and used the words happy, calm, and in control. She said she was having the best time she had had in the job in years. The person who was most defensive about the old way had become the most protective of the new one.

Jess described the problem the change had solved in terms the room understood immediately. 



"We could not get parity in how our team did what they did," she said. "They all did a great job, but we just didn't have them all doing it the same way." 

Jodie went further, walking the room through what a client journey used to look like across seven disconnected systems. She described it as ordering a meal where the steak, the potatoes, and the wine all come from different restaurants, and nobody tells the rest of the kitchen when something goes wrong. 

The other thing worth understanding about these rooms is who turns up to them. Last Friday, the room included Rory Somerville from Ray White Bendigo, whose portfolio quietly outperforms agencies several times its size. Marco Di Benedetto from DC Compliance, whose work Jodie credited publicly as the reason she sleeps at night. Kylie Walker from That Property Mum, a consultant who works across several of the businesses in the room. 

Heather Edwards and Karmen Costigan from Harcourts Corporate. All four Harcourts Solutions directors participated, with Brendan, Eddie, and Greg hosting a separate walkthrough of the office for the visiting principals. The ecosystem that gathers around these afternoons, the consultants and partners and operators who have already made the journey and now show up to support the people still considering it, is as much a part of the value as the conversation itself.

Jodie closed the afternoon with a line that has stuck with everyone who was in the room. "If you're sitting on the fence, just don't. Lean over the fence, for God's sakes."

The future is already here. It is being lived in offices like Harcourts Solutions, by teams like Jodie's and Jess's, in front of rooms full of people who are ready to make the crossing. The study tours exist so that crossing does not have to be a leap of faith. It can be a walk through someone else's office on a Friday afternoon, hearing from people who have already done it, understanding the full journey from start to finish, and leaving with a clear picture of what the other side actually looks like.

If you are curious about what one of these afternoons looks like from the inside, talk to your Ailo contact. The door is open.

What the leap looks like from the inside

Growth without compromise: inside Ray White United's 1,100-management year

Ray White United closed the financial year with 1,100 new managements added organically, matching the year before and taking the group past 2,200 new managements across two financial years. For Karl Von Riegen, Head of Department for Property Management, the growth is only half the story.

Karl is direct about what has enabled the run. "We're really grateful for the way Ailo has assisted us. It's a system that enables the whole of the Ray White United team to deliver an exceptional service." The team leans on Ailo's growth tools, projects, actions and everyday workflows to keep service standards high while the portfolio expands, so growth never comes at the cost of retention.

Nobody embodies that better than Kayla Fenech, Ray White United's Business Development Manager and 2025 Property Management BDM of the Year. In March she signed 45 new managements in a single month, in a quiet period with only around 20 inbound leads. The result came from a pipeline of 650 prospects built and nurtured inside Ailo's growth tools, where the system held the reminders, sequences and data while Kayla held the relationships.

"We're all like a really good team, there's a really good culture, and I just love coming to work."

For Karl, the contrast with legacy trust accounting systems is the standstill. 

"Ailo has everything we need to operate at scale presently, but it's continuing to improve in so many ways, which is something that was lacking in the legacy systems. That constant improvement makes us very excited for the new functionality that's coming."

The target for the coming year is 1,300 new managements, alongside a new office joining the group. 


Expansion means opportunity. The group is focused on growing career pathways and attracting more property managers and leaders into the business. As Kayla puts it: 

"It requires a lot of hard work. But it's very, very rewarding for what you do."

Jonathon Graham has spent four years at Meriton, starting as a property manager and working his way up to Performance Manager. 

He looks after the Queensland portfolio: close to 2,000 managements and roughly 4,000 tenants across thirty buildings between Brisbane and the Gold Coast. It is the leading edge of a much larger move. Meriton manages more than 11,000 apartments across New South Wales and Queensland, and the shift onto Ailo is now extending across that national footprint. 

In Queensland, within the first month, the team's arrears fell by more than half.

For Meriton, moving onto Ailo was a deliberate investment in the people it serves. The business wanted to lift the experience it offered renters beyond what its systems could support: more ways to pay, more visibility for tenants over their own tenancy, and faster answers when they reached out. 



Ailo gave Meriton the chance to close that gap, putting choice and transparency in the hands of tenants and owners alike.

Life before, across seven different systems

"Before Ailo, the best way to describe it was probably chaos," Graham says. The team ran six or seven programs that did not talk to each other in a meaningful, productive way. A property manager would check one, move to the next, watch a screen refresh and lose their place. Behind the scenes there were manual syncs that ate time and slowed everyone down. "Seven different softwares just becomes a mountain of issues."

Arrears were a constant struggle, in part because tenants had no way to see their own position.

They relied on a property manager to send a ledger, and part payments made the picture harder to read. The team offered two ways to pay, and the faster of them still took days to clear.

It was not just a bad week. It was the life before. There was scepticism, too, about whether an app could really carry the load. "Can a tenant really have this many options? That was probably our biggest question."

"Seeing the amount of tenants that signed up to the app, the amount that made a payment through the app, was just mind-blowing." 



Today more than nine in ten tenants are active on the app, payments clear within about two hours, and renters choose from several ways to pay. Arrears came down by more than fifty per cent inside the first month.

The number matters less than what it changed. Phone volume has dropped, because owners and tenants can log in and see everything for themselves. 

"The phone calls we are getting now are happy stories,"

 Graham says. For him, the relationship itself has changed. 

Inside the team, the working day has changed shape. People leave at five knowing the work is done, take a proper lunch, and no longer keep sticky notes across their desks. "It's all in your projects. It's all in your tasks. It's all in one system."

Meriton's reason for getting this right runs deeper than the day-to-day. The business sees its renters as future owners, with many going on to buy the very home they are living in. "A tenant paying on time is important to us because our tenants become homeowners," Graham says. "They normally buy the apartment that they're renting." Giving renters more ways to pay, and a clear record of their own payments, is part of how Meriton supports that. For a renter, Graham says, every on-time payment is "a step in the right direction."

That belief, that good service and good systems compound into something larger, is what Graham would pass on to any principal weighing up the change. 

How Meriton rebuilt its rental experience on Ailo

Australian renters in 2026 are spending a record share of their income on rent.

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reports that 28% of renting households are spending more than 30% of their disposable income on housing costs, the long-accepted threshold for financial stress.

The picture is compounding pressure on time, attention, income, and the simple capacity to keep the small administrative tasks of life from turning into something more expensive, or at the very least, more of a headache.

Meg Morris rents inside that picture. She lives on the Sunshine Coast, her workdays are busy, and her inbox, as she puts it, is one of those inboxes.



What sets her experience apart is what happens inside the part of her week that belongs to rent.

Once a week, Meg opens her app and works through everything in a single short session:

Glances at whatever water bill has come through and pays that too

Taps through a reminder to update her bond on the RTA after a recent lease renewal

The week's rental admin is done. The rest of her week belongs to her.

Asked to describe what that actually looks like, Meg doesn't go searching for adjectives. She describes the workflow she has built around it.

"I find that by going into the app, I only have to go in once a week, pay my rent, reminds me about any other bill, I just do it all while I'm in there, and then that's it, that's it for another week."

The phrase "that's it for another week" carries the underlying truth of what has changed for her. There is a beginning and an end to her week's interaction with her rental life, where for many renters there isn't one at all.

From "oh, what's this" to "stoked," inside one download

When Meg's agency moved to Ailo, her first reaction was the one most renters have when a new app turns up in their rental life. Oh, what's this. She downloaded it to see what it was about.

That is where her experience starts to diverge from the average. Stoked is not a word renters tend to reach for when describing a new app they've just been asked to download.

Halfway through the conversation, unprompted, Meg shifts to cost of living.

"Obviously with the cost of living and everything like that too, people often put bills on a back burner and then they forget about them. And then, you know, there's overdue fees and all sorts of things that can come because people are time poor and, you know, unorganised, unfortunately."

She isn't making a case for the platform here. She is naming the world she lives in, and the data backs her: renters running tight on time, on money, and on the cognitive bandwidth required to track multiple administrative obligations across multiple systems. With one in five rental households in low-income financial stress and another quarter spending more than the recognised threshold on housing, the cost of letting a bill slip is no longer minor. It is the kind of thing that can take a fortnight to recover from.

Then, without a pause, she explains what's different now.

Her water bill doesn't ambush her at the wrong moment. It sits where she will already be when she is ready to deal with it, in the same place she has already opened to pay her rent.

Inside Ailo, renters can pay how they want. Meg pays her rent on her credit card, knowing there is a surcharge, and budgets for it because she likes the instant settle. She also knows she could direct debit her bank account with no surcharge, slightly slower, but she has picked the trade-off that fits her week. "It's not overwhelming," she says. "It's very straightforward."

Asked if she'd be upset moving into a new place and finding her next agency wasn't using Ailo, her answer comes immediately. "I would." She has worked out a rhythm that fits her life, and she would rather not give it back to start over on someone else's system.

She has been recommending Ailo to other renters, and on the call she asked, almost in passing, whether it was only available at Ray White. It isn't. The way she talks about it, you'd think it had always been there.

She isn't alone in this perspective. Earlier this year, 

Jazmin Hermione, a content creator who writes about money from a renter's point of view, made a similar argument:

 rent does not have to be a purely passive cost, and visibility, choice, and understanding payment options matter more than the method itself.

Different renter, different city, same underlying observation. There is a way for renting to feel less like a thing happening to you, and Meg, like Jazmin, has found it.

Near the end of the call, Meg was asked to imagine giving Ailo back. To picture a week without it. She tried, and then she answered.

Five plain words. Just a renter, on the Sunshine Coast, who has worked out something that works for her, and would rather not give it back.

Once a week, that's it: a renter's perspective on Ailo

Hayden Potts didn't inherit a portfolio or migrate from a legacy system. He started from zero. A short time later, PRD Northern Beaches manages over 100 properties across the Whitsundays and Mackay region, and Ailo has been underneath every one of them from the first management agreement.


For a growing office inside the PRD network, 

the decision to build on Ailo wasn't about escaping a legacy system. It was about never inheriting one.

The distinction matters. Offices that migrate carry muscle memory from old workflows, and much of the onboarding conversation is about unlearning. Hayden's team never had that problem. Their processes, their client communication rhythms, their back-end systems were all designed around what Ailo made possible from day one.

That three-sided visibility - investor, property manager, tenant - is a recurring theme across Ailo's user base. But Hayden frames it as something more than a feature. It is the architecture of how his team operates. A good property manager with full visibility across all stakeholders can carry a larger portfolio with less friction, and that is precisely the model PRD Northern Beaches was designed around.

For a business still in growth phase, the relationship with the platform team matters. Hayden was direct about this: 

It is a simple statement, but it carries weight from someone whose entire operation was built on the platform. He is not comparing Ailo to something else. He is saying the business as it exists would not be the same without it.

Built from Building a Rent Roll from Zero on Ailo | PRD Northern Beaches 

How Kayla Fenech became one of the most exciting BDMs in Australian property management

Kayla Fenech is BDM of the Year at Ray White United Group, a business that has grown from 200 managements to over 3,000 across seven offices in roughly three years. She is part of the reason the business grew by 922 organic managements in a single financial year with just 22 preventable losses. And in March 2026, she broke her own record: 45 new managements signed in a single month.

Those numbers are remarkable. The person behind them is worth understanding.

Kayla's entry into real estate was unplanned. She was weighing up university options when her mother suggested property. "I was always interested in scrolling on realestate.com, looking at properties," she said. She applied for a few roles, landed a receptionist job at a small office, and began a steady progression through PM assistant, portfolio manager, and eventually into business development.

"I was doing a bit of the onboarding new management, and I really liked that. So I wanted to try and do something with that, that I enjoy more than doing physical day-to-day property management."  

Not a step away from the industry. A step deeper into the part of it she found most rewarding. 

I could almost hear Kayla smiling through the phone. "Was it the thrill of the chase, Kayla" I asked. She bust out laughing "It's the thrill of the win". 

When asked what makes Ray White United different, Kayla did not talk about tools or processes. She talked about the people. Peter Diamantidis, the group's founder and principal, has built something in Western Sydney that produces excellence at every level of the business. Kayla sees it daily. 

Pink

Karl Von Riegen, Head of Department for Property Management, leads the division Kayla operates within. The trajectory of the business under his leadership speaks for itself. But what Kayla describes is not just growth. It is a team where the standard is visible, where recognition reinforces effort, and where the ambient energy lifts everyone's game. "It's not like you're in an office where everyone's got a flat mood. Everyone's always happy."

Kayla's March result did not come from a hot streak. It was a quiet month for inbound leads, with only around 20 coming through. She signed 45 new managements because she had spent months building and nurturing a pipeline of 650 prospects inside Ailo's growth tools. The system held the reminders, the follow-up sequences, and the data. Kayla held the relationships.

This is the pattern that separates the best BDMs from the rest. The system carries the operational weight so the human can focus entirely on the investor sitting in front of them. "You cut out so much of the time of things that you need to do. You don't have to have a million things in your mind."

Asked what she would say to a BDM or PM working on legacy systems without that clarity, Kayla was blunt. 


Kayla has been invited to speak at The One Conference with Avi Khan later this year. It feels like a trajectory that was always going to happen for someone who combines this level of discipline with this level of warmth. 



"It requires a lot of hard work," she said. "But it's very, very rewarding for what you do."

When Jodie Stainton examined how her Brisbane business was actually running, she found it was operating across sixteen different systems. Her team managed over 2,300 properties, and every one of them was being served by a stack of disconnected tools that had accumulated quietly over years.

Stainton's diagnosis is the industry's diagnosis. Most principals can quote one number from memory: what they pay per property per month for trust accounting. It sits between one and two dollars. It's the number that gets negotiated, the number that gets compared, the number that anchors every conversation about cost.

Trust accounting is one piece of what it takes to serve a property under management. Around it sits a constellation of other costs that have stopped being noticed: inspection software, maintenance tools, communication apps, compliance management, key tracking, digital signing, document storage, reporting dashboards, renter screening, payment gateways, and increasingly, AI tools bolted on to fill gaps the core system was never designed to close.

Each one is its own subscription. Its own login. Its own monthly charge. Its own workaround that somebody figured out eighteen months ago and never questioned again.

When principals list every app their team uses to get through a single day, the count is rarely fewer than six. Some businesses are running twelve. Stainton's was running sixteen.

The pattern is consistent across the country. The workarounds become invisible. The subscriptions become furniture. The cost compounds in silence. And while principals keep negotiating the $1.50, the real number sits at $10, $12, $15, sometimes $17 per property per month.


In a different market, the margin absorbs the waste. Rents climb, portfolios grow, and nobody notices the $15 because the revenue covers it.

Regulated rents in several states mean the revenue lever is constrained. Staff costs aren't going backwards. A Property Manager earning $99,000 today was earning $75,000 three years ago, and they're worth every cent, but the cost of delivering the service has risen structurally and permanently.

Courtney Hall on the leap to Ailo

A migration she did not expect to be easy

The system carries the day now

What six months has returned

“"My business has gone up since I've had Ailo. The productivity of my staff has become better. My clients are happier. I haven't had a trade come to me complaining about an overdue invoice."”

“"There's nothing more satisfying than over-servicing your people. You can go to sleep at night knowing that this system can work your day."”