Designing a Property Management Business Around Outcomes

When I first spoke with Shannyn Laird, what struck me wasn’t her enthusiasm for a new platform. It was how deliberately she talked about outcomes.

Shannyn isn’t coming at property management from a single angle. She runs property management operations day to day as Director and Head of PM at Havenly Property, and she also advises agencies across Australia and New Zealand through her consulting practice. She’s spent close to two decades inside the mechanics of the industry, watching where things break, why teams burn out, and how systems either support or quietly undermine good operators.

So when we discussed her decision to choose Ailo for the next phase of her business, I wanted to understand what really tipped that decision.

She admitted that, like most experienced operators, she started by looking at features. She wanted to be confident the experience for owners and tenants would be properly supported. On paper, Ailo ticked the boxes. But it didn’t take long for her focus to shift.

What mattered more than functionality was what the system enabled. Not just for her business, but for everyone connected to it. Owners. Tenants. Contractors. Suppliers. The platform wasn’t asking people to adapt to it. It was shaping behaviour in a way that made good outcomes easier to achieve.

That difference became obvious very quickly. In the first couple of months, her business experienced rapid growth, the kind that often exposes cracks. Instead, onboarding felt calm. Tenants were comfortable using the system. Owners found the transparency helpful rather than overwhelming. They knew when to reach out for the moments that mattered, and for everything else, they had what they needed without picking up the phone.

Shannyn works with a wide range of investors, including offshore owners who typically introduce more complexity, not less. What surprised her was how well optionality worked when it was designed properly. Investors could manage bills, choose how they paid, and still have everything recorded cleanly for end-of-financial-year reporting. Instead of creating more process, flexibility reduced it.

Given her consulting background, I was particularly interested in how support landed. Shannyn has seen enough implementations to know the difference between a help desk and a partner.

She told me about a trust accounting question late on a Friday afternoon. Instead of being pointed to an article or asked to log a ticket, she received a call. Someone walked her through it, checked in the next day, then followed up the next month when she had to do it again. Just after five o’clock, an email landed confirming everything had been done correctly, along with a simple “have a great weekend”.

That moment stuck with her. Not because it was dramatic, but because it built confidence. She wasn’t just getting an answer. She was learning how to navigate the system properly, without the background stress that so often comes with trust accounting.

Shannyn is unapologetically process-driven. She believes strongly in consistency and repeatability, particularly when teams are split across onshore and offshore roles. But she’s equally clear that process alone isn’t enough. Property management might look black and white on paper, but in practice it’s full of nuance. Compliance needs to be easy not to compromise on, but people also need support when the process isn’t quite enough.

That balance, between structure and humanity, is something she sees missing in many platforms. It’s also where she believes Ailo behaves differently.

One moment in our conversation captured the shift she’s seeing in the market. A landlord asked what software her agency used. Before she could explain anything, he stopped her. If it wasn’t Ailo, he wasn’t interested. He’d experienced it with another agency and didn’t want to go backwards.

For Shannyn, that wasn’t about winning a deal faster. It was a signal that technology is no longer invisible to clients. In some cases, it’s become shorthand for service quality.

Because she was building with scale in mind, Shannyn was determined to avoid fragmented systems from the start. She didn’t want separate journeys for sales, onboarding, and property management. Everything needed to live in one place so context wasn’t lost when a client moved from one team to another. When a property manager took over, they had the full picture from the first interaction, not a stripped-back version that required rebuilding trust.

As both a growth manager and a business owner, the responsibility ultimately sits with her. What Ailo gave her was clarity. She can see where her team needs support at a glance, assign work intelligently, and set templates once instead of reinventing the wheel. There’s no reliance on side tools, no chasing updates across platforms. Just visibility into who’s struggling, where to lean in, and how to keep things effective without burning people out.

What stayed with me after the conversation wasn’t a list of benefits. It was how intentional her choices were.

Shannyn didn’t choose Ailo to make the early days easier. She chose it because it aligned with how she believes property management businesses should work as they grow. Outcome-led rather than feature-led. Structured without being rigid and human without being chaotic.

When someone who both runs property management operations and advises other agencies on improving theirs makes that call, it’s worth paying attention and the way Shannyn phrased this was spot on.