How Meriton rebuilt its rental experience on Ailo

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.

"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."

The answer came on day one. "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.