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

Life after trust accounting

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. "How can we be doing this?" Maricel Rigoir remembers thinking. "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.

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.

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.