Elise Wilson has spent 18 years in real estate. She runs operations at Belle Property Maroochydore on the Sunshine Coast, and she has a theory about what's changed in the industry that most people don't want to say out loud.

"People never used to be as flippant as they are now"

Lavender

It's a blunt read of the market, and Elise doesn't dress it up. Investors make faster decisions on less information. Loyalty to an agency is thinner than it used to be. The competition isn't just the office down the road offering a lower fee. It's the expectation that every service experience, from a GP appointment to a Qantas flight, should work the way it does on a phone.

"If we fixed the retention, you're doubling your profitability"

Belle Property Maroochydore onboarded with Ailo in December. For Elise, the shift wasn't about what changed inside the office first. It was about what changed for the investor.

Disbursements were the clearest example. Under the old system, the fifteenth of every month brought a wave of emails: why don't I have any money? The answer was always the same convoluted explanation about end of month not falling on the last day of the month, and the bank not accepting that as an excuse when the mortgage was due.

"I can't tell you how many emails we used to get," she says. Now investors see where their funds are and disburse whenever they choose. The emails stopped.

The transparency cuts both ways. Investors feel more in control, which means they're less likely to chase the team for information that should have been available to them all along. And the team gets that time back to focus on the parts of the relationship that actually matter: the advice, the responsiveness, the things an investor would notice and value.

Elise's view is that a small agency can't compete on volume. "Nobody wants 500 landlords that are so penny pinching that we can't get them to pay for basic maintenance," she says. "We need to represent value to bring in the people that can appreciate it."

When the technology walked in before the pitch did

The signal that something had shifted came before Belle Property had even finished transitioning. A landlord on the fence told them directly: I'd rather go with you, but this other company uses Ailo.

"We did end up signing that management," Elise says, "because we said we were signing up to Ailo."

It's a moment that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. A back-office system decision becoming the reason a landlord chose one agency over another. But Elise sees it as confirmation of something she already knew. The service experience is the product now, and investors can tell who's equipped to deliver it.

Shortly after onboarding, Belle Property had unplanned staff changeover. In a small office, that's the kind of disruption that used to spiral. Elise, who isn't a property manager by trade, was able to step into the workflow herself and keep the portfolio moving. A new team member with no trust accounting background picked up the rhythm through the system rather than through a rushed corridor handover.

It reinforced what Elise had already seen from the investor side. When the business holds together through disruption, the people it serves never feel the turbulence. That steadiness is part of what makes an agency harder to leave.

Elise Wilson on Making a Small Agency Harder to Leave

Molly Stewart has been a property manager long enough to know that things rarely go to plan. But even by the standards of regional New South Wales, the timing of her office's migration to Ailo was extraordinary.

Pink

The Manning Valley floods forced LJ Hooker Taree to operate with a single person in their physical office. The remaining 40 staff worked remotely, scattered across the region, managing portfolios through a platform they had only just adopted.

That line lands quietly, but it carries weight. In the middle of a natural disaster, with a team dispersed and an office underwater, nobody lost track of what needed to happen next. The system held.

Molly is also clear about what the shift has meant for her tenants. When asked whether the technology has created distance, she pushes back.

"The relationship with our tenants has grown," she says. "It's definitely gained, not lost."

Tenants now communicate with their specific property manager directly through the platform, rather than emailing a generic team address. For Molly, that has made the service more personal, not less.

Sheridan Gibbs joined the LJ Hooker Taree team after the migration, so she has no memory of the old way. For her, Ailo is simply how property management works. And she is remarkably clear about what that means day to day.

Cloud

When pressed on whether the structure has changed how she works, Sheridan doesn't hesitate.

"It makes it a lot more personal. They're messaging you directly and they're working with you directly."

Both women are optimistic about what comes next. When asked whether the platform is unlocking her potential, Molly pauses for a moment before answering.

"Yes. I definitely think it's unlocking my potential."

When the Flood Came, the System Held

White

There is something that happens when you put the right people in a room that isn't trying to sell them anything.

Last Wednesday evening, I stood at the front of MECCA Carlton and welcomed the first Ailo After Hours Masterclass of 2026. 


Close to seventy of these events now, held across the country since mid-2023, and the format is always the same. Property managers and principals from some of Victoria's most respected offices, arriving into a space that is warm and familiar and entirely free of the usual professional-event furniture. No slides. No stage. No product pitch. Just people in a room, and a panel conversation that, by the end of the evening, had the audience asking questions that weren't really about software at all.

They were asking about a different way to work. I've watched it happen enough times now to know when the room has shifted. Wednesday night shifted early.

Mel Jerzyna runs LJ Hooker Penrith, and this was not her first time on the panel. I keep inviting her back because her honesty is the kind that makes a room go quiet. Twenty-five years in this industry, the kind of experience that earns a healthy scepticism of anything that promises to change the way things are done. She told the room that the push to look at Ailo didn't come from inside her business. It came from her husband.

"But it was honestly the best move I ever did."

, did what no product demonstration could. I've moderated close to seventy of these evenings. I still felt it land. Every person in that room understood what she meant. Not abstractly. Personally.

Property management is a profession carried largely on the shoulders of women, and it has asked an enormous amount of them for a very long time. What Mel described wasn't just burnout. It was the slow erosion of everything outside the job. Her reclaiming her evenings, her weekends, her presence at the dinner table, wasn't a personal achievement she arrived at alone. It was something that became possible when the system she worked in finally matched the standard she had always held herself to.

What she noticed first, once things changed, wasn't a metric. It was something smaller. Her team had started arriving five minutes before opening instead of an hour early. Laptops were closing at five o'clock. And people had started, unprompted, offering to help each other. 


That last line is worth sitting with. In a profession known for chronic overload, someone had time to ask. That is not an operational outcome. That is a culture. And the thing that created the space for it was a single platform that held the logic of the day, so that the people in the business didn't have to.

Rory Somerville runs Ray White Bendigo. I've known Rory for years, and I asked him to be on the panel because when he talks about his business, people listen differently. Forty-five people on the ground, and another fourteen working alongside them from the Philippines, a team he treats, in his own words, with exactly the same care. "Yesterday we did corporate massages in the office in Bendigo," he told the room. "We had massages over in the Philippines too. Pizzas in both places." He said it matter-of-factly, which made it land harder than if he'd made a point of it.

Rory is also the founder of TaskBridge, a VA solutions service built from his own experience of genuinely integrating local and remote teams. The motivation behind both, his Bendigo business and TaskBridge, turns out to be the same thing. When Rory looks at property management, he sees people. Not portfolios, not compliance obligations, but people who were increasingly, in the years before Ailo, scared to take annual leave. 


That question didn't get a philosophical answer on the night. It got a practical one.

What changed for Rory's teams was visibility. Not surveillance, but clarity. When everyone in a portfolio, local staff and the Philippines team alongside each other, is working inside one system and can see exactly where things stand, the fear of absence disappears. Someone can step in. Something doesn't fall. The work holds its shape without the person having to hold it together personally. That is what Ailo made possible. Not a feature. A feeling.

The audience arrived curious and left asking the kind of questions that come from someone genuinely weighing a decision rather than entertaining a conversation. One attendee had been through a demo the day before. She wanted to know what migration actually looks like: what it feels like to leave a legacy system, how long it takes, what the support is like in those first weeks. The answers came from Mel and Rory, not from me, which is precisely the point. She was talking to people who had stood where she was standing.

Other questions followed, on arrears, on the moment that chasing stops and visibility takes over, on what happens when a landlord can see everything without having to call anyone. The room knew every question before it was finished. That's what a room full of property managers looks like when the selling is out of it and the honesty is in.

Ailo conducts these evenings because we believe that peer conversation changes minds in ways that a sales pitch alone simply cannot. 

Nobody who walked into MECCA Carlton last Wednesday was under any obligation to be curious.

 They came because something in the idea of it appealed to them.

What they found was two people who had asked the same question they were asking, made a decision, and came back to describe what was on the other side of it. The old world behind them. A future that felt, in their own words, genuinely bright.

If you were in that room on Wednesday, you know what I mean. If you weren't, the next event isn't far away.

Something Happens When Nobody's Selling

Keith Trinder has been a property investor for the better part of three decades. He knows what it felt like to wait until the end of the month to understand what had happened to his money. A body corporate levy, rates notice, or water charge would arrive without warning, and the monthly statement would reveal an unwelcome surprise.

That was before his property manager, Hayley Mills, and the team at Harcourts Solutions - led by Jodie Stainton and Jess Calvert - moved the business to Ailo

For Keith, the value is not complicated. He checks the app roughly every second day - not because he is anxious, but because he can. Bills show up before they hit. Rent payments register in real time. Inspection records are there if he wants them.

That visibility has changed how he thinks about financial planning. Surprises have been replaced by visibility. The end-of-month reckoning has been replaced with an ongoing picture.

Keith's other discovery was the ability to move funds when they arrive - not when the calendar dictates it. If his tenant pays three or four weeks in advance and no bills are pending, Keith can transfer the balance immediately.

For an investor thinking about cash flow, servicing a mortgage, or simply keeping capital working, the difference between waiting until the 30th and moving money in days is meaningful.

The experience Keith describes was not accidental. Jodie and Jess and the Harcourts Solutions team made a deliberate decision when they evaluated a change in platform: investor outcomes were a primary consideration.


Jess said. "The outcomes of our investors were a high priority when we considered making the change."

Visibility was a deliberate design priority, not a feature afterthought. Jess knew that if investors could see what was happening in real time, the service standard would lift automatically — and investors would be able to do more with their money as a result.

"Faster access to funds means investors can do so much more. Paying down a mortgage faster is a real outcome for a lot of people. That was part of our thinking."

Keith was unambiguous about his assessment when asked if there was anything he would change.

"Nothing, the way this all works for me is perfect now with Harcourts, Hayley and Ailo -I can't think of any changes. I'm just happy the way it is. Don't fix it if it's not broken."

For a man who has managed investment property for thirty years through multiple systems and approaches, that is a considered position.

"You know what's happening": how real-time visibility changed everything for one long-term investor

At the One Conference in January, Ailo co-founder and CEO Ben White stepped into the property management room and asked a question most agencies haven't really sat with yet: 

what if AI's biggest impact on property management has nothing to do with efficiency?

He shared two predictions and three ways to prepare.

Prediction 1: AI will solve problems property managers don't even see today

Ben started by talking about something every PM knows but rarely names. Not the technical side of the job but the emotional side.

Running your entire day out of an overflowing inbox. Relying on post-it notes. Getting messages completely out of context. Accounting processes that practically invite errors. That knot in your stomach when you log on Monday morning. The absolute scramble when someone goes on leave.

None of these are really software problems. They're emotional ones. And they've been around so long that most people in the industry have just accepted them as part of the deal.

Ben's point was that the next generation of AI-powered platforms won't just speed up what you already do. They'll find and fix problems that have been sitting there for years, right under everyone's nose. Things the industry has always assumed were just... how it is.

Prediction 2: AI will solve landlord issues that landlords don't see today

The second prediction zoomed out from the PM to the investor, and to a bigger question about what property management could actually be.

Most agencies today define what they do pretty narrowly. Collect rent. Fix things when they break. Find tenants. AI makes it possible to offer investors something much broader.

Think about what a property investor actually deals with across the life of their investment: asset planning, mortgage decisions, assessing risk, tax planning and working out when to buy and sell.

Right now, all of that sits with different people: accountants, mortgage brokers, financial advisers, depreciation specialists. None of them are talking to each other. And none of them are connected to the agency managing the property day to day.

AI-powered platforms will pull all of this into one place. This dramatically changes what an agency can offer and how valuable the PM becomes to the investor. New services, deeper relationships, new revenue. And ultimately, it puts the agency and the property manager at the centre of a completely new ecosystem.

But the opportunity comes with a warning. If agencies don't step into that central role, someone else will.

1. Treat it as a cultural shift, not a tech one.

The biggest change coming isn't a new tool or a new platform. It's a mindset shift. Lean into the change rather than resist it, because it will be good for careers, good for businesses, and there's no viable future without it. Tech can't solve culture. That part is on you.

2. Start expecting more from your technology partners.

Most property managers have lived with clunky, disconnected systems for so long that they've stopped imagining things could be different. Look at the daily frustrations with fresh eyes. The emotional load of property management, all those hidden problems from prediction one, shouldn't just be accepted as normal. Good technology should actually solve them.

3. Start building a new ecosystem with your agency at the centre.

This is where the two predictions come together. If AI can solve PM problems they didn't know they had, and solve investor problems they didn't know they had, then the agency that brings all of that together becomes incredibly valuable. Start thinking about customer value creation across the whole investment journey. What new services could you offer? What would it look like if your agency was the hub connecting investors with everything they need? Great technology makes this possible. But it starts with the ambition to get there.

The industry is moving, and agencies that wait too long to adapt risk being left behind. If these predictions play out, property management becomes a bigger, more interesting, more rewarding career than it's ever been.

The agencies that move first won't just be more efficient. They'll be more valuable.

Ben White is the co-founder and CEO of Ailo. He presented "The future of property management in an AI world" at the One Conference PM room in January 2026.

Want to see how Ailo is building toward this future? Talk to our team.

Two predictions for AI in property management (and how to prepare)

Mel Jerzyna on Scaling Property Management Without Burning People Out

, the conversation didn’t start with growth. It started with control.

Mel runs one of the more operationally mature property management businesses I come across. She’s pragmatic, direct, and very clear on what does and doesn’t work at scale. So when she talks about growth, it’s never abstract. It’s grounded in what her team can actually sustain.

“We’ve been on Ailo just over a year now,” she told me. “Best decision. I’ve got no complaints whatsoever.”

That wasn’t said lightly. It came after a year of real-world use, not a honeymoon period.

Over the last year, Mel’s business has materially increased capacity. Where portfolios once sat around 120 properties per manager, they’re now comfortably operating well above 200.

What mattered wasn’t the headline number. It was how little drama came with it.

That framework has become the backbone of how her team works. Projects define the work. Actions surface what matters. Visibility replaces guesswork.

And that visibility extends across the team.

That shift has changed how the team supports each other. Instead of work being hidden in individual inboxes or heads, it’s shared and visible.

“They jump in and help each other because it’s so transparent,” she said.

One of the most striking parts of our conversation was Mel’s story about Wayne.

Wayne joined the business in December. He came from recruitment, not property management. No PM background. No trust accounting history. Three months in, he’s managing over 200 properties.

“He’s running 218,” Mel said, almost casually. “And his response time is 6.9 minutes.”

That number matters because it reframes the conversation entirely. This isn’t about heroic individuals. It’s about systems doing the heavy lifting.

When I asked why she hired him, Mel didn’t talk about experience.

“It was his common sense,” she said. “Recruitment is dying. He knew it. He could see that property management isn’t going anywhere. That told me he wasn’t stupid.”

“He came to the interview with the legislation printed out,” she said. “He’d already rattled off half of it.”

But here’s the critical part. Three years ago, Wayne wouldn’t have been a viable hire.

“You would’ve needed someone with ten years’ experience,” I said to her. “The risk would’ve been too high.”

“With Ailo and the projects in place, it’s pretty much foolproof,” she said. “You follow the steps. That’s it.”

Technical knowledge still matters, but it no longer defines who can succeed. Transferable skills do.

Relationship management, organisation, energy & judgment capabilities. Those are now the attributes Mel looks for.

Across the team, the numbers tell the story.

“We’ve got portfolios at 162, 218, 225,” she said. “Most of the team is over 200 now.”

Response times are measured in minutes, not days.

“In the old world, we measured reply time in days,” I said. “Now you’re talking minutes.”

“Our average is 7.6 minutes,” she said.

What that means for clients is consistency. What it means for leaders is predictability.

“I can see exactly what’s happening,” she said. “Who’s got actions outstanding. Where we need to help.”

That visibility has also changed how Mel leads.

“I’m not guessing anymore,” she said. “I’m not waiting for something to blow up.”

Towards the end of our conversation, Mel touched on something that comes up often in this industry. Fear of change.

“Everyone says, ‘My property manager will hate the change,’” she said. “They probably will for the first month.”

“But with the right support, the change actually relieves them.”

That insight is consistent with everything else she described. When systems reduce mental load, people stop resisting change because it no longer feels like risk.

“It was the best change I made without knowing it,” she said.

Mel’s story isn’t about chasing growth at all costs. It’s about creating the conditions where growth becomes possible without breaking people.

By putting structure in place, she’s changed who she can hire, how quickly people can succeed, and how confidently the team can scale.

Ailo didn’t replace experience in her business. It redistributed it. 

And in doing so, it’s allowed Mel to build a team that grows together, supports each other, and keeps raising the bar without burning out.

That’s not a feature story. It’s a growth story.

Scaling Property Management Without Burning People Out

When I caught up with Tina and Cathy from 

, what struck me wasn’t excitement about a new platform. It was the confidence it had enabled in the business and in the team, the kind that only comes from watching something evolve over time and seeing feedback taken seriously.

I was first introduced to Tina back in 2019 by 

, with a view to exploring what the future of property management systems might look like.

From that first meeting, one thing was immediately clear. Tina holds an exceptionally high standard and isn’t shy about making demands of technology partners.

For that reason, when they looked at Ailo early, they held off deliberately. They only moved when it met the standard they were prepared to put in front of their owners and their team.

That context matters. This isn’t a story about jumping early, it’s about waiting until something is genuinely ready.

And that hesitation wasn’t resistance to change. It was a responsibility to their team, and to the tenants and landlords they serve.

Watching the Platform Grow With the Business

One of the first things I wanted to understand was whether their confidence today was about what Ailo does now, or about what they believe it will continue to do. For Cathy, that answer was clear.

What mattered wasn’t just delivery, but the relationship behind it. Being able to give candid feedback, raise issues that affected real clients, and trust that those issues would be taken seriously.

Those owners had come from legacy systems they were comfortable with. The fact that their concerns had been addressed over time changed the conversation entirely.

“They were looking for certain things when we took Ailo on a couple of years ago,” Cathy said. “Those things are there now. They’re over the moon.”

I asked them how they’d speak to leaders who think they already know what Ailo is because they saw it a year or two ago.

“The most important thing is that you work with us to get the program to suit property management and our owners’ needs,” she said. “Watching the development from five years ago to today has been remarkable.”

What she was really pointing to was confidence in trajectory. Not just where the platform is, but how it listens and responds.

“You held off responsibly,” I said to Tina. “You said it wasn’t ready yet, and then you said, now it is.”

“Today, I’m an advocate for it,” she said. “Absolutely."

Genuine advocacy like that doesn't arrive out of thin air, its comes through lived experience.

When we shifted from philosophy to practice, the conversation became more concrete.

Transparency came up repeatedly, from both of them.

“Notes,” Cathy added. “Transparency. Notes.”

For Tina, this had a direct impact on how she works as a BDM and team leader.

By keeping everything in one place, handovers stopped being risky.

“If I’m off, the property manager or leaser can see exactly what was said,” she said. “They know the context.”

That continuity mattered not just internally, but to investors as well.

“Things don’t get missed,” Tina said. “That’s the most important thing for me.”

What sat underneath all of this was culture.

For LJ Hooker Narang, confidence in Ailo isn’t about features or even efficiency. It’s about knowing their team is supported, their owners feel heard, and the business can keep growing without losing its standards.

There was no sense of “sign up and see you later” in how they described the relationship with Ailo, its on ongoing, iterative and shared - even years after they made the commitment to change. 

Really, that’s what stood out most to me. This isn’t a platform they adopted and adapted themselves around. It’s one they feel has grown alongside them, responded to their reality, and continues to earn their trust

Why LJ Hooker Narang Sees Ailo as a Long-Term Partner

When I spoke with Ashleigh Roberts, I wanted to start at the highest level and work backwards.

We kicked off by discussing the bigger question of property management as it exists today versus what it could be, if the right foundations were in place.

Ashleigh has spent the better part of two decades in property management. She’s led teams, trained and coached across networks, and now operates as Principal of Belle Property Sandgate. Her perspective isn’t theoretical. It’s formed through running teams, carrying responsibility, and seeing first-hand where good people struggle.

She spoke candidly about how often property managers are left feeling frustrated, not because they lack capability, but because the systems around them make it harder than it needs to be to do a good job.

You can see why we get along. Ashleigh’s distinction is spot on, and I think that matters. In her view, much of the pressure in property management is systemic. Stress isn’t a personal failing. It’s a signal that something upstream isn’t working.

Where she believes many software providers went wrong is in misunderstanding who they were building for.

What stood out to her about Ailo wasn’t just that it considered landlords and tenants first, but that it also understood the lived experience of the property manager in the middle.

That shift had a tangible effect on the client experience.

Ashleigh was clear that fees were no longer the primary battleground. In her experience, owners were willing to pay for quality, but had lost confidence when service didn’t match expectation.

“What’s changed is that we do what we say we’re going to do,” she said. “The communication is transparent. Owners can make good decisions because they have the information. They feel they can trust their manager.”

That trust, she explained, comes from control, not in a negative sense, but from knowing exactly where things are up to at any given moment.

“If an investor calls with a question, we have an answer,” she said. “Even if it’s not the answer they were hoping for, there’s no frustration because there’s clarity.”

From a leadership perspective, the impact went deeper than service delivery.

Ashleigh talked about how empowering it is to watch capable property managers move from coping to excelling once the friction is removed.

She described it as finally giving good people what they need to be great.

“That’s the difference,” she said. “Good people don’t become great on their own.”

As our conversation turned to leadership, Ashleigh’s philosophy became even clearer. She’s not interested in being the cheapest operator in the market.

“We want to be the highest quality,” she said. “Trusted. educated and accessible.”

For her, quality means having the time and capacity to be present. To answer questions without scrambling, to walk into people’s homes with respect, and never rush a conversation that matters.

That level of care, she explained, is only possible when the systems underneath the business are doing their job quietly and reliably.

The final question I put to her was how she would speak to leaders who say property management is just too hard.

“You’re focusing on the wrong thing,” she said. “You’ve probably already had great people. They’re not staying because they don’t feel supported.”

For Ashleigh, enablement is the missing link. Not more pressure. Not more resilience training. But systems and structures that allow capable people to operate at the level they aspire to.

When someone with Ashleigh’s depth of experience speaks that plainly, it carries weight. I find it genuinely refreshing to hear leadership articulated so clearly, without ego.

This isn’t a story about switching software. It’s about recognising that calm, trust, and quality don’t happen by accident. They’re designed. And when the system supports that design, people finally get to do what they came into the industry to do.

Ashleigh Roberts on Enablement, Trust and the Future of Property Management 

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.

“The features were important, but they weren’t the deciding factor. What mattered was the outcome it enabled for everyone in the ecosystem.”

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.

“I realised pretty quickly it wasn’t about what the system could do, but what it made easier for owners, tenants, and the team.”

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.

“I had a landlord say, ‘If it’s not Ailo, I’m not interested.’ He’d already experienced it and didn’t want to go backwards. That saved both of us time. I didn’t need to sell the features. For him, it was the experience that mattered.”

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.

Ailo joins LJ Hooker at Carla Zampatti HQ for International Women's Day