Shanniah Barri on Reducing Mental Load in Property Management

When property managers talk about system change, the conversation often stays at the surface. Features. Workflows. Integrations. What’s missing from the legacy platform and what might be better somewhere else.

What I wanted to understand with Shanniah Barri was something deeper. Not just whether Ailo worked, but how it changed the way she thought about her role, her team, and her ability to actually switch off.

Shanniah is a senior property manager at Belle Property Sandgate, with more than a decade in the industry. She’s tech-savvy, process-driven, and clear about the standards she expects from the systems she uses. She also happens to have used Ailo as a tenant before ever using it as a property manager, which gave her a perspective most people don’t start with.

From Curiosity to Frustration With the Old Way

When we spoke, Shanniah described her mindset before the change as a mix of excitement and impatience. She likes technology and believes good technology should make work easier, not harder.

Her frustration wasn’t abstract.

“I felt my legacy program was clunky,” she said. “When I saw Ailo, it was just so much more intuitive. After that, every time I logged into the old system, I was annoyed that I wasn’t using Ailo.”

What bothered her most wasn’t a single missing feature. It was the accumulation of friction. Finding information was difficult. Emails were hard to track. Workflows existed but couldn’t be changed.

“We run at that one per cent more,” she explained. “But I couldn’t customise something as simple as a lease renewal email. I had to open a Word document just to send the message the way I wanted.”

The workflow dictated the process, not the other way around. You couldn’t skip steps, remove steps, or adapt them to how the team actually worked. Over time, that rigidity became exhausting.

“Ailo lets you add those extra steps,” she said. “That one per cent. Sending the owner the extra message. Reminding you to make the extra call. That’s the difference.”

She also laughed about something more subjective but no less real.

“Ailo looks prettier,” she said. “It’s clean. Everything’s where it should be. And honestly, that matters for adoption.”

Expectations Are Changing

As we talked about usability, the conversation shifted naturally to expectations, particularly for newer property managers.

Shanniah was blunt. Going backwards isn’t an option.

“When I started, we used one of the really old, non-cloud programs,” she said. “If I ever had to go back to that, I wouldn’t do it. I actually wouldn’t do property management without Ailo now.”

She sees this less as preference and more as reality. Property managers today expect systems to be intuitive, accessible, and supportive of how they work. Not confusing. Not visually hostile. Not something you dread opening.

“If you take that away,” she said, “I don’t think I’d stay.”

When Everything Lives in Your Head

One of the most important moments in our conversation came when Shanniah explained how she used to manage her workload.

“For a long time, it was fine because it was just me,” she said. “I’ve been doing this for 12 years. I relied on my brain. Mondays I do this. Tuesdays I do that.”

But that reliance came at a cost.

“There was nothing prompting me,” she said. “It was all in my head.”

That meant sick days were stressful. Leave was stressful. Even evenings at home were interrupted by doubt.

“Seven o’clock at night, you’re thinking, did I do that lease renewal? Is it due? I can’t remember because I’m working off my brain.”

With Ailo, that mental load shifted.

“If it wasn’t done, I’d know,” she said. “It would be in the actions. I don’t have to think about it.”

As a parent, that mattered.

“You have to be present at home,” she said. “Work mental load makes you not present.”

Being Able to Switch Off, Properly

I asked her directly how important it was to be able to switch off.

“It’s the most important thing ever,” she said.

She described taking four weeks off over Christmas, something that would previously have been unthinkable.

“I could see the workload before I left,” she said. “What was coming up. What was expiring.”

She set her colleague up with a clear list of actions, knowing that if those were completed, there would be no surprises.

“I didn’t think about work for three weeks,” she said.

The contrast with the past was stark.

“Before, you’d come back and do an audit. Check lease renewals. Check what happened while you were away. This time, we just came in and knew what the actions were.”

That predictability, she said, was everything.

The Impact Goes Beyond Work

As we wrapped up, it became clear that the impact of Ailo wasn’t confined to productivity or efficiency.

“It’s the mental load,” she said. “You carry that into your relationship with your kids.”

When a system allows you to trust that nothing is being missed, it doesn’t just change how you work. It changes how you live.

For Shanniah, that balance is no longer negotiable.