What changed at 200, 750 and 4,000 properties

Kara Davoren, Allana Neale, and Felicity Apps sat on the same panel with almost nothing in common on paper. One is twelve months into her career. One built her portfolio from a single desk into one of the largest in Western Sydney. One runs a tight team that manages more per person than most principals would attempt. Asked what Ailo had changed, they described the same thing from three different distances.

Kara is the newcomer, and it shows in the best way. She has been a property manager for twelve months, all of it on Ailo, with no memory of how the job used to be done.

She manages 200 properties and, twelve months in, is already certain she could hold more.

What lands is not the ambition but the ease behind it. She admits she was frightened of property management before she started, having watched how the pressure sat on people. That is not how she describes her own week.

"I'd go home feeling free," she said. For a room of managers who remember the old version of the job, a first-year property manager who goes home free and wants a bigger portfolio is a quietly radical thing to hear.

Allana is the growth story. She was the first property manager in her business, sitting on 200 properties. It has since grown to just over 4,000 managements and, by her account, the number one operation in Western Sydney. The teams are built in pods, each running around 400 properties with a senior, a property manager, a leasing officer, and an assistant. What made that scale possible, she says, was visibility.

"Before Ailo, I had no idea how to manage a team," she said. Now, when someone takes leave or calls in sick, she does not spend the morning digging through an inbox to work out what is outstanding. She logs in, sees what was actioned and what is due, and handles the priorities before a landlord ever notices a gap. She is candid that she resisted at first, comfortable with what she knew.

"Once we transferred over, the capacity and being able to give that good service, it changed everything," she said.

Her description of the old way is the one every principal recognises.

Felicity is the established hand who did the hard yards early. Ben first visited her office three or four years ago and, by his own admission, did not convince her on the spot. She interrogated it, then moved. Her team is four people with three admin staff, and three of those property managers manage 750 properties between them, heading towards 250 each by the end of the year. The change she values most is not operational, it is human. "There was a lot of anxiety back in the day, people going home to think about work," she said. That has gone. She mentions, almost in passing, that she forgot it was end of financial year that afternoon, and the reports had already gone out. What she remembers of the old life is Christmas.

When she talks about the move itself, she is honest that the first weeks were rough, and warm about how they got through it, hosting an information night for landlords and taking cups of tea and biscuits to the ones who could not make it into the office.

Three businesses, three completely different areas, and the same sentence underneath all of it. They are each carrying more than they used to, with no more compromise.