Ailo is a new way to manage rental properties in Australia. We’ve built a technology platform to help renters, owners and property managers all work together to turn a good investment into a great home.

As a renter, a lot of what Ailo does to help improve your tenancy experience is behind the scenes.

We help your property manager with things like managing maintenance requests and paying trades – so that if things break, your property manager can get them fixed quickly. We also help them organise and manage money, so they can spend less time doing accounting and more time managing your property.

The part of Ailo you'll see and hear about the most though is our mobile app for renters, and the additional payment options it offers.

The app is designed to empower you with more visibility and flexibility when it comes to paying rent – and to help you communicate more easily with your property manager. We give you a range of payment methods, the choice to pay manually or automatically, the ability to coordinate payments as a group of tenants, a log of all your past rent payments, an embedded chat platform so you can get hold of your property manager faster – the list goes on.

As your agency moves over to Ailo, there are a number of really positive things you can and should expect to change (in addition to your rent payment options) – and this article goes through each of these key changes.

Ailo has a lot of automation and workflow management tools to help property managers manage their work more effectively. As a result, we know from our data that, as a renter, you will see repairs being completed more quickly.

But better project management tools is only part of the solution.

We’ve seen first hand how agencies are building stronger relationships with their property investors through Ailo, making it easier and faster to get repair and maintenance work prioritised and approved faster. Our embedded messaging platform also helps with this.

And, through Ailo’s industry-first payments platform, agencies are able to support their network of quality tradespeople with faster payments – which means tradespeople are more and more likely to prioritise jobs with Ailo agencies. Typically, tradespeople have to wait until end of month (or even longer for larger bills that need multiple rent cycles to cover them) to get paid, which can be crippling for small businesses who rely on strong cash flow.

Communication is at the core of any good relationship. But old technology has made it really difficult for property managers to keep everyone in the loop and on track.

We built communication into the heart of Ailo, so your property managers can keep you updated and respond to your questions faster and more proactively. Here’s how:

First, we wanted to give your property manager new ways to engage with you that are faster and easier.

So, we started by building smart notifications like auto rent reminders and live rent ledgers into a custom-built smartphone app for renters to give you real-time, 24/7 access to your payments history, paid-to date, and upcoming rent payments and bills. That means you don’t have to wait for someone to ring you back to confirm when your next rent payment is due or whether your last rent payment cleared.

We also built an embedded messaging platform directly into Ailo (called Chat), making it easier for your property manager to respond to you even when they're out of the office at inspections or leasing appointments – and work through issues quickly without the unnecessary formality of traditional communication tools. Chats can be shared with roommates and even split into threads, so you can keep things clear and organised (unlike old school emails!). Last time we crunched the numbers, a typical agency on Ailo responded to chats within 4.7 hours.

Second, we pull all your chats and emails with your property manager into one place for your property manager and their team to see in their Ailo app. This makes it easy for them to see what’s going on and respond to you quickly. It also means the whole agency team knows what’s going on, so if somebody goes on holiday or leaves, you’re not having to explain things again or dig through old emails. Everything is securely stored in Ailo. You can also export your conversations if you ever need to.

Finally, Ailo links your emails, chats and any documents or photos you send into their project management tool, so all of your conversations are in context of the task they are completing for you.

In our experience, too many rental properties are not compliant with the patchwork of complex and evolving State and Federal legislation designed to protect renters from house fires, electrical faults and strangulation from corded windows and blinds. In Queensland alone, we’ve found almost a quarter of rental properties are not compliant upon first inspection.

That is why we partnered with Australia's leading compliance provider to make it easier for your property manager and landlord to keep your home compliant and safe for you and your family. The solution is embedded directly into your property manager’s Ailo app, and the automations and smart project management tools we’ve built make it simple to stay on top of legally-required inspections and hardware repairs and maintenance

We offer this solution to Ailo agencies in major cities and towns across Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and the ACT – and are continuously working to expand our reach.

Traditionally, property managers offered only a handful of payment options for renters: cash, direct debit or bank transfer.

With Ailo, agencies are able to offer a broader range of payment methods including the ability to pay rent or bills with a bank account, debit card or even credit card if cash is tight one month or you want to boost rewards points.

Ailo is also the only property management platform to integrate with CentrePay, which means renters on government assistance can have their rent paid directly from Centrelink through Ailo.

Each payment method available through Ailo offers a different experience, and some have different fees associated with them. You can learn more about your payment options here.

For share houses, Ailo also makes it simple to split the rent between everyone on the lease. In older systems, if someone hadn’t paid on time, renters and property managers had no way of knowing who to blame and everyone suffered as a consequence. The Ailo app makes it crystal clear who has paid and who owes what.

We don't think renters should have to pay rent early just because it takes 2-3 days to clear in someone else's bank account. In the Ailo app, we can see the minute you've paid, so we consider rent paid immediately (before it's cleared by the banks). That way you never have to worry about clearing times or long weekends - the due date is the day you have to pay. Easy.

Similarly, in Ailo your paid-to date advances on a daily basis which means you can make more frequent smaller payments if money is tight one month to avoid going into arrears. Before Ailo, agencies typically could not support multiple, small payments because of the enormous overhead required to accept, receipt and reconcile each payment. Our fee-free payment method on the Ailo app – one-off bank account transfers – was designed specifically to support renters in this situation.

We built Ailo to help put trust and transparency back into property management so everyone who rents, manages, owns or services a rental property has a better experience.

Your agency invested in Ailo, because they want to deliver a better service to their clients. For renters, this means they want to make it easier for you to get a hold of them, they want to be able to coordinate repairs quicker, and they want to give you more visibility, choice, and control over your rent and bill payments.