What it means for your property manager to be on Ailo | investors
Ailo
25 January 2024
Investing in a rental property is a big decision. And you deserve a great property manager by your side to help you manage your investment day-to-day and stay on track to achieve your financial goals.
That’s why your property manager has invested in Ailo. They strive for excellence, and they are committed to transforming the way they work to deliver an even better service to you.
What does better mean? It means they want to be more responsive and adaptable to your needs and preferences. They want to make it easier for you to get a hold of them and to access important information like balances and upcoming expenses yourself. They want to give you better tools to maximise your cash flow, minimise mortgage stress, and more easily manage your expenses. They want to take care of maintenance and repairs faster, so your renters are happier and want to stay longer.
Importantly, they want you to feel supported, confident, and in control.
Ailo is a new approach to property management that uses technology to give you this level of choice and convenience that you’ve come to expect in other parts of your life already.
Technology is transforming services everywhere. It’s giving us more choice and convenience by putting us in control of the service we use – from the way we bank, to the way we invest, to the way we order taxis and takeaway food, and now to the way we manage investment properties.
As your agency moves over to Ailo, there are a number of really positive things you can and should expect to change as they transform how they work day-to-day. This blog explains more about Ailo and goes through each of these key changes, including:
- What is Ailo?
- What can I expect if my property manager uses Ailo?
- What is the Ailo app, and why should I use it?
1. What is Ailo?
At Ailo, we’re in the business of helping property managers transform how they work day-to-day, so they can get closer to their customers (you!).
To do this, we built a technology platform called Ailo to help your property manager manage rental properties in new and powerful ways – and to help them build better relationships with customers, and better businesses, as a result.
Put simply, property managers use Ailo to deliver better and new services. In this respect, Ailo is more than just a new piece of technology. It’s a wholly new and up-to-date approach to property management. The next section of this blog delves into what this transformation means for you.
The part about Ailo you'll probably see and hear about the most is our mobile app for property investors, called ‘the Ailo app’. The app gives you access to even more new (and better) services. And, it gives you the ability to deeply customise how you work with your property manager to maximise your investment.
We believe everyone can win in property management, and designed Ailo to prove it. You can read more about Ailo and our mission here.
2. What can I expect if my property manager uses Ailo?
In addition to an overall lift in customer service, here’s why property investors prefer agencies who use Ailo to manage their investments:
We offer more payment options to help renters stay up-to-date on rent
We allow your property manager to offer more fast and secure payment methods to renters to make it easier for them to pay consistently on time – including direct debit, manual bank transfer, credit card, debit card, and even Centrepay.
Our embedded payments platform gives renters the choice to pay manually or automatically and easily coordinate payments as a group of tenants. Plus, we built smart notifications for upcoming rent, and made it crystal clear what date tenants are paid up to in their Ailo app for renters.
It sounds crazy, but simply showing renters their paid-to date and sending auto-reminders when their rent is due has seen agencies on Ailo experience astronomical drops in arrears.
A more responsive property management team
Ailo makes communication a lot easier and faster.
To begin, your property manager has their Ailo app with them all day, which means they can respond to you when they’re out of the office at inspections and leasings.
We’ve also built technically that not only pulls all of your emails into their Ailo app and associates it to your property – it also gives them the ability to pin your messages to the different tasks they are working on for you. For example, if you email approval for a quote to fix a broken dishwasher, that email is also logged in their repair task for easy reference by anyone on the team. This not only makes it easier for them to keep you in the loop, it also makes it easy for another member of their team to jump in and keep things moving if your property manager is off sick or on leave.
Faster repairs with better quality tradies
Ailo has a lot of automation and workflow management tools to help property managers manage their work more effectively. As a result, we see in our data that repairs are being completed more quickly. But better project management tools is only part of the solution.
Having a stable income is more important than ever these days. That’s why we’ve made it easier for your renters to not only pay rent on time but to also flag concerns, repairs and maintenance, so your property manager can resolve issues sooner. 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. This delay can be crippling for small businesses who rely on strong cash flow. With quality trades in high demand, this is a huge advantage.
Less stress at tax time
Keeping documents in order for tax time can be time consuming and stressful. With Ailo, there’s no need to keep an old shoe box full of invoices and statements to tackle at year end.
On 1 July, we automatically email you an easy-to-read, end of financial year statement. All of your property expenses, whether you paid for them with a credit card or from rental income, are logged and included.
Plus, your statement and accompanying emails will include a link to a ZIP file that will contain all of your bills processed and uploaded through Ailo during the fiscal year – making it easy for you to simply forward the one email to your accountant.
Peace of mind your property is compliant
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.
Ailo partnered with Australia’s leading compliance provider to make it easier for your property manager to keep your investment property compliant and safe for your renters.
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. Plus, to help with your cash flow and eliminate any surprise bills, we automatically break down your annual bill into a more manageable monthly fee deducted directly from your rental income.
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.
Our goal is to educate you on your legal obligations as a rental property owner, and give you peace of mind that your tenants are safe and you are protected from unacceptable legal risks of noncompliance.
3. What is the Ailo app, and why should I download it?
This isn’t just another useless app or portal that’s home to all your monthly statements and not much else. The Ailo app was designed to elevate your experience owning an investment property.
From better visibility into what’s going on to direct access to funds, there are many reasons property investors love the Ailo app. But the most common theme we hear is around customisation and personalisation, so let’s start there:
Customise the service to your unique situation
Every property and every property investor is unique. So why is it that property management has traditionally been a one-size-fits-all proposition? For the first time ever, the Ailo app gives property owners more choice, control, and visibility in how their property manager manages their investment – and their relationship.
Whether you want to delegate everything and only be called in an emergency or you want full control so you can tinker and find new ways to make your money work harder (or somewhere in between!), the Ailo app gives you more choice and control to match the service to your unique needs.
Through the Ailo app, you control your profile and account settings including when and where your funds are deposited and when and how your bills are paid.
You can group multiple investment properties together and automatically use income from one to cover bills for another. You can choose to communicate with your property manager via in-app chat, phone or email. You can update your preferred name, add a secondary phone number, upload a profile photo, or change your email address.
You can skim your statements when they come through via email on the first day of every month, or you can hop into the app after a late night at the office to see how much income you can expect in your account after council rates this month.
Importantly, you can change your preferences anytime, on your own schedule.
You get direct access to your income 24/7
Why should you have to wait until the end of month to access your rental income? Downloading the Ailo app will give you direct access to your funds 24/7, so you access your income sooner.
For example, to help offset the rising rate environment, you’ll have the option to transfer your income directly onto your mortgage within minutes after your renter’s payment clears in Ailo instead of waiting for your property manager to manually transfer it to your offset account at the end of the month.
Ailo uses the New Payments Platform (NPP), so you can instantly transfer funds from Ailo to an eligible bank account within minutes instead of waiting the usual 1-2 business days.
Improve your cash flow with more bill payment options
You don't need to keep rental income sitting dormant in your agency’s trust account, not earning you interest and waiting for a bill to come in. You now have the option to withdraw your rental income anytime, and cover expenses with your debit or credit card instead the day they are due (and not a moment sooner!) – and collect those rewards points!
Your bills, no matter how you paid for them, will still be reflected in your statements to make tax time easier.
There is typically a small service fee to pay bills via your Ailo app using credit card, debit card or automated direct debit. However, we are currently reviewing our payment methods for bills, and as a result have placed a waiver on all service fees for bill payments for the time being. Paying bills with rental income, of course, is free.
Always know what’s going on with 24/7 instant access
It can be frustrating to have to wait for someone to reply or call you back during office hours. Why should you have to wait for someone else to start their workday (or for a statement at the end of the month), so you can get the information you need to complete your tax return or review your cash flow?
With the app, you get instant access to your live balance, statements, historical transactions, and a list of upcoming bills so you can easily see whether you'll have enough rental income to cover them.
At Ailo, we believe you deserve more transparency into the status of your rental income, too. That is why you (and your property manager) can see your rent as soon as it’s paid, even before it’s cleared by the banks. So if the rent is late, your property manager can get on top of it sooner.
The goal is no end-of-month surprises.
Fast, secure and more immediate responses with in-app chat
The Ailo app has an embedded communications platform that lets you quickly and easily send secure messages directly to your property manager. We call this feature, Chat.
Chat lets you have a quick back-and-forth conversation with your property manager and without the (unnecessary) formalities and lag of more traditional tools like email. In fact, many of our property investors argue it’s a much more efficient and accessible way to contact their property manager compared to email or phone. Some also love having all of their communication about their investment property in one place in their app, instead of having to dig through their overflowing email inboxes.
Elevating your investment experience
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. And a better experience starts with giving you more and better choices.
If you don’t want to download the Ailo app, that’s okay. You don’t have to. Whenever you are ready to unlock an easier way to communicate with your property manager, access bills, statements and real-time balances on your own time, and take more control over when and where your funds are deposited (and how your bills are paid!) – our door is always open.