Zero to 380 properties in a year, starting from a kitchen bench
Ailo
21 August 2026
In June last year, Sarah Smith was sitting at her kitchen bench with no office, no staff, and no properties. Today her business manages around 400, most of it organic growth, and she runs it with a systemised approach to growth that most of the industry treats as luck or elbow grease.
“I think about growth from a data nurturing and generation point of view,” she says. “If you can look at it from a database creation standpoint where you go, this is a 12 month journey, your mindset entirely changes.”
— Sarah Smith, The Modern Agent
Her framework is disciplined. Build the database properly, keep it privacy compliant, wash it every twelve months, and nurture it so that no contact ever lands cold. "If you're the enduring person, past 12 months, you're 90 per cent further along than the majority of people in the industry."
But the differentiation underneath it is not tactical. "I'm not talking about we're different because we've got low fees," she says. "What they want is connectivity. They want to be able to call someone. Are you contactable? If that is what you're different at, and you can be good at that, and Ailo truly enables that - then you'll always attract business."
The hardest part of promising connectivity is keeping the promise while growing at speed. Sarah is candid that her move to Ailo was not comfortable. "It was something that was thought out for a really long time. Really change resistant," she says.
“I knew that I had to make a decision that was better for my team and not for me personally.” With four new staff arriving through an acquisition, she needed a system that could hold her checklists, policies and procedures without everything funnelling back to her. “It is better for the business. It is better for the operations. It is better for the consumers. Then it was a no-brainer.”
— Sarah Smith, The Modern Agent
The early evidence is showing up in small moments. An owner recently emailed asking her to update his bank details, something she will never accept over email for privacy reasons. She offered to confirm by phone, or he could do it himself in the app. "He emailed me back and said, all good. I found it. I've done it myself."
At 400 properties in a pod-based team, those moments are the whole game.
“Owners have really good connectivity, but owners also have the ability to reach out to another person if they can't get me and it's urgent. It was a decision made specifically to support my team, to enable them to be better at their jobs. And if I'm more available, I can list and sell more, and I can continue to grow the business.”
— Sarah Smith, The Modern Agent
The next twelve months, she says, will not look like the last. Having built the database the hard way, she is turning toward attraction: social, educational content, being visibly different in a saturated market. "A lot of people do a lot of things and they just don't do them fully."
That instinct to do things fully traces back through her career. She spent years in corporate roles, including running operations across 28 offices and later consulting to 125 businesses in a state role. What she took from that vantage point was not a playbook but a conviction.
That instinct to do things fully traces back through her career. She spent years in corporate roles, including running operations across 28 offices and later consulting to 125 businesses in a state role. What she took from that vantage point was not a playbook but a conviction.
“It made me realise that was a select group of people that just took a risk on themselves, and none of them really knew what they were doing entirely. Most of them just figured it out the entire way along.”
— Sarah Smith, The Modern Agent
She left corporate because no title, however senior, let her run a business on her own values. "How can you ever impact or affect real change if you're not in genuine control?"
Control is a word she handles carefully, and she lands on a better one.
“Call it accountability, call it responsibility, call it whatever you want. The buck stops with me. Stuff will go wrong, my team will make mistakes, we will grow and we will lose managements. But controlling the accountability of the consumer experience is the most important thing to me.”
— Sarah Smith, The Modern Agent
From a kitchen bench to 400 properties, that is the through-line: a business where the standard is hers to set, and hers to answer for.