White

When I first spoke with Shannyn Laird, what struck me wasn’t her enthusiasm for a new platform. It was how deliberately she talked about outcomes.

“The features were important, but they weren’t the deciding factor. What mattered was the outcome it enabled for everyone in the ecosystem.”

Shannyn isn’t coming at property management from a single angle. She runs property management operations day to day as Director and Head of PM at Havenly Property, and she also advises agencies across Australia and New Zealand through her consulting practice. She’s spent close to two decades inside the mechanics of the industry, watching where things break, why teams burn out, and how systems either support or quietly undermine good operators.

So when we discussed her decision to choose Ailo for the next phase of her business, I wanted to understand what really tipped that decision.

She admitted that, like most experienced operators, she started by looking at features. She wanted to be confident the experience for owners and tenants would be properly supported. On paper, Ailo ticked the boxes. But it didn’t take long for her focus to shift.

“I realised pretty quickly it wasn’t about what the system could do, but what it made easier for owners, tenants, and the team.”

What mattered more than functionality was what the system enabled. Not just for her business, but for everyone connected to it. Owners. Tenants. Contractors. Suppliers. The platform wasn’t asking people to adapt to it. It was shaping behaviour in a way that made good outcomes easier to achieve.

That difference became obvious very quickly. In the first couple of months, her business experienced rapid growth, the kind that often exposes cracks. Instead, onboarding felt calm. Tenants were comfortable using the system. Owners found the transparency helpful rather than overwhelming. They knew when to reach out for the moments that mattered, and for everything else, they had what they needed without picking up the phone.

Shannyn works with a wide range of investors, including offshore owners who typically introduce more complexity, not less. What surprised her was how well optionality worked when it was designed properly. Investors could manage bills, choose how they paid, and still have everything recorded cleanly for end-of-financial-year reporting. Instead of creating more process, flexibility reduced it.

“I had a landlord say, ‘If it’s not Ailo, I’m not interested.’ He’d already experienced it and didn’t want to go backwards. That saved both of us time. I didn’t need to sell the features. For him, it was the experience that mattered.”

Given her consulting background, I was particularly interested in how support landed. Shannyn has seen enough implementations to know the difference between a help desk and a partner.

She told me about a trust accounting question late on a Friday afternoon. Instead of being pointed to an article or asked to log a ticket, she received a call. Someone walked her through it, checked in the next day, then followed up the next month when she had to do it again. Just after five o’clock, an email landed confirming everything had been done correctly, along with a simple “have a great weekend”.

That moment stuck with her. Not because it was dramatic, but because it built confidence. She wasn’t just getting an answer. She was learning how to navigate the system properly, without the background stress that so often comes with trust accounting.

“They didn’t just answer the question. They showed me how to do it, checked in the next day, and checked again the next month. That meant I felt confident navigating something new without feeling like I had to figure it out on my own.”

Shannyn is unapologetically process-driven. She believes strongly in consistency and repeatability, particularly when teams are split across onshore and offshore roles. But she’s equally clear that process alone isn’t enough. Property management might look black and white on paper, but in practice it’s full of nuance. Compliance needs to be easy not to compromise on, but people also need support when the process isn’t quite enough.

That balance, between structure and humanity, is something she sees missing in many platforms. It’s also where she believes Ailo behaves differently.

One moment in our conversation captured the shift she’s seeing in the market. A landlord asked what software her agency used. Before she could explain anything, he stopped her. If it wasn’t Ailo, he wasn’t interested. He’d experienced it with another agency and didn’t want to go backwards.

For Shannyn, that wasn’t about winning a deal faster. It was a signal that technology is no longer invisible to clients. In some cases, it’s become shorthand for service quality.

Because she was building with scale in mind, Shannyn was determined to avoid fragmented systems from the start. She didn’t want separate journeys for sales, onboarding, and property management. Everything needed to live in one place so context wasn’t lost when a client moved from one team to another. When a property manager took over, they had the full picture from the first interaction, not a stripped-back version that required rebuilding trust.

As both a growth manager and a business owner, the responsibility ultimately sits with her. What Ailo gave her was clarity. She can see where her team needs support at a glance, assign work intelligently, and set templates once instead of reinventing the wheel. There’s no reliance on side tools, no chasing updates across platforms. Just visibility into who’s struggling, where to lean in, and how to keep things effective without burning people out.

What stayed with me after the conversation wasn’t a list of benefits. It was how intentional her choices were.

Shannyn didn’t choose Ailo to make the early days easier. She chose it because it aligned with how she believes property management businesses should work as they grow. 

Structured without being rigid and human without being chaotic.

When someone who both runs property management operations and advises other agencies on improving theirs makes that call, it’s worth paying attention and the way Shannyn phrased this was spot on. 

"Features matter, but only if they get out of the way, reduce complexity, and allow you to focus on what actually matters, and thats what Ailo enables".

Designing a Property Management Business Around Outcomes

Cloud

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.

“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.”

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.”

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.”

“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.”

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

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

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.

“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.

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.

Shanniah Barri on Reducing Mental Load in Property Management

When I speak with principals about changing property management systems, the hesitation is rarely about ambition. It’s about disruption. Most can see there’s a better way, but the perceived cost of change feels higher than the pain of staying put.

Ben’s business wasn’t underperforming. His team was capable. The intent was there. But the weight of complexity was pulling him back into the weeds every day.

I asked Ben how he’d convince another Belle principal, or any principal, who feels there must be a better way but is afraid to make the leap.

“I used to get called into multiple times daily,” he said. “Complexities, issues, trust account questions. It all just landed in my basket.”

Traditional software, layered integrations and fragmented communication channels had turned property management into a constant exception-handling exercise. Money sat in trust accounts longer than it needed to. Reconciliation felt heavy. Mid-month and end-of-month were events, not processes.

“Reconciliation is daily. It’s simple. Mid-month and end-of-month just happen. It’s a blip on the radar now.”

What replaced that noise was space. Space to work on the business rather than in it. Space for the team to focus on relationships.

That shift showed up externally sooner than Ben expected. He was recently complimented by another Sunshine Coast agent whose properties they manage.

“He said, whatever you’re doing, it’s excellent. I’ve got properties all over the country, and your communication and service have stepped up more than anyone else.”

From my perspective, Ben’s team always had the capability. What Ailo unlocked was consistency.

“The trust accounting and money side of it used to feel like foreign ground. People were scared of it,” he said. “Now it’s completely transparent and visible to everyone. Owners and tenants.”

We circled back to complexity, because that word kept coming up.

Before the switch, communication lived everywhere. Email. Teams. Outlook. WhatsApp. Individual inboxes and personal workflows. Every handover meant context loss.

“When someone left, went on maternity leave or travelled, all that knowledge left with them,” Ben said. “You couldn’t collaborate properly around a tenant or owner’s wishes.”

Now, the work lives in one place. Conversations, context and decisions stay with the property, not the person.

“Thankfully, my team doesn’t tag me in anything anymore,” he said. “They don’t need to.”

One question I always ask is what surprised someone after making the change. Not in the demo, but once the dust settled.

“I underestimated how simple the learning curve was,” he said.

This mattered more than it might sound. Ben is wired for change. His team isn’t chasing novelty. They value consistency.

“The fact that you can bring in people with no PM background, young people, people from other countries, and vault them in quickly, that was huge,” he said. “It’s not a steep learning curve.”

The impact was tangible. Ben used to spend significant time in the PM team. Now, he’s politely asked to leave.

“They’re like, we know what we’re doing. You don’t need to be here.”

That’s not disengagement. That’s confidence.

Ben was blunt about something else. Many solutions he was offered were complex by design, built for scale at the expense of relationships.

“That’s not the future of our industry,” he said. “This is relationship-based. Owners and tenants want to know who they’re dealing with.”

Systems shouldn’t replace relationships. They should protect them.

From where I sit, that’s the real win. When principals can step back without things falling apart, scalability stops being theoretical.

I asked Ben whether 2026 looks different now that Ailo is embedded.

His answer wasn’t about headcount or tech. It was about posture.

He entered the year with a rejuvenated team, fresh leadership at Head of Department level, and momentum already built.

“It’s enabled everyone to be growth-focused,” he said. “Senior PMs, assistants, inspections coordinators. They’re all thinking about growth now.”

“I’ve got six BDMs now, not six property managers who never left their desks.”

What stood out to me in this conversation wasn’t a feature or a metric. It was the absence of noise.

When complexity is removed, teams don’t just move faster. They move differently. They stop firefighting and start building.

Ben Radcliff didn’t need more effort from his team. He needed a system that stopped getting in their way.

And that, more than anything, is what changed the trajectory of Belle Property Noosa, Coolum & Marcoola.

Belle Property Noosa, Coolum & Marcoola: Reducing Complexity to Unlock Growth

Sky Reverse Gradient

I wanted to speak with Jazmin Hermione because her name keeps coming up.

Not through brand deals or loud promotion, but through comment sections, stitched videos, and peer-to-peer recommendations. Jazmin has built a reputation for being candid and practical when it comes to money, particularly from a tenant’s point of view. She tells it as it is, without trying to sell an outcome.

She’s also clear about what she isn’t doing. Jazmin does not present herself as a financial adviser. She shares knowledge she has picked up through experience, moving out, paying rent, setting up credit, and learning how everyday systems actually work.

“I definitely had to do a lot of digging myself,” she told me. “So if I’ve already figured some things out from life experience, I just want to share it so it’s easier for other people.”

Jazmin is part of a growing wave of Australian finance creators filling a gap left by traditional education. Her content focuses on personal finance, budgeting, and everyday money decisions, delivered in plain language to Gen Z and young millennials navigating inflation, housing affordability, and rising rents.

What sets her apart is tone. There is no moralising. No scare tactics. No judgement.

“I just enjoy answering questions and sharing my experience,” she said. “Judgement-free.”

That approach has built trust, particularly with renters who feel talked about, but rarely spoken with.

One of Jazmin’s most engaged TikTok videos explored paying rent via credit card. The reactions were immediate. Some viewers focused on the surcharge. Jazmin focused on the net outcome in her own circumstances.

“We never got a credit card because we wanted to go into debt,” she explained. “It was very strategic.”

Putting rent on a credit card came with a surcharge, but the rewards points she earned more than covered the cost.

“In my head, that was still a seven or eight dollar profit,” she said. “The math worked out positive for us, and I was happy putting that towards travel.”

Those points funded flights. One trip each year, paid for with rent that had to be paid regardless.

Her point was not that everyone should do the same. It was that rent is often treated as a fixed, passive cost, when in reality different households have different priorities, cash flows, and tolerances. For Jazmin, the approach worked because it aligned with her situation, not because it was a universal solution.

Jazmin’s experience using digital payment platforms highlighted what mattered most to her, not features, but how it felt.

“Just having an app on my phone where I can check if rent’s been paid, see my history, change the card if I need to, message quickly. Everything’s in one place.”

That visibility mattered even more in a shared tenancy. Everyone could see the same information. No guessing. No tension about whether rent had gone through.

“It just made the experience easier,” she said. “There were different payment options, and if I wanted to use a credit card, I could.”

What mattered was not the method itself, but the ability to choose deliberately, or not at all, based on what made sense at the time.

It is important to be clear about what this conversation is not. Jazmin is not suggesting tenants should put rent on a credit card, stretch their cash flow, or use debt to manage rising costs. Cash flow still comes first.

What she is highlighting is the value of understanding what options exist, and being able to opt in only when it genuinely suits a household’s circumstances, rather than being locked into a single, inflexible way of paying.

That distinction between availability and obligation is subtle, but powerful.

Jazmin’s content resonates strongly with renters.

“I feel like rent is probably everyone’s biggest expense,” she said. “If you can actually get a little bit of benefit from paying it, anyone would jump on that opportunity.”

She is sharing what she has learned as a tenant and encouraging others to ask better questions about the systems they interact with every week.

Her influence sits in awareness, and it is a message resonating loudly in a growing marketplace of tenants looking for more from their rental experience. More visibility. More choice. More control.

And a clearer understanding that even within a system they do not own, there are still levers they can pull.

This article shares one tenant’s personal experience and perspective. It is not financial advice. Consider your own circumstances and cash flow before making decisions about payment methods.

Why Jazmin Hermione Thinks Rent Should Work Harder for Tenants

                    What Our Customers Say

Ailo co-founder Ben White and Harcourts Solutions Group Property Management Director Jodie Stainton sat down with Real Estate Business to discuss what's really changing in property management. Spoiler: it's not just the technology.

When property managers wake up anxious about checking their emails, when landlords switch to shares because the real estate investment experience has been so poor, when talented team members leave the industry altogether – these aren't software problems. They're cultural ones.

That was the central theme of a recent conversation between Ben White, co-founder and CEO of Ailo, and 

, Group Property Management Director at Harcourts Solutions, on the Real Estate Business podcast. 

What started as a discussion about property management technology quickly became something much bigger: a conversation about reshaping an entire industry's approach to service, culture, and customer experience.

One of the most striking moments in the conversation came when Ben talked about something most property managers know intimately but rarely discuss openly: anxiety.

"I'm obsessed with anxiety in property management at the moment," he said. At industry events, when he asks property managers if they're nervous about returning to the office tomorrow, hands go up across the room.

Machines are good at prioritising messages based on sentiment, urgency, and importance. People checking their inbox at 2am hoping to get to "inbox zero" are not.

"Why shouldn't the work be prioritised based on importance rather than time?" Ben asked. "There's absolutely no reason why that can't be done."

For Jodie, this resonated deeply. At Harcourts Solutions, she noticed team members were building elaborate ecosystems around their core system just to do their jobs – Trello boards, Asana projects, Slack channels, even a physical key system.

"We had two people sitting on the front desk every day assigning emails because we had one email inbox," she said. "I can't know how quickly we're getting back to people because who knows?"

These weren't efficiency problems. They were signs that property managers had accepted working conditions no other professional would tolerate.

A running theme throughout the conversation was pushback against the narrative that younger workers are entitled or difficult.

Jodie agreed. If property managers are leaving for competitors, if talented people are choosing other industries, that's not a generational issue. It's a leadership issue.

"Do you want to work for a leader that is pushing the edge, may be wrong sometimes, but at least is pushing?" Ben asked. "Or do you want to work for a leader that says 'I couldn't be bothered, maybe it's a fad'?"

In 2026, people want advancement in their careers. They want to work for leaders with vision. Salary alone isn't enough anymore.

Both Ben and Jodie kept returning to a central insight: in service industries, culture and customer experience are inseparable.

"You can have two identical restaurants serving the same food," Ben said. "If you have different culture in the team and the way they service you, the experience is fundamentally different."

For Jodie, this meant being intentional about every detail. Her team doesn't speak negatively about clients or tenants. Ever. It's not acceptable in her office.

"I had a new team member come in and she'd been there for a few weeks and we had our check-in," Jodie said. "She told me, 'I've never worked in a place where I haven't heard people say that tenant's this or that owner's that.' I think that was the moment where I went, okay, I'm actually doing some good things here."

She extends the same standard to how team members speak about each other.

One of the most interesting threads in the conversation was about transparency as a cultural statement.

Ben talked about inviting an actual customer to sit in on a full-day strategic planning session with Ailo's leadership team and advisers. "We talked about our business warts and all. This person was there and it was wonderful. I think it's one of the best things we've done."

The message it sent through the team: this customer relationship isn't theoretical. We're actually committed to building this together.

For property management businesses, choosing software that doesn't allow you to turn off landlord or renter visibility is a similar cultural statement. You're saying to your clients: we're committed to transparency. You can see what we see. We're on the same team.

"That's not a technology statement, it's a cultural statement," Ben noted.

Both Ben and Jodie acknowledged they're making big claims about where property management is heading. And they're comfortable with that.

"History will judge if we're successful," Ben said. "But we're going to see it."

For Jodie, the proof is already showing up in her business. 

. Her clients are more engaged. Her agency is growing.

But beyond metrics, there's something more fundamental happening. Property managers on her team are taking annual leave without anxiety. They're following clear priorities instead of drowning in their inbox. They're building relationships instead of just processing transactions.

Reimagining property management: Reshaping service, culture and customer experience with Ailo and Harcourts Solutions Group.

The future of property management: Service culture and tech that supports it | Podcast

Ben White spent the past year watching property management agencies split into two camps: those leaning into AI, and those in wait-and-see mode.

His theory about what separates them has nothing to do with the technology itself. It's about clarity. 

Ben sat down with Samantha McLean from Elite Agent to unpack why AI is actually a cultural problem, not a tech one, and what that means for the future of property management. 

Watch the full podcast on Elite Agent here.

For years, building new products or features meant long development cycles and significant investment. That created a natural barrier between having an idea and bringing it to life.

"When product was much harder to build, it was a tech problem," Ben said. "Now I think it's a cultural problem."

AI has democratised product development. Anyone with an idea can create something functional. 

(During the podcast, Ben and Sam proved this by live-coding an ROI calculator for solar upgrades in about two minutes! 

The hard part isn't building anymore. The hard part is knowing what to build. And you can't answer that unless you understand how you create value for customers.

Ben offered a framework built on two questions:

Do you think the property manager is at the centre of the story, or the landlord?

Do you believe the value you deliver to customers is going to stay the same, or will it change?

Your answers place you in one of four quadrants, and each one leads somewhere different.

If you believe the property manager is at the centre and the job will stay the same, you're building AI that helps property managers do their current job faster. "If you see your job as taking photos and writing a report, you're in competition with your inspection app," Ben said.

If you believe the landlord is at the centre but the job stays the same, you're headed for the direct-to-landlord model. "That person is putting the landlord at the centre and assuming the future is to take your salary."

But there's another option, and it's the one Ben is betting on. "I think property management is one place where you create and nurture ongoing customer relationships with everyone in the community."

The quadrant you choose determines whether AI threatens your business or transforms it.

Watch the podcast

Ben pointed out something most agencies haven't reckoned with yet.

"If you look at the P&L of a property management business, the most important fee is the fee for collecting rent. It's 80% of the revenue," he said. "Honestly, how much time does it take you to collect rent?"

There's a misalignment between where value sits and how agencies charge for it. 

This is where the opportunity sits. Not in automating what property managers already do, but in systematising the things that actually create value such as risk management, capital improvement planning, energy efficiency upgrades, or maintenance strategies that protect capital value.

Ben believes AI will strain agency culture more than anything that's come before.

"It tests whether or not you're committed to the customer and your commitment to innovate and change," he said.

If your culture is built around doing the same thing over and over, AI will replace you. If your culture is built around judgment, context and relationships, AI becomes an enabler.

"People want to be challenged, push themselves and create something," Ben said.

You have to be optimistic to see the path forward clearly, Ben said.

"A precondition to seeing the future is optimism. If you're optimistic that you can create value, and you can create more value over time, the pathway's a lot clearer than people think it is."

Property management has every ingredient you'd want in a post-AI world. It's built around the most important asset people have. It's local. It's relationship-based. It's full of human dynamics and emotion.

But that only holds true if you believe property management is more than collecting rent and fixing ovens.

Listen to Ben White's full conversation with Samantha McLean on 

Where your agency sits in the AI quadrant (and why it matters)

It's 2pm on a Tuesday, and you've got eight tabs open across two screens. Your property management system is in one tab, your inbox in another, a supplier's quote in a PDF viewer in a third. You're switching between windows trying to remember which owner you need to call back about that maintenance quote, and whether you've already sent the entry notice for tomorrow's inspection.

For most property management software platforms, the approach to workflow management has been the same for years: build tools for different types of work (inspections here, repairs there, lease renewals over here), then add a task or checklist feature on top to help you track what needs doing.

It's more sophisticated than the paper-based systems of the past, but the fundamental problem remains: your tasks live separately from your work. You check a list to see what needs doing, then navigate away to actually do it, then remember to come back and update the list.

 takes a different approach – one that's worth understanding if you're evaluating whether to make a platform change.

15.01.26 | Release Notes

What's New in Ailo

15 January 2026

Refund management fees yourself (no support ticket required) 💸

“I’ve used it multiple times over the last week already, and I love it!”

Click Manage → Refund fee → add a quick note → done ✅

More control to update contact details for renters & investors 📝

Bill payment timing update (starting 1 February 2026) 📅

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New Way

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Built from your feedback

More updates you asked for

1. Fee templates now locked to users with Finance Manage access if that’s what you prefer 🔒

2. Your logo now shows on Tenancy History (ledger) statements 🎨