White

Ask a room of property management leaders what growth means and the first answers are numbers. Ask them again twenty minutes later, once three of their peers have described what growth actually cost their teams before they fixed it, and the answers change.

That is what happened at Indooroopilly Golf Club on Thursday 10 September, the third room in A Working Round Table for Principals and Leadership in Property Management, the series Ailo has been carrying around the country this year. 

Adelaide in July, Melbourne in August, Brisbane now, Sydney at the end of the month. 

The format is deliberate;  round tables, a table captain on each, principals invited alongside their heads of property management, a screen for the data and a roving microphone for the questions. No stage, no demonstration, no pitch. 

Every guest arrives to find their own team's culture survey results in an envelope on the table, so the conversation has something to push against from the first minute.

The panel was Jodie Stainton, Group and Property Management Director at Harcourts Solutions; Lindsey Burne, franchise owner at LJ Hooker Dickson and chair of the LJ Hooker Franchise Owners Council; and Lisa Hyland from Ray White Canberra. 



Three businesses of a similar scale, three different franchise groups, one common decision made in the last couple of years.

Jodie opened with a definition of growth built on people rather than rent roll. 



The numbers came after, and they were considerable, but the line that made people put their pens down was about data. She described arriving at a legacy system as a self-declared data nerd and being unable to answer the most basic question a director gets asked. "I could not work out how many managements we have." She went to board meetings with a figure she could only place within a ten per cent range. 



Lindsey's register was different. He speaks as an owner with a rent roll that is also his retirement plan, and he was candid about a mistake. 

He had once been given an innovation award by a legacy system, and over fifteen years he kept adding the technology those systems put in front of him, every product promising to lift properties per head. 





You could feel the room recognise itself in that sentence. Every owner in the industry built their stack one well-intentioned subscription at a time, and what was sold as the solution became the problem. His answer was to strip it back to one system, and the transparency that gave him is what changed his team.

Lisa brought the word she has used all year for a business that has completed three acquisitions in four months: calm. Her frame for growth is her people, and her mechanism is a programme she calls Choose Your Own Adventure, where a property manager decides how large a portfolio they want to carry and the business wraps the support around them, from an expected 200 properties through to 250 with a virtual assistant behind them. What struck me was how she described change. 



We spent the middle of the morning on the Service Profit Chain, because the survey results in front of every guest were built on it. The leading indicators of a chain that is broken are familiar to anyone who has run a rent roll: workarounds, duplicated entry, cliques forming because communication has failed, a receptionist taking the same message four times in a day. The lagging indicators are the ones that hurt: turnover, burnout, recruitment that never ends. The three panellists' teams had scored high on engagement and alignment. Lindsey has now run the survey twice, and the change between them was the point. Where his team once resented every new management because they were already full, they are now wishing the BDM luck on the way out the door. "I need another one."

The questions from the tables were the evidence that the room had moved. One principal, mid-restructure and unsure whether she had the right people, asked the question of the morning: do you start with the team or with the process? Lisa's answer was to get the people in a room and understand what is actually going on before touching anything. Jodie's was shorter. "Always start with the people." My own was that both of those begin with a vision the team can see themselves in. Another table asked how you measure success when the checklists are gone and the autonomy is real. Lindsey's answer was to put one metric on the screen at each team meeting and watch it. "Whatever we focus on, three weeks later it's better."

The panel described what happened in their businesses when the system stopped being the constraint, and the audience were left to draw their own conclusions, which is the only way a decision like this should be made.

Ailo runs these rooms because peer conversation changes minds in ways a sales pitch never will. The question I left Brisbane with is the one I will carry to Sydney: how much of what your business has labelled a growth problem is actually a systems problem wearing a growth problem's clothes?

The Sydney round table is on Tuesday 29 September. Principals and property management leaders can register here: 

A room full of principals stopped talking about growth and started talking about what was in the way of it

Deborah Gidman chose her property management platform before she had a business to run it in. "I was introduced to Ailo about five or six years ago and always knew that if I started my own agency, that would be the platform that I would choose." When she founded Resident Property in Baldivis, south of Perth, that is what she did. 

Three and a half years on, the boutique agency runs on a conviction much of her industry still finds uncomfortable: the rent belongs to the investor, so the investor should hold it.

"A lot of property managers recoil at the thought of them not being in control of the investor funds," Deb told the room at an Ailo After Hours evening at MECCA Subiaco in August, back on the panel as a returning Ailo Ambassador. 

She calls that discomfort the biggest selling point in her business when talking with prospective investors. "There's no point in your money sitting in my trust account until the end of the month. How about you control the funds instead?"

In practice, rent reaches the investor as it is paid, and what happens next is their call: pay a bill from the app, or 


"have that money go into your offset weekly if you want".

 Some investors leave it to arrive at the end of the month, as it always did. 

Cloud

The choice comes with one condition, and she sets it on the day they sign. "You can have it as you want. However, if you have a council rates notice that comes in and requires payment, you need to pay it. If you have a hot water system replacement, you have to pay it. Because my contractors need to be paid, and we're not going to delay our contractors." It is a short speech, and it tells an investor a great deal about how she runs things.

It also answers the question every boutique agency hears. Managements in her market are moving between agencies, and investors compare fees. 



Renters get the same candour. Their app shows every payment in colour, blue for on time, red for overdue, orange for late, and Deb tells them at sign-up that their investor sees exactly the same thing. "So if you've got orange, orange, orange, when we come to lease renewal, maybe we're taking that into consideration. And people just are paying on time." The trust account, meanwhile, has shrunk to a single job. "All I'm receipting are bonds. Your rent immediately allocates. We don't touch it."

Lately she has been calling every investor on video and asking the same three questions. Do you use Ailo? Are you loving it? What do you like? "I like that I can sit on a Friday night and see where my tenant is paid to. I like that I've got access to everything at my fingertips." Then Deb's summary of what she has built: "It's that full visibility, but I'm still doing the work for them."

That last clause is where the fee lives. 


Deb Gidman's fees are higher than the agency down the road. Her investors know exactly why.

Alicia McCulloch runs Thryve Property, the agency she founded around fourteen months ago. The move she pulled in her first few months tells you most of what you need to know about how she built it.

She was not running away from the business. She ran it from the road. "From a car with Starlink, with the kids screaming in the back. It was actually great."

She grew the business while she was away, and end of month happened somewhere in the middle of Australia. 


Tenants had no concerns. Investors had no concerns. The thing that made it possible, she says, was consolidation. "Just having one program to log into. I didn't have to go, I need to do this, need to do that, or where's that password sitting at home on the computer. That really just gave me peace of mind."

The feature of her working day she values most is that nothing gets lost. 

It also changes what her business can survive. Knowledge no longer lives in one person's head. "Things don't need to live in a property manager's head like they often would, and someone goes away or is sick suddenly and you're basically stuck. It's just there. Out of the head, into the computer. Peace of mind."

Even the trust account, the anchor of the traditional agency back office, has faded into the background. A handful of tenants prefer to pay the old way and that is fine, but the vast majority pay through the app however they choose. "The trust account role is obsolete," she says.

Fourteen months in, Alicia describes the journey with characteristic understatement, going from a standing start to a growing rent roll while working from wherever she happens to be. 

The business runs on visibility, one thread of truth per property, and the headspace that comes from not chasing information across five systems. Taking a month one holiday was not a risk for Alicia, it was the proof she was making the business she wanted. 

Alicia McCulloch built a business she can run from anywhere

Cadie Duncan grew up in real estate and has spent thirteen years in the industry, but when she founded Cadie Property Co, a boutique agency on the Sunshine Coast, she was starting a rent roll from zero. Two years later she had grown it to 150 properties, without prospecting.

The business was built around a deliberately narrow promise, one point of contact, no sales division, premium personalisation. That promise is exactly what disaffected investors are looking for. 


The catch in that model is obvious. A sole point of contact absorbs every hour of admin herself, and the hours she spends on disbursements are hours she cannot spend on the relationships that generate the reviews. Cadie is honest about what drew her to Ailo in the first place. "I've been in real estate for 13 years and there's not one time where I've really sat down and properly learned trust accounting. That to me was the green flag."

The burden that lifted was broader than the trust account. "The mid month, the end of month, the disbursements. There's always issues with those. This really outlays all of that. It's a really easy process, and there's no stress at all involved."

The savings are concrete. Where most businesses her size pay upwards of $5,000 a year in trust account audit fees, Cadie's audit now costs a few hundred dollars, after Ailo gave her auditor direct access to the platform. And the stress relief was tested at the hardest moment on the property management calendar. She flew to Queenstown on the first of July, the week most agencies spend buried in reconciliations and investor calls. "I didn't really think it through, but I was like, you know what, Ailo's got my back. Not one phone call, hand on heart."

Her clients feel the difference, and it shows up in an unusual place: the referral script her own investors use. 
"I get lots of referrals from my current owners to their friends, and hand on heart, all they say is, he told me about the software. He said it's so simple and so easy to use."

Her Google reviews mention the transparency and the access to funds unprompted. She now sends prospects a link to read about the platform themselves, letting the product do part of the listing presentation.

The next stage of growth is about leverage. Cadie recently brought on her first team member, and the training curve surprised her. 


The plan is to have her fully trained by the end of the year, at which point Cadie steps back from the day-to-day and into a growth role, prospecting properly for the first time in the company's life.

Asked what she would tell someone else starting from zero, her answer is about time. 


For a business built on one person's availability, that reclaimed time is not a convenience. It is the product.

She has never poached a property. The referrals do it for her.

Pip Redfern launched her agency in March last year. She runs it as a sole operator, and she came to ownership with an unusual pedigree: big agency experience, consultancy experience, and time inside property technology itself. She has seen how systems work, how they fail, and how teams build workarounds when they do.



Standing behind decisions matters because the expectations she is servicing have risen, and they keep rising. 

"People want more for less. They want it quicker,"

 she says. Owners and tenants now benchmark their property manager against every other service in their lives, and in a saturated market full of capable operators, a sole operator cannot meet that expectation with hours alone.

Her answer was to separate her availability from her clients' access. 



That changes what her actual conversations are for. "When I call them, we're not having a conversation about how's rent, where's my tenant paid up to. We're talking about what am I doing in a year? Am I keeping this property? Am I selling it? What maintenance do I need to do?"

The compounding effect is trust, and it arrives faster than it used to. Much of her book is takeover management, owners arriving with distrust of the industry baked in. "It's so transparent. You can't pull the wool over their eyes even if you wanted to. I could have built trust in six or nine months before. Now it's 30 to 60 days."

The standard holds at the moments that matter most. End of financial year, the most demanding week on any agency's calendar, passed through her business without friction. One owner messaged her mid-afternoon asking how to get a statement from his previous agency, because hers had already arrived. "He was like, yeah, I got yours at like 1am this morning." He spent the following weeks chasing the other agency for the rest.

She has no VAs and no intention of hiring any, and her portfolio target is larger than anything she managed as a PM in her previous career. The headspace goes somewhere deliberate: she wants to change the perception of property management from the inside. 



"We are a profession, like a lawyer. This industry can give you so much if you give to it. I don't want people to come in and burn out."

How Pip Redfern meets rising expectations as a team of one

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.

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. 


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. 


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. 



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. 



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.

Zero to 380 properties in a year, starting from a kitchen bench

When one of Kayla Symons's property managers went on maternity leave, the usual playbook says you hire a temp. Belle Property St Kilda didn't need to.

"Three of our seniors went, nah, just give me more," the Head of Property Management told the room at Ailo's After Hours event at MECCA Carlton. Some of her team now comfortably manage two hundred and thirty properties each, with field support for routine inspections and leasing. 


That capacity was the surprise of Belle Property's first twelve months on Ailo, and it arrived unannounced.

"We went from everyone being a little bit stressed to people being a little bit bored, which was not something we expected," Kayla said. "We had property managers saying, if you want properties to manage, I'm happy to take on more."

Belle Property St Kilda is a strong business by any measure: long tenured staff, low turnover, and a team Kayla describes as happy to begin with. But like every office in the industry, they had absorbed wave after wave of legislative change, and the workload had grown with it. "You just catch your breath from the last one, and they go and shove a new one in there."

So they went looking, and they did it properly. The research journey took them to Canberra and Sydney, visiting offices running different platforms to see what was working and what would fit their business. What stood out about Ailo was not a feature. It was what the businesses using it said about their teams: happier, calmer, less stretched.

Twelve months in, Kayla can name what changed. On their legacy platform, "there's fifty different ways for each person to do the same task." A compliance report might live in tasks, in documents, in emails, or in the compliance section, depending on who filed it. "When there's that high level of deviation, with everyone doing their own thing in their own way, that's where you end up with the gaps."

The reactive cycle went with it. Every property manager knows the pattern: a tenant reports maintenance, the owner doesn't respond, and the job quietly slips from view until the owner calls a week later asking why nothing happened. Now an unanswered owner surfaces automatically in her team's actions. "That's your flag to be proactive. Chalk and cheese is the difference."

The structure holds even when the people are new. Temps who have never seen the platform sit down with the training modules on day one. "By the end of day two, they're ready to go. They know what your office processes are, because it's built into your projects and your actions list. It's just tap, tap, tap."

And a busy week is still a busy week. Vacates cluster, things land at once. The difference is what happens next. 


That, for Kayla, is the whole story. The team didn't work less. They found out how much more they could hold, comfortably, and asked for it themselves.

'I'm happy to take on more': how Belle Property St Kilda found capacity it didn't know it had

Leonie Ardley has been managing property at PRD Dapto for more than four years, and she talks about her trust accounting the way most property managers talk about their weekends. 

"It takes me like two minutes to do the banking and I'm done,"

 she says. "Whereas before I was there for like twenty minutes, half an hour. Then you've also got to do mid-month and end of month." On Ailo, that cycle no longer exists as a separate job at all.

PRD Dapto was among the first offices in the PRD network to make the move, and Leonie remembers fielding the questions from peers. "Everyone was asking us, and we were like, it's great." 

The early months took some finding of feet, and Leonie is honest about the reason: the team was trying to run Ailo the way they had always run their legacy systems. "You've got to adapt," she says. The turning point came when they sat down with the Ailo team, who looked at how they were working and asked a simple question. Why aren't you doing it this way? "And we're like, oh - this is great!" 

What changed the daily experience most was projects. Ask Lauren Coward for her top three and she doesn't hesitate. 


For Lauren, the same structure carries new tenancies from application to move-in, every small step held in checklists the team has customised to the way their office actually works rather than a fixed list handed down by the software. "It's so easy to forget little steps along the way," she says. "It makes it so simple."

When something unfamiliar does come up, the support experience has been the difference. A commercial bond that migrated across with the portfolio sat unresolved in the trust account until a member of the Ailo team, Olivia, talked Leonie through it and followed up with step-by-step instructions. "It took me five minutes and it was done."

It's Lauren who watches the platform evolve most closely. "You can see the constant updates," she says. "Every time we've had something, it's like, oh look, what's this?" The team reads the What's new section every time it appears. "We check that whenever it comes out and read it and make sure we're using the system to its full potential," Lauren says. "Because I think that's a big thing a lot of people don't do. How much you can actually do."

Asked what she would tell another property manager considering the move, Leonie doesn't reach for features. 


Would she ever go back? "No. Definitely not." Beside her, Lauren didn't say a word. She just shook her head and smiled.

The property managers who drive home thinking about the weekend, not the list of things they've forgotten

Nurit Brukarz does not usually attend events like this. 

The CEO of Motion Property, a Melbourne family business managing around two and a half thousand residential properties, made a point of saying so at Ailo's After Hours event at MECCA Carlton. She came because of something larger than her own business.

For Nurit, the standard of a property management business comes down to what its leaders can actually see. And for most of her career, spanning four platform changes, the answer was not much.


Arrears figures tell you whether the money arrived. They tell you nothing about whether a renter waited three days for a reply, whether a maintenance job sat untouched, or whether one property manager is drowning while another coasts. A business can look healthy on paper while the service underneath it quietly erodes. That gap between the numbers a platform reports and the service a team delivers is where standards slip, and it is precisely what Nurit set out to close.

She took her time. The conversation started three years before the decision, and the move took another twelve months after that. She looked at every platform on the market.

Now the visibility runs through the whole business. Her dashboard shows who is responding and how quickly, which has produced an unplanned side effect: her team has turned responsiveness into a running competition. 


"There's a whole competition going on and it's great. Very competitive."

Her owners see their properties for themselves rather than calling to ask. Her reporting goes as deep as she wants it to. "The reporting's excellent. You get a lot of data. You go really deep in there. If anything, you guys have customised reports for us."

And when new staff arrive, the standard is held by the system rather than by whoever happens to be training them. Two new team members started on the day Motion Property went live, with no training at all. "They were just able to walk in, and everything is workflow. Everything's templated."

That is the connection Nurit wanted the audience to make. Raising the standard of an industry is not a matter of asking people to care more. Her team already cared. It is a matter of making the work visible, so that good service can be seen, measured, and expected.

"If anybody wants to reach out for a chat, I'm always available."

'You just don't see that on the legacy platforms': why Nurit Brukarz went looking for a standard she could see

Rory Somerville is Managing Director of Ray White Bendigo, a business of around two thousand properties run by a team of forty-five with close to fifteen more offshore. He was among the first principals in the country to move his business onto Ailo, and retention, not acquisition, is the number he watches. He is also unusually candid about where the business started.


"We swapped to Ailo when we weren't an excellent business. We were probably an OK business," he told the room at a recent industry panel in Adelaide.

The conversation that started it had nothing to do with software. Rory and his business partner were talking about how to become the easiest person in property management to be employed by. 

What the day actually looked like explains why. Property managers arrived, sat down, opened their email, and used the inbox to decide which fire to put out. 


"Emails were just flying left, right, and centre and you would reply to one email and then you go to the next one and then the first one’s replied and then all of a sudden you’ve done nothing for the day other than deal with two different things."

The work itself was scattered across separate programs, one for inspections, one for messages, another for the ledger, each with its own login and its own logic.
Now the order of the day is inverted. 


"The first thing we do is we look at our projects, we've got a structured approach to the day," Rory said. "Anyone that's structured and consistent and has steps to follow is going to be more efficient."


Messages are the second or third thing a property manager touches, not the thing that sets the agenda.
The consequence he did not anticipate came from one of his own property managers. Ahead of a speaking engagement, he asked her what she would say if she were the one on the panel. Her answer was not about software. "She said, oh, I just love the fact that I can have sick leave and actually be sick, rest, relax, and come back recovered." For Rory, that landed as an indictment of the industry rather than a compliment to a platform. 


Since the right to disconnect became law, every principal in the country carries a sharper obligation to their team's mental health. Rory's view is that the obligation is easier to meet when a business does not depend on any one person’s private way of doing things. His team now book annual leave and take it. 

When somebody is sick, they are sick, and the portfolio keeps moving without them. Nobody has to choose between recovering and keeping their portfolio in order. 

What he did not expect was to find that showing up in the accounts. He and his business partner went back through the balance sheet and compared the trajectory of their employee obligations before the change and after it.


A team that rests is a team that is not carrying an unused entitlement the business has to hold against.

The other change sits further from the team and closer to the ledger. Because money no longer waits for the month to close before it moves, the business holds far less of it at any one time. "One thing with Ailo is you hold less money," Rory said. That made the business a lower risk to its insurer, and it renegotiated its professional indemnity premium down on the strength of it.

Rory does not offer any of this as a single reason to change, he calls them by-products, the sort of thing a legacy system never puts in front of a business owner because it was never built to look. 

His point is the one worth reflecting on; the business set up so its people can rest and the business carrying less on its balance sheet are not two different businesses. They are the same decision, seen from two ends.

The Hidden ROI of a Happier Property Management Team

Ailo co-founder Ben White joined Kylie Walker on The Property Management Podcast this week for episode 271, The Future of Property Management: AI, Innovations and Software.

For years, property management has defined itself by its tasks - collecting rent, coordinating maintenance, managing tenancies. 

Ben's argument on the episode is that this framing has always sold the profession short, and that the next decade will prove it. 

The future of the industry is not technology replacing people. It is technology removing the repetitive administration that consumes a property manager's day, so that time can go where the value actually sits - the relationships with owners, renters and the communities around every property.

That reframing changes how an agency should think about its technology decisions. Rather than comparing platforms feature by feature, Ben encourages business owners to choose partners on the strength of their long-term vision, and to use the capacity that automation creates to rethink what exceptional service looks like. 

The thread running through the whole conversation is a simple one - the more the industry invests in people and relationships, the more valuable property management becomes.

Charcoal

From there, the conversation ranges widely: the evolving definition of property management beyond its traditional task list, technology as a tool that lifts customer service rather than a threat to it, the win-win-win shape of a genuinely service-led business, the role regulation will play in separating agencies on service, and what AI and robotics might mean for the profession over the longer arc. 

It closes on the practical question that matters most to anyone in the industry today - how property managers future-proof their careers and businesses as the ground shifts.

Ailo is the podcast partner of The Property Management Podcast, founded by Kylie Walker which reaches an audience of property managers, department heads and business owners, around Australia, every week. 

Over the coming months the series will feature more voices from across the Ailo community, the people running departments and portfolios day to day, on what actually changed when their systems changed.

The future of property management is more human, not less

Corrine Forsyth has watched Ailo grow up. "We were client number four when Ailo first arrived on the scene,” she told the Fortitude Valley panel. Four years on, the parts of the job she once dreaded have quietly stopped being a job at all.

Corrine leads the property management teams at Ray White Beenleigh and Ray White Redland Bay, part of a group operating across South East Queensland. What pushed her to move, half a decade ago, was trust accounting. 

Payments were landing in the account with no reference against them, "just rent, or a number," she said, for a business managing hundreds of properties. "Who is this for?" She had come to resent the hours it took. "There's so much better use of my time supporting my team than sitting there doing anything to do with tenants paying rent."

The clearest measure of how far that has travelled came at the end of the financial year. Asked what the period looks like now, Forsyth was almost dismissive. "It's just a Wednesday. Just doing my emails." The event that once dominated the calendar has become a non-event, and that calm is the point.

Being early meant she watched the platform expand from a single function into the operating system for the whole business. 


She lives in the team dashboard; her virtual assistants work from it; the projects tell everyone what is due and when. The spreadsheets are gone, lease renewals included, and smoke alarm compliance sits in the same place. 

Consolidation is a running joke with her principal. When Ailo released 360 inspections, her team plugged in the cameras they already owned and retired a separate program they had paid for alongside a legacy platform for years, at no extra cost. "Glenn and I agree that it’s good news when you can strategise around costs, letting go of unnecessary expenses is always welcome." He no longer asks her how anything works. "Glenn does not need to ask me questions anymore, because I've taught him how to use Ailo."

Part of what has kept her invested is being heard. "If my team puts in feedback and you implement it, you shout them out on the monthly, so it makes them feel really heard," she said, and the younger staff in particular treat each new release as something to explore.

The people she expected to resist turned out to be the strongest advocates. Owners now consolidate properties onto the platform so they can move between them regardless of location, and they update their own details, insurance and payment methods, and check when the next inspection is due, all of which has taken the follow-up calls away. 


Compliance sharpened the case. Forsyth is candid that most businesses do not appreciate their exposure until someone audits it. When she moved that work to DC Smoke Alarms, an entire role's worth of manual updating disappeared, tenant details synced, and the risk became visible. 

"I can go into our dashboard and within thirty seconds see if there's any compliance issue across the whole rental."

Four years in, the through line is the same one that first sold her. The work she never wanted to do has simply gone quiet.

End of financial year is just a Wednesday

Jessica Calvert, Property Management Operations Manager, Harcourts Solutions. Brisbane. 3,500 properties.

When Harcourts Solutions weighed up moving to Ailo, nothing was broken. That was the difficult part. "We actually had a really great business," Jessica Calvert told the room at the Ailo After Hours panel in Fortitude Valley. 


Jessica runs property management operations for the Brisbane agency, a portfolio of around 3,500 properties. What was running smoothly, on closer inspection, was a team holding twelve separate pieces of technology together by hand. "None of which spoke together," she said. "It wasn't a great ecosystem." A new starter was handed a 700-page manual the team called the Bible, a document of screenshots explaining which task lived in which system, and where the same information had to be entered for the fourth time. What Calvert wanted was one platform, and a single standard way of working that lived inside the tool rather than in a binder. 


The change showed up first in small operational moments. Her leasing team used to cancel open homes halfway through the day because nobody had seen that a lease had been signed or a receipt paid overnight. 


The larger return has been retention, of business and of people. Because the work is consolidated, the team no longer wakes in the middle of the night remembering a task they missed, and they can take leave knowing exactly where every property stands. Calvert does not treat this as a soft benefit. 

The part that surprised her most was the response from investors and renters. When Harcourts folded in a rent roll it had acquired, moving roughly a thousand more properties across, the new owners rated the experience ten out of ten within the first fortnight. 

A single newsletter noting that one payment change could save landlords thousands on their mortgage prompted about five hundred of them to switch to daily disbursements within half an hour. 

"That's us putting money back in the pocket of our investors immediately." 

At their first end of financial year on the platform, Calvert counted around two owner queries across the entire 3,500-property business.

Compliance was the one decision her whole team agreed on. Facing the risk that sits on the licensee, Calvert put the question to the room. 



The certificates now sync into the platform, the dates stay current, and an exception report shows anyone not connected. "That's Jodie's licence on the line," she said, and for the first time it is a part of the business she does not have to think about.

None of this required a business that was failing. It required a business willing to change while it was ahead.

Why great businesses choose to evolve

When Esther Sebbens talks about the software the industry has relied on for decades, she makes a distinction most people in the room have never heard put so plainly. The tools were built around the trust account, she argues, not around the property manager. For most of her career that meant the technology looked after the money and left the actual work, the repairs, the inspections, the renewals, the chasing, to whatever patchwork each office could assemble around it.

At Blackshaw Belconnen, the family agency she runs as Managing Principal, that patchwork had grown to the point of fatigue. Her team was moving in and out of a rental platform, a separate database for the offshore team, an inspection tool, and a handful of other bolt-ons, learning each one and stitching them together by hand. 

“There was a little bit of tech fatigue happening, having to jump in and out of stuff,” she said, describing a working day that could touch five or six separate tools before a single task was finished.

Preparing a single tribunal matter for ACAT could mean pulling records from several systems at once. “This is not what productivity looks like, and it’s not what I want my team doing. We have better things to focus on,” she said. 



“Of course we have to attend to ACAT matters, but it shouldn’t stop the business for hours or days at a time.”

What drew her to Ailo was not a feature. It was a category shift. 



Her team took to it faster than a hardened property manager might expect, and she thinks the reason is telling. 

“The majority of my staff actually aren’t from a property management background, so they were willing to embrace the change,” she said. “Everybody has had exposure in different industries to project management, so it made sense to move to this.” 

The office already ran on tight procedures and checklists, and those carried straight across. “Because we had tight procedures and checklists, we were able to move those pretty much straight into Ailo, and the projects and actions were already set. It felt familiar.” It was, she adds, a good deal more intuitive than the database they had been running.

The most concrete change was one she felt in her own week. Blackshaw Belconnen had bought a rent roll over six years, which left Esther disbursing three times a month, on the fifteenth, the twenty-fifth, and at end of month. Moving that burden onto the platform gave her a full day back every month. 

The rollout to renters was calmer than she expected. Her team identified the people likely to find the change hardest, called them personally, and left existing trust payments in place rather than forcing anyone across. Three complaints, in total. On the busiest day for receiving funds out of trust, the day after public service payday, twenty-two transactions now take about five minutes.

As a principal, Esther reads the wider market from where she sits. Investors are better informed than they were, and they are starting to expect the visibility and the faster access to their money that a platform like this makes possible. 



An investor who can see funds building in their wallet can draw them down for a bill when they need to, rather than waiting for the calendar. Her warning to peers is unsentimental. “Those agencies that aren’t doing this will start missing out on business.”

Her own view of the change is just as direct. “Change can be really scary, especially when you know something in your sleep,” she said. “But you’ve got to keep moving with technology. If you don’t, you’re going to be left behind.” Once the team had settled in, she found that much of the manual work they used to do by hand had quietly become redundant, absorbed into the platform. “The system will do it for you.”

Property management software was never built for property managers

Melissa Jerzyna, Director at LJ Hooker Penrith, on the 2am emails, the end of month she forgot, and what changed when compliance stopped being hers to carry.

The person who told Melissa Jerzyna that something had to change was not a colleague, or a coach, or anyone from the industry. It was her husband. 

He had watched her work at the computer late into the night, week after week, and eventually he put it to her plainly. "Are you listening to this?" he asked her. "Why aren't you doing any of this?" She had been in property management since 2001, and by her own account she was very good at it and completely worn out by it. "I felt like I was constantly chasing my tail," she says. He wanted his wife back.

She is now a Director at LJ Hooker Penrith, one of the most awarded property management offices in the LJ Hooker network, and she has spent the last few years describing to rooms full of her peers what happened next. She did not go looking for a better version of what she already had. 


What she found on the other side took some adjusting to, and she is candid about that. Everything in the new system was a project, and the word itself nearly undid her. 




Once she did, the rest of the office followed. She measures the change in the small things a manager notices. Her team stopped arriving at eight for a nine o'clock start. Computers started closing at five. She leaves at half past five herself, which she describes as a miracle, and the work is done when she does.

The clearest signal came when she was not there at all. End of month arrived while she was in Cairns, and she missed it entirely.

 "I'd actually forgotten it was end of month,"

 she says. Someone asked whether they could avoid scheduling training during it, and she had to ask what day it was. 

"The system does it, and I don't have to do it, and I didn't even remember about it."

 The same is true of holidays, which she used to dread on the way back rather than enjoy on the way out. "What am I coming back to? That's my biggest fear," she says of the old way. Now she returns and tells her team she has actually had a holiday. Asked at one event how Ailo makes her feel, she gave a one-word answer. "Relaxed." Asked what she would do differently, she gave another. "I would have done it sooner."

Compliance was the last piece to fall into place, and in some ways it was the one that mattered most, because it was the one carrying the real risk. Smoke alarm compliance is the kind of obligation that is easy to assume is handled and expensive to be wrong about, and for years it lived in a separate system, kept current by whoever remembered to update it. 

In April 2026 Melissa moved her portfolio to DC Smoke Alarms, the embedded compliance partner that now sits inside the Ailo workflow, and the change is one she describes in the language she uses for everything else that has worked. 



The point, for her, is not that the work disappeared. It is that it stopped depending on memory. "The streamlined system has saved us time, improved efficiency, and given our team complete confidence that our compliance obligations are being managed effectively," she says. That word, confidence, is the one that does the work. In a portfolio the size of hers, the difference between believing you are compliant and knowing it is the difference between a business that is exposed and one that is not.

It fits a pattern she has come to expect. "You don't have to go from one program to the other," she says. "Everything feeds straight back in. It all comes back to Ailo as one central place." She says much the same about the support behind it, which she rates as second to none. "There's no stupid question," she says, and in her job there are a lot of questions.

What she describes now sounds less like a software change than a change in the weather. "I reckon I'm a happier person than what I was two years ago, and I say that with full confidence," she says. Her team have stayed, which in this industry is not nothing. "My team have never been happier, and I've retained the team." She spent a long time waiting for the right moment before she moved, and she has a view on that too, for anyone still waiting. "There is never a right time, but you don’t need to overthink this, Ailo is the only way to go."

Twenty-five years in, and never more in control

Take away the tedium, and what is left is the relationship

Parm Singh spent fifteen years in hospitality before he ever sold a house. It shows. Ask him what makes Wemark Real Estate different from the franchises around it, and he does not talk about fees or coverage or scale. He talks about picking up the phone.

Lavender

That instinct built a business. Since 2018 Parm has grown Wemark to more than 440 properties under management in Adelaide, every one of them won organically. "We've never bought anything," he says, and he means it as a point of pride. He signed the early managements himself, before he had a BDM to help him. He also runs teams in Dubai and India and flies out every couple of months, yet he still calls Australia home. "That's where my kids are."

A book like that, held by a small team across time zones, only works if the machinery underneath it behaves. For a long time it did not. The reactive burden of legacy property management has a sound, and every principal knows it: the phone ringing the moment a disbursement lands a day late.

"If the tenant was late for a day and missed our mid-month disbursement, and we've got a disgruntled landlord calling, where's my money? They think we are not paying them."

The money was there. The problem was that nobody outside the office could see it.

Parm is, by his own description, "a very big technology fan," the kind of operator who books software demonstrations for the pleasure of it. 

"I like to try out things which can improve the systems and provide a better service to the clients."

 He sat through several before he moved to Ailo, and what he was looking for was not a feature list. It was relief. 

"Ailo is user friendly. It's not complicated." 

He wanted less money sitting exposed in the trust account too, where Wemark once held hundreds of thousands at a time and now holds a small fraction of it.

The relief arrived on two fronts. His investors can now see when their money has been paid, and move it themselves when they want to, and the anxious calls have gone quiet. "Now they can actually see. It's much better that way."

And the tedium that used to sit between Parm and his clients has thinned right out. The manual transactions his team once processed by the hundred every day now run to ten or fifteen, and he expects to be rid of them entirely. Renters paying directly means fewer wrong references, fewer payments landing against the wrong account, and fewer of the quiet errors that fill a property manager's afternoon. 

"Less stress, less admin work, less reasons to make mistakes."

Put the pieces together and you arrive at the thing Parm actually wanted. His team is no longer doing the same work over again across several different programs, which means the hours they used to lose to administration are hours they can now spend on people. Ask him whether that is the real return, and he does not hesitate. "Exactly."

It is why he is not slowing down. The target is 500 managements by the end of the year, and to double the book within two to three years, still without buying a single one. And when the question turns to whether he would tell other South Australian businesses to make the same move, the hotelier answers the way he answers everything, personally and without a pause. "Yeah, of course."

Property management that stays personal as you grow

Maricel Rigoir spent her career on the trust accounting side of property management. Fifteen months after Paterson Real Estate moved to Ailo, the trust account sits empty, the SA Water bills take minutes, and she is going for her property management licence.

Not long ago, the arrival of the SA Water bills at the Reynella agency meant paper invoices counted by hand, scanned at the photocopier, and paid by cheque. 

"We're in the 21st century, and we are still writing cheques."

Maricel came up through trust accounting and runs the business side of the agency, one with landlords who have been with it for over 30 years. Her mornings ran to the same rhythm for most of that career. "My first thing in the morning is turn on the computer, download the file, and manually receipt," she says. The routine did not pause for holidays. "Even over the Christmas period, we're closed, but that still has to get receipted, because people need their money."

She was not the one arguing for Ailo. Her position when the agency changed platforms was healthy scepticism, and in Adelaide she had plenty of company. "I was someone that was in the beginning kind of anti-Ailo, only because not many PMs, particularly in Adelaide, were using it." The local market, she points out, has long belonged to one legacy platform.

16.09.26 | Release Notes

What's New in Ailo

16.09.26

Missed rent reviews

Bond mismatch tracking

Portfolio shared funds - clearer consent warnings

Renter memberships now rolling out to all agencies