White

A property manager's best work is the work nobody sees. Ailo built Project Thank You to change that, with a Send thanks button for investors in the app, and three agencies show what happens when an investor can simply say thank you.

Most of what a property manager does well, nobody sees. For property managers right around Australia, keeping things running smoothly takes a great deal of work. The rent comes in, the repair gets booked, the lease is renewed, and almost none of that effort is recognised or valued by the investor whose property it protects.

Ailo's view is that this matters far beyond morale. How a property manager feels about their work shows up in how they look after an investor's property, and the investor is the one who feels the difference. The relationship between the two is what keeps them together, yet the usual channels carry problems and rarely carry appreciation.

Ailo believes the relationship-led approach is the one that works, and that it starts with property managers feeling seen, valued and thanked.

The thinking was to close the loop. A property manager does a good job. The good job is seen. It is thanked. The good work becomes visible. Ailo could have left that to chance, hoping an investor might pick up the phone on a good day. It chose to build it into the platform, so the relationship could carry good news as easily as a complaint.

The result is Project Thank You. Investors see it in the Ailo app they already use to keep across their property, as a Send thanks button, and it takes a tap rather than a form. The thanks lands in real time in the property manager's messages, with a little celebration attached, and it comes from a named investor rather than an anonymous score. It goes to everyone from the agency in that conversation, so nobody gets left out, and the property manager can open the chat it came from and reply to the investor. The agency can see the thanks coming in on a Thanks tab in its dashboard.

It is deliberately lighter than a survey. Esther Sebbens, Managing Principal at Blackshaw Belconnen, put the difference plainly. "It's much better than doing things like an NPS score," she said. Some investors are very appreciative, she said, but "nobody really has the time to write that type of stuff." Simplicity is the point. "By being able to make it so simple, then they have that opportunity, and then the person receiving it gets that."

At Ray White Canberra, Britt Smith looks after a large portfolio, and the thanks cut through the noise. "All I deal with at the moment is like negativity on from the tenants or owners," she said. So when investors began thanking her, she noticed. "You had party hats and whatnot coming through," she said. "It was nice to actually be recognised for what we do."

Her colleague Annette Thompson speaks to the invisible part of the job. With "the amount of effort that we put in behind the scenes, which is unknown to most people, it is always nice just to get that little bit of feedback and that little bit of thanks, just to show that people appreciate it." What struck her was the difference between hearing it and seeing it.

Lavender

Back at Blackshaw Belconnen, the first thank-you caused a small stir. Esther's staff called out that they had got a thank you, and everyone went to have a look. "I think property managers don't get that very often," she said.

A thank-you doesn't stay with the moment it arrives. It carries into the next call, the next inspection and the next difficult email. For Esther, timing and authorship are what make it land. People, she said, "receive the gratitude more when it is in real time, and you can see that it's coming from that specific person."

A thank-you from one investor lands with one person. At Ray White Canberra, Lisa Donnellan began bringing the thanks to the team's property management meeting this month, so everyone could see them together. One property manager's reaction was, "Oh, wow, I didn't realise I got that many thanks from my owners."

Not everyone was sure it would catch on. When Project Thank You arrived at Ray White Canberra, which looks after around 3,650 properties across Canberra, Lisa was not convinced. She thought the idea was "a bit average". She didn't think many investors would do it. Since starting in August, the property managers at Ray White Canberra have received 81 thanks from investors.

What changed her mind was who the thanks came from.

Lisa recalls one property manager who said, "I didn't think that owner liked me," and then got a thanks. That is the relationship Ailo had in mind. An investor who had seemed hard to please had been paying attention all along, and now the property manager knew it. The thanks didn't just reflect a good relationship. It made it stronger, because both sides now knew where they stood.

For Lisa, the value lies in what a thank-you represents. No investor has to send one. When they do, it is a choice.

Up in North Queensland, Belle Property Townsville is newer to it. The agency looks after around 1,260 properties, and Kristie Dawes, who heads property management there, says the team is "well into month one" on Ailo. Investors there can "send their thanks directly through to their property manager".

Ailo sees recognition as part of keeping good property managers doing the job they're great at. When a property manager stays, the investor keeps the person who knows their property, their tenants and their history.

The job is still the job. What has changed is what happens when an investor notices. The investor can say so in a moment, the property manager hears it from someone they know, and the team can see it. "I wouldn't say look forward to it," Britt said, "but I definitely like when I get it or when it comes through."

That was always the idea. A property manager who feels their work is seen looks after a property differently. An investor who is looked after notices, and says so. And a relationship that carries good news as well as bad is one both sides want to keep. Ailo built Project Thank You so the good work and effort behind the quiet days no longer goes unseen, and so the people doing the work can hear, every so often, that it mattered.

Behind every well-run property is someone who deserves a thank you

Omar Hamid and Katie Bursnall, directors of Rent Star Property Management in Brisbane, on moving about 1,200 properties to Ailo in four weeks and a tech stack that had got out of hand.

Katie Bursnall had braced herself. Changing systems is rarely painless in property management, and Rent Star Property Management had about 1,200 properties to move. The Brisbane agency, which Katie runs with fellow director Omar Hamid, moved them all to Ailo in about four weeks.

She had been preparing for it to be a lot harder. There were little things, as there always are, but no major disaster. For Omar, the support made the difference.

The idea came earlier. About five of Katie's team went to an Ailo event at MECCA without her, and came back with a message. "They all came back from the event and were like, 'Oh, Katie, you should look at this. It looks really good,'" she says. With half her property managers already keen, she took a closer look. "It planted the seed," Omar says.

Omar put the system first and the cost second. "Definitely priority is how do we provide our team with the best software? That's always been our priority," he says.

Katie had set herself a goal for the year: simplify. Staff turnover had been climbing, and she wanted a setup that took pressure off her team and gave them a reason to stay. About eight different programs plugged into their legacy system, and every new team member had to learn them all. "I just think the tech stack was getting too complicated," she says. Omar saw the same thing day to day. "Even just finding information can become difficult," he says. "You got to like log into this and then log into that and check this there, and then for new team members to know where to find everything was becoming very difficult and a bit clunky."

One thing was not up for negotiation. Katie's team already used AI to type up entry reports, and they were not going back. "To go back to typing those up would have been a big adjustment," she says. With entry reports written up by AI in Ailo, they did not have to.

Now that the team is working in Ailo every day, Omar keeps coming back to the workflows.

January and February are the busiest months of the year for the team, and Omar is keen to see what this summer brings. "Really keen for us to go through that period and see the impact it can have, and how Ailo will enable us to get through those busy times," he says. With the move behind them and far fewer logins to juggle, Rent Star is heading into its busiest season with room to grow.

Rent Star moved 1,200 properties to Ailo in four weeks

Shanelle Van Kalken and Leah Foster have worked side by side through three mergers. Now at LJ Hooker Mudgeeraba, they are on the road to 500 managements.

Shanelle Van Kalken has been through three mergers, and this is close to her third time on Ailo. When she took her role as Senior Property Manager at LJ Hooker Mudgeeraba, being on Ailo was part of the deal. Business Development Manager Leah Foster has been beside her the whole way.

For Shanelle, the difference is being shown what to do next. "I've used three different legacy systems and none of them just have that ability to tell you what to do each day, like have that step by step within every single project," she says.

The two work as a pair, and their Ailo Projects are built around that. They went through every project together and decided who is responsible for each step, keeping most of Ailo's defaults. When Shanelle finishes her part of a new business project, the next Action goes to Leah automatically. "I know Leah's going to do her next step," Shanelle says.

When Shanelle is on leave, Leah picks up where she left off, with the notes already there. "There's no spreadsheets. There's no note jotting down. It's all there," Leah says. "It's like your happiness comes back."

The pair recently helped a team from another office move to Ailo, and their advice started with the morning routine. "First thing of the day, don't look at your Outlook, don't look at your emails, look at your projects, look at your actions," Shanelle says. What surprised that team most was being able to comment on a message, a project or an Action and assign it to someone. "There's no picking up the phone, emailing, going into somebody's office," Leah says. "It's just all there for you."

Owners notice too. When a tenant paid late and the rent missed the end of month disbursement, Shanelle offered to release it to the owner straight away. "He's like, 'Yes, please,'" she says. Investors can also see their own balances and what is in flight. "Nothing's kept from them," Leah says.

Now the focus is growth. "We're on our road to 500," Shanelle says. With arrears reminders going out automatically and no disbursement runs to do by hand, she sees room for far more.

For Leah, the time is only part of it. "It's definitely about time and bringing back that love for property management again, so you're not so stressed out all the time," she says. Three mergers on, the two are still side by side, and still enjoying the work.

Step-by-step Ailo Projects put this LJ Hooker duo on the road to 500

Zsofia Popplewell runs a boutique rental business on the Sunshine Coast. With her tenants paying rent through Ailo, end of month is gone for good.

Zsofia Popplewell is an on-site manager on the Sunshine Coast, and her business, Coastal Prestige Property Management, holds management rights. That makes the job a little different from looking after a simple rent roll. She manages the entire portfolio as a one-person operation.

When she bought the business, it came with its own software. It was fine for sending emails to owners, but for running a rental portfolio it was basic. Money could not simply drop into the system, so the banking was done by hand, and the work chewed up a lot of her time.

End of month was nothing new to her. Before management rights, Zsofia ran a holiday resort for eight years on an older system, and month-end was the part she dreaded. "Every single time I got a heart attack during the end of month," she says.

When she looked at Ailo, she found it easy to use and transparent. Her emails sit in one place where she can find them, and the banking is simple. With rent now coming in through Ailo, her month looks very different.

For someone working alone, that means no month-end run hanging over her.

She suspects plenty of people still doing end of month on an older system know the feeling, especially when they are interrupted halfway through. Her verdict is simple. "I'd pay any money for that."

Day to day, she likes how repairs run in Ailo, with each job set up as an Ailo Project and its steps laid out as Actions. "It's really easy to run, and everything is just very easy, very, very easy," she says.

Her owners and tenants see more too. Owners can see their expenses and where their rent is up to, and they can get as involved as they like. When Zsofia forgot to put up the rent on one property, it was the owner who spotted it. "The owner alerted me, 'Hey, you forgot to put up the rent,' because they can see," she says. Tenants can see where their rent is up to and when their next routine inspection is due, and they can chat or call, whichever suits them.

Zsofia can see why that visibility matters for bigger businesses too. In agencies with a lot of staff turnover, having everything in one place takes the pain out of handing a portfolio over, because anyone can see where each job is up to.

With end of month off her list, Zsofia's attention can stay on her owners, her tenants and the repairs that keep each property running.

How a one-person Sunshine Coast business dropped its month-end run

Chloe Dann, Property Management Team Leader at Ray White One Group, on bringing about 1,800 properties onto Ailo and a team that feels calmer for it.

Chloe Dann stepped into the team leader role at Ray White One Group at the start of 2026. A move to Ailo had already been talked about by the leaders before her, then put on hold when the business lost a number of staff, and with them some of the properties they looked after.

By the time Chloe picked it back up, the team was working across a legacy trust accounting system, a separate rent payment service, spreadsheets, Google Forms and an inspection app. Each did its job, but the information drifted between them, and keeping it all lined up had become full-time work in itself. What tipped it was rent. Payments were held up between tenant and trust account, so tenants who had paid appeared to be in arrears.

Ailo holding its own banking mattered, because owners are paid straight away and tenant payments process quickly. But the bigger draw was having one place for the whole job, from payments through to the inspection and maintenance work the team had been running elsewhere.

Earlier in her career, at previous agencies, Chloe worked as a property manager under leaders who brought in change without asking, and that experience shaped how she leads her own team. Her office door stays open, and new processes go past the people who will use them before anything is settled.

Ray White One Group moved around 1,800 properties to Ailo and went live on 3 October 2026, and the team settled in quickly.

A fortnight in, Chloe sat everyone down to ask what was working and what was not, and 98 per cent of her property managers said they loved having everything in one place, with Ailo Projects a particular favourite. For the few still finding their feet, a little extra training is the plan.

Owners have noticed too. They can see far more of what is happening on their property than before, and Chloe says customer service with owners has lifted as a result. What she is looking forward to most, though, sits closer to home.

Her advice to anyone weighing up the same move is honest. A change like this takes real work to make sure everything flows, and she would not pretend otherwise. But with her team working from one place, and owners seeing more than they ever have, Chloe is clear that the work was worth it.

98% of PMs love it: Ray White One Group's 1,800-property move

Charlene Amber, Pod and Team Leader at Harcourts Solutions, on moving to Ailo and what came after.

Charlene Amber runs a portfolio of around 750 properties at Harcourts Solutions in Brisbane. She wants it to reach 1,000. When the business began looking at a move to Ailo, she was the person the rest of the team watched. If Charlene was okay with it, everyone else would be.

She was not okay with it, at least not at first. Charlene knew the legacy system from beginning to end, and had brought it with her from a previous business. It had its flaws, but she had a workaround for every one of them. On a portfolio that size, that is how you survive.

What moved her was seeing Ailo for herself. Visiting other agencies already running on Ailo, and time spent with her principal Jodie, did more than any presentation could. The business took the team through it step by step, and the decision was made together rather than handed down.

Charlene is honest that there was an adjustment period. She had the questions anyone running a large portfolio would have, and it took a little while to find her feet. Onboarding has since improved, and businesses going live on Ailo now settle in within about two weeks.

What carried her through was the team around her. The procedures were built with the people who would use them, and the change felt shared. The business has since grown from around 2,300 properties to roughly 3,500, including an acquisition of an additional 1,050 or so.

The shift Charlene describes now is less about any feature and more about how her day feels. Work arrives when it needs to be done, not all at once, and her time goes to owners rather than to chasing.

She no longer takes work home unless it is the kind she wants to do, like ideas for how the team could be structured as it grows. Her grandson visits the office, and every couple of hours they play ball up and down the hall. In a few weeks she is heading away for two weeks, probably the first time she will travel without her laptop.

The person everyone looked to before the move is still the person everyone looks to. The difference is that Charlene now spends her energy on the portfolio she is building, the team growing with her, and the thousand properties she has had in her sights all along.

How a 750-property team leader now spends her time with investors

Melissa Jerzyna on handing smoke alarm compliance to DC through Ailo, and what her team did with the time

Melissa Jerzyna runs a busy office. As Director of Property Management at LJ Hooker Penrith, she oversees a rent roll of more than 1,300 properties, and every one of them needs its smoke alarms checked, logged and paid for each year. For years that meant follow-ups, missed appointments and calls from tenants wondering why nobody had turned up.

When Mel moved the office's smoke alarm compliance to DC, working inside Ailo, the reason was simple.

Under the old arrangement, property managers spent time replying to the provider about tenant details and chasing access. Since the switch, Mel says, there have been no access issues and no tenant complaints about no-shows. The few jobs DC cannot get to are the ones where a tenant cannot be reached, and those are flagged in the system as outstanding compliance jobs for the team to pick up.

Her estimate of the difference is generous. "It has probably reduced our workload when it comes to compliance by 80%," she says, before revising it upwards: "probably closer to 90."

The team felt it straight away, and Mel puts that down to something modest.

"PMs are busy enough as it is," she says. The hours that used to go on reminders and chasing now go back into the portfolio. "The time that the team have saved, they can be managing more properties or they can be servicing their owners in different ways."

The accounts side benefits too. DC's invoices upload directly into the system, so the bills no longer need to be keyed in by hand. "We've 1316 properties under management," she says. "Having to process 1200 odd bills of smoke alarm compliance a year. That's a big chunk. I'm not having to do that as well."

The team has built its own habits around the process. DC sends through a list of the properties due, with key numbers already attached. Staff print the list, collect the keys and drop them into what the office now calls its DC smoke alarm buckets, ready to be picked up on the day.

For an office managing a portfolio of this size, smoke alarm compliance has gone from a daily chore to something that simply happens in the background, leaving Mel and her team free to spend their days on the owners and properties that keep LJ Hooker Penrith growing.

LJ Hooker Penrith cut its smoke alarm compliance workload by up to 90%

Kara Davoren on the simplicity that gave her the confidence to grow

Kara Davoren did not wait to feel ready. Hired as a property management assistant at Ray White Ashfield | Summer Hill, she watched how the work sat in front of her, then made a call most people would leave for later.

She arrived without the depth or experience that usually comes with the role, but she made up for it with energy and a desire to do a fantastic job. Because Ailo was easy to use, confidence followed, and with it her capabilities. Fresh from leasing on legacy systems, she landed straight into property management on Ailo, and within weeks she asked for a portfolio of her own. The growth was her request, made because she felt ready.

It's this simplicity and ease of use that sits at the centre of her growth story. The office portfolio is around 800, and hers grew to about 200. A year and a half on the platform, she talks about her portfolio with the calm of someone who has room to spare. For any property manager reading this, the 200 is not the point, and it is not a target. What matters is that she chose it from a position of confidence and the work stayed manageable.

"Everything is there in the one place, I switch off when I switch off, 200 seems easy when you have the right systems."

Ailo Projects did the heavy lifting. A new tenancy, a repair, a vacate, a bulk message to renters: each opens as a Project, a body of Actions she can work through in sequence rather than inventing from memory or chasing an arbitrary checklist left behind by a legacy system.

"It's honestly a step-by-step," she said. "If you start a new tenancy, open your project, add the same details. Step-by-step, it gives you what to do and you mark it off as ticked as you go through it."

Those Actions are customisable, with due dates that adjust to the business, and they can be delegated and logged so the work stays visible. When someone comes in for keys and the property manager is out, a colleague can still ask the questions that used to live on a sticky note. Have they paid their rent? Bond? Application? Sharer details? If the Project is worked through, the keys go out.

Kara adds her own Actions for how her assistant prefers to work. Seven days' notice means a seven-day due date, not a tomorrow invented under pressure.

Asked how Ailo makes her feel, she did not reach for a product word.

Every property manager in the room recognised their own version of that spiral: the bedside note, the Post-it note on the fridge, the SMS to yourself. Kara's version has gone quiet. Asking for the responsibility early stopped feeling like a leap once the evenings stayed hers and the weekends stayed free, because the work that used to follow her home finally had somewhere else to live.

From PM Assistant to 200 Managements Without Losing Her Nights

We are very excited to have launched our new home membership model for Ailo users.

Our driving mission is to improve the experience for all involved in property management. We truly believe the experience of owning, renting and managing a property can be transformed through a platform that is designed to create real value for users and that leaves legacy ideas around a one dimensional interaction in its wake.

Our goal is that everyone should get value from the Ailo platform.

For renters, that value is built in the way the platform gives them visibility and control over their tenancy and its functioning. This manifests in:

More ways to communicate with their property managers

Faster ways for property managers to communicate with renters

Full visibility into past and upcoming tenancy inspections

Control and optionality in managing tenancy related bills

Interactions with, and management of relationships with, co-tenants

Access to their rent cycle and tenancy ledger at any time, through a real time ledger.

The live ledger immediately reflects rent as paid the moment renters pay, doing away with uncertainty and old ideas of paying days ahead of the due date in order to be “on time”.

The Ailo platform is designed to serve users, not the other way around. Importantly, the Ailo platform at its core is designed to provide renters with choice and it supports a wide range of options for how a renter can manage their home obligations, interact with the property manager, manage arrangements with co-tenants, make payments, including direct debit, bank initiated payments and CentrePay, amongst others. No other platform has done more in this effort.

We have for a long time supported renters in their choice of paying rent by credit and debit cards. Consistent with industry practice, we charged a service fee for providing payment services.

From 1 October, industry wide changes require removal of surcharges for card payments. This new requirement challenges all service providers across Australia, and in particular those that process rent, to do one of two things: no longer offer the flexibility of card payments, or create new value for renters that go far beyond just processing a payment.

Most companies have responded by removing the choice to use cards as an option for renters all together. Before deciding how we would respond, we surveyed and interviewed renters who pay by card and have been trialling new models of providing services within the Ailo Platform. Our offering remains considerate of the legislative protections for renters around payment methods and the Ailo platform having been, and continuing to be, provided to renters, investors and service providers at no cost.

Renters were clear that they wanted to keep flexibility in methods of payment. Cards help them manage cash flow; it is how they pay for and track many other expenses and may earn them points on their largest regular expense. We decided to rise to the challenge by adjusting the service we provide to both create new sources of value for our users and preserve the flexibility for renters to use cards, should they choose.

Card options are part of a broader set of features bundled under an optional home membership for a cost. This preserves a user’s ability to choose to make card payments while getting additional value as part of the offering.

Our vision for home memberships is to help everyone manage their home more effectively and economically. The optional memberships provide tools to centrally manage and pay any home and personal bills, track them over time and benchmark them against others. We have developed checklists to help users manage the different stages of a tenancy and also created more flexibility and simplicity over how bills can be managed and paid on time.

Membership options are entirely opt-in for the user. They do not have any impact on the core renting experience and will not change the relationship members have with their property manager or managing agency. To be clear, a member will not get any preferential treatment from the property manager and non-members will always have access to all the renter features and free payment options set out above. The value in memberships is all about the home, not the tenancy.

We are excited to bring more services to market and to increasingly support and enhance the experience of managing a home.

Learn more about the Ailo Platform for renters

Got questions or need help? Contact Ailo Support at 

New home memberships model announced

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.

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.

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

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. 


21.10.26 | Release Notes

What's New in Ailo

21.10.26

Choose the rent due date when setting up a tenancy

Edit occupied since date from the Manage menu

Deleting a backdated rent review now reverses its adjustment