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Mel Jerzyna on Scaling Property Management Without Burning People Out

, the conversation didn’t start with growth. It started with control.

Mel runs one of the more operationally mature property management businesses I come across. She’s pragmatic, direct, and very clear on what does and doesn’t work at scale. So when she talks about growth, it’s never abstract. It’s grounded in what her team can actually sustain.

“We’ve been on Ailo just over a year now,” she told me. “Best decision. I’ve got no complaints whatsoever.”

That wasn’t said lightly. It came after a year of real-world use, not a honeymoon period.

Over the last year, Mel’s business has materially increased capacity. Where portfolios once sat around 120 properties per manager, they’re now comfortably operating well above 200.

What mattered wasn’t the headline number. It was how little drama came with it.

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That framework has become the backbone of how her team works. Projects define the work. Actions surface what matters. Visibility replaces guesswork.

And that visibility extends across the team.

That shift has changed how the team supports each other. Instead of work being hidden in individual inboxes or heads, it’s shared and visible.

“They jump in and help each other because it’s so transparent,” she said.

One of the most striking parts of our conversation was Mel’s story about Wayne.

Wayne joined the business in December. He came from recruitment, not property management. No PM background. No trust accounting history. Three months in, he’s managing over 200 properties.

“He’s running 218,” Mel said, almost casually. “And his response time is 6.9 minutes.”

That number matters because it reframes the conversation entirely. This isn’t about heroic individuals. It’s about systems doing the heavy lifting.

When I asked why she hired him, Mel didn’t talk about experience.

“It was his common sense,” she said. “Recruitment is dying. He knew it. He could see that property management isn’t going anywhere. That told me he wasn’t stupid.”

“He came to the interview with the legislation printed out,” she said. “He’d already rattled off half of it.”

But here’s the critical part. Three years ago, Wayne wouldn’t have been a viable hire.

“You would’ve needed someone with ten years’ experience,” I said to her. “The risk would’ve been too high.”

“With Ailo and the projects in place, it’s pretty much foolproof,” she said. “You follow the steps. That’s it.”

Technical knowledge still matters, but it no longer defines who can succeed. Transferable skills do.

Relationship management, organisation, energy & judgment capabilities. Those are now the attributes Mel looks for.

Across the team, the numbers tell the story.

“We’ve got portfolios at 162, 218, 225,” she said. “Most of the team is over 200 now.”

Response times are measured in minutes, not days.

“In the old world, we measured reply time in days,” I said. “Now you’re talking minutes.”

“Our average is 7.6 minutes,” she said.

What that means for clients is consistency. What it means for leaders is predictability.

“I can see exactly what’s happening,” she said. “Who’s got actions outstanding. Where we need to help.”

That visibility has also changed how Mel leads.

“I’m not guessing anymore,” she said. “I’m not waiting for something to blow up.”

Towards the end of our conversation, Mel touched on something that comes up often in this industry. Fear of change.

“Everyone says, ‘My property manager will hate the change,’” she said. “They probably will for the first month.”

“But with the right support, the change actually relieves them.”

That insight is consistent with everything else she described. When systems reduce mental load, people stop resisting change because it no longer feels like risk.

“It was the best change I made without knowing it,” she said.

Mel’s story isn’t about chasing growth at all costs. It’s about creating the conditions where growth becomes possible without breaking people.

By putting structure in place, she’s changed who she can hire, how quickly people can succeed, and how confidently the team can scale.

Ailo didn’t replace experience in her business. It redistributed it. 

And in doing so, it’s allowed Mel to build a team that grows together, supports each other, and keeps raising the bar without burning out.

That’s not a feature story. It’s a growth story.

Scaling Property Management Without Burning People Out

When I caught up with Tina and Cathy from 

, what struck me wasn’t excitement about a new platform. It was the confidence it had enabled in the business and in the team, the kind that only comes from watching something evolve over time and seeing feedback taken seriously.

I was first introduced to Tina back in 2019 by 

, with a view to exploring what the future of property management systems might look like.

From that first meeting, one thing was immediately clear. Tina holds an exceptionally high standard and isn’t shy about making demands of technology partners.

For that reason, when they looked at Ailo early, they held off deliberately. They only moved when it met the standard they were prepared to put in front of their owners and their team.

That context matters. This isn’t a story about jumping early, it’s about waiting until something is genuinely ready.

And that hesitation wasn’t resistance to change. It was a responsibility to their team, and to the tenants and landlords they serve.

Watching the Platform Grow With the Business

One of the first things I wanted to understand was whether their confidence today was about what Ailo does now, or about what they believe it will continue to do. For Cathy, that answer was clear.

What mattered wasn’t just delivery, but the relationship behind it. Being able to give candid feedback, raise issues that affected real clients, and trust that those issues would be taken seriously.

Those owners had come from legacy systems they were comfortable with. The fact that their concerns had been addressed over time changed the conversation entirely.

“They were looking for certain things when we took Ailo on a couple of years ago,” Cathy said. “Those things are there now. They’re over the moon.”

I asked them how they’d speak to leaders who think they already know what Ailo is because they saw it a year or two ago.

“The most important thing is that you work with us to get the program to suit property management and our owners’ needs,” she said. “Watching the development from five years ago to today has been remarkable.”

What she was really pointing to was confidence in trajectory. Not just where the platform is, but how it listens and responds.

“You held off responsibly,” I said to Tina. “You said it wasn’t ready yet, and then you said, now it is.”

“Today, I’m an advocate for it,” she said. “Absolutely."

Genuine advocacy like that doesn't arrive out of thin air, its comes through lived experience.

When we shifted from philosophy to practice, the conversation became more concrete.

Transparency came up repeatedly, from both of them.

“Notes,” Cathy added. “Transparency. Notes.”

For Tina, this had a direct impact on how she works as a BDM and team leader.

By keeping everything in one place, handovers stopped being risky.

“If I’m off, the property manager or leaser can see exactly what was said,” she said. “They know the context.”

That continuity mattered not just internally, but to investors as well.

“Things don’t get missed,” Tina said. “That’s the most important thing for me.”

What sat underneath all of this was culture.

For LJ Hooker Narang, confidence in Ailo isn’t about features or even efficiency. It’s about knowing their team is supported, their owners feel heard, and the business can keep growing without losing its standards.

There was no sense of “sign up and see you later” in how they described the relationship with Ailo, its on ongoing, iterative and shared - even years after they made the commitment to change. 

Really, that’s what stood out most to me. This isn’t a platform they adopted and adapted themselves around. It’s one they feel has grown alongside them, responded to their reality, and continues to earn their trust

Why LJ Hooker Narang Sees Ailo as a Long-Term Partner

When I spoke with Ashleigh Roberts, I wanted to start at the highest level and work backwards.

We kicked off by discussing the bigger question of property management as it exists today versus what it could be, if the right foundations were in place.

Ashleigh has spent the better part of two decades in property management. She’s led teams, trained and coached across networks, and now operates as Principal of Belle Property Sandgate. Her perspective isn’t theoretical. It’s formed through running teams, carrying responsibility, and seeing first-hand where good people struggle.

She spoke candidly about how often property managers are left feeling frustrated, not because they lack capability, but because the systems around them make it harder than it needs to be to do a good job.

You can see why we get along. Ashleigh’s distinction is spot on, and I think that matters. In her view, much of the pressure in property management is systemic. Stress isn’t a personal failing. It’s a signal that something upstream isn’t working.

Where she believes many software providers went wrong is in misunderstanding who they were building for.

What stood out to her about Ailo wasn’t just that it considered landlords and tenants first, but that it also understood the lived experience of the property manager in the middle.

That shift had a tangible effect on the client experience.

Ashleigh was clear that fees were no longer the primary battleground. In her experience, owners were willing to pay for quality, but had lost confidence when service didn’t match expectation.

“What’s changed is that we do what we say we’re going to do,” she said. “The communication is transparent. Owners can make good decisions because they have the information. They feel they can trust their manager.”

That trust, she explained, comes from control, not in a negative sense, but from knowing exactly where things are up to at any given moment.

“If an investor calls with a question, we have an answer,” she said. “Even if it’s not the answer they were hoping for, there’s no frustration because there’s clarity.”

From a leadership perspective, the impact went deeper than service delivery.

Ashleigh talked about how empowering it is to watch capable property managers move from coping to excelling once the friction is removed.

She described it as finally giving good people what they need to be great.

“That’s the difference,” she said. “Good people don’t become great on their own.”

As our conversation turned to leadership, Ashleigh’s philosophy became even clearer. She’s not interested in being the cheapest operator in the market.

“We want to be the highest quality,” she said. “Trusted. educated and accessible.”

For her, quality means having the time and capacity to be present. To answer questions without scrambling, to walk into people’s homes with respect, and never rush a conversation that matters.

That level of care, she explained, is only possible when the systems underneath the business are doing their job quietly and reliably.

The final question I put to her was how she would speak to leaders who say property management is just too hard.

“You’re focusing on the wrong thing,” she said. “You’ve probably already had great people. They’re not staying because they don’t feel supported.”

For Ashleigh, enablement is the missing link. Not more pressure. Not more resilience training. But systems and structures that allow capable people to operate at the level they aspire to.

When someone with Ashleigh’s depth of experience speaks that plainly, it carries weight. I find it genuinely refreshing to hear leadership articulated so clearly, without ego.

This isn’t a story about switching software. It’s about recognising that calm, trust, and quality don’t happen by accident. They’re designed. And when the system supports that design, people finally get to do what they came into the industry to do.

Ashleigh Roberts on Enablement, Trust and the Future of Property Management 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Structured without being rigid and human without being chaotic.

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

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

Designing a Property Management Business Around Outcomes

Cloud

When property managers talk about system change, the conversation often stays at the surface. Features. Workflows. Integrations. What’s missing from the legacy platform and what might be better somewhere else.

What I wanted to understand with Shanniah Barri was something deeper. Not just whether Ailo worked, but how it changed the way she thought about her role, her team, and her ability to actually switch off.

Shanniah is a senior property manager at Belle Property Sandgate, with more than a decade in the industry. She’s tech-savvy, process-driven, and clear about the standards she expects from the systems she uses. She also happens to have used Ailo as a tenant before ever using it as a property manager, which gave her a perspective most people don’t start with.

From Curiosity to Frustration With the Old Way

When we spoke, Shanniah described her mindset before the change as a mix of excitement and impatience. She likes technology and believes good technology should make work easier, not harder.

“I felt my legacy program was clunky,” she said. “When I saw Ailo, it was just so much more intuitive. After that, every time I logged into the old system, I was annoyed that I wasn’t using Ailo.”

What bothered her most wasn’t a single missing feature. It was the accumulation of friction. Finding information was difficult. Emails were hard to track. Workflows existed but couldn’t be changed.

“We run at that one per cent more,” she explained. “But I couldn’t customise something as simple as a lease renewal email. I had to open a Word document just to send the message the way I wanted.”

The workflow dictated the process, not the other way around. You couldn’t skip steps, remove steps, or adapt them to how the team actually worked. Over time, that rigidity became exhausting.

“Ailo lets you add those extra steps,” she said. “That one per cent. Sending the owner the extra message. Reminding you to make the extra call. That’s the difference.”

She also laughed about something more subjective but no less real.

“Ailo looks prettier,” she said. “It’s clean. Everything’s where it should be. And honestly, that matters for adoption.”

As we talked about usability, the conversation shifted naturally to expectations, particularly for newer property managers.

Shanniah was blunt. Going backwards isn’t an option.

“When I started, we used one of the really old, non-cloud programs,” she said. “If I ever had to go back to that, I wouldn’t do it. I actually wouldn’t do property management without Ailo now.”

She sees this less as preference and more as reality. Property managers today expect systems to be intuitive, accessible, and supportive of how they work. Not confusing. Not visually hostile. Not something you dread opening.

“If you take that away,” she said, “I don’t think I’d stay.”

One of the most important moments in our conversation came when Shanniah explained how she used to manage her workload.

“For a long time, it was fine because it was just me,” she said. “I’ve been doing this for 12 years. I relied on my brain. Mondays I do this. Tuesdays I do that.”

“There was nothing prompting me,” she said. “It was all in my head.”

That meant sick days were stressful. Leave was stressful. Even evenings at home were interrupted by doubt.

“Seven o’clock at night, you’re thinking, did I do that lease renewal? Is it due? I can’t remember because I’m working off my brain.”

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

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

I asked her directly how important it was to be able to switch off.

“It’s the most important thing ever,” she said.

She described taking four weeks off over Christmas, something that would previously have been unthinkable.

“I could see the workload before I left,” she said. “What was coming up. What was expiring.”

She set her colleague up with a clear list of actions, knowing that if those were completed, there would be no surprises.

“I didn’t think about work for three weeks,” she said.

“Before, you’d come back and do an audit. Check lease renewals. Check what happened while you were away. This time, we just came in and knew what the actions were.”

That predictability, she said, was everything.

As we wrapped up, it became clear that the impact of Ailo wasn’t confined to productivity or efficiency.

“It’s the mental load,” she said. “You carry that into your relationship with your kids.”

When a system allows you to trust that nothing is being missed, it doesn’t just change how you work. It changes how you live.

For Shanniah, that balance is no longer negotiable.

Shanniah Barri on Reducing Mental Load in Property Management

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s not disengagement. That’s confidence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

29.01.26 | Release Notes

What's New in Ailo

29 January 2026

Change of ownership: control the transfer of funds yourself!

“You’ve nailed it!”

coming soon: OUT LATER this week

Process full refunds for rent payments yourself

Letting & renewal fees: configure as % of annual rent

Built from your feedback

More updates you asked for

1. Copy a calendar link to sync your Ailo inspections with any calendar app 🔗

2. Attach bills for payment from project files 🖇️

3. You can now filter paid bills by date range 🔎

Friendly reminders 🐘