Smart Property Management: Automating the Everyday

The right tech stack isn’t just about saving time—it's about improving service, reducing stress, and allowing teams to focus on relationship-building and client support.

In this webinar, Kelly Kovacev from Inspection Express along with Rohith George and Min Ahrns from Managed App discuss how AI and automation are transforming property management by reducing repetitive admin tasks. Learn how the integration between Inspection Express and Managed App, which streamlines processes like condition reports and end-of-month reconciliations, allows property managers to save significant time while maintaining a personal touch:

Full transcript

Kelly Kovacev: Hi everyone and welcome. I'm Kelly from Inspection Express and today we're diving into how AI and automation can seriously reduce the pressure during peak times in property management. I'm so proud to be joined today by Ro and Min from Managed App, our key integration partners to show us how automation is changing the game for property managers. We'll dive into how top property managers are eliminating repetitive admin, reclaiming some serious time, all without losing that human touch that makes property management so powerful. Focusing on three key areas. Condition reports, end of month reconciliation and the importance of having integrated products. And hopefully you'll pick up a few practical tips along the way. Ro, could you give us a quick intro to Managed app, your role there and what inspired you to focus on automating, trust accounting and payments?

Rohith George: Hi Kelly, thanks for having us here. So right. I joined manage back in 2018 as the first employee and the goal for Manage was to simplify property management by removing the unnecessary manually handling of money in trust bank accounts for property managers, streamlining a lot of the underlying pain points about, you know, unknown funds, you know, daily downloads or end of month reconciliation. So Manage basically designed a bunch of digital wallets for renters, owners, tradies and agents and that allows renters to fund those wallets within a full suite CRM. And we basically instantly make payments between the renter all the way to the property owner while paying the agency in the middle. When I've started back in 2018, we're processing about $800,000 a month in transactional volume for agents. Now we're nationwide and we process over $120 million a month. Doing integrations with market leading products like Inspection Express allow us to focus on providing the best seamless experience for a lot of our customers, especially as they start scaling. Using a product that specifically focuses on inspections and removing a lot of their admin helps us almost double down on a lot of the automation and efficiency gains. So we help with the management of the rental property, logging maintenance task and processing payments. And with an integration with you guys, it helps get a lot of the inspections done at the same time.

Kelly Kovacev: Awesome. And who are some of the key accounts that you guys are currently working with?

Rohith George: We are nationwide so we have kind of 30% of our markets over up in Queensland, Victoria and and again another 30% down in New South Wales. Some of our biggest customers are Marshall White down in Melbourne. They've been with us since 2019. We also power a lot of really fast growing agencies as well. So I think it was Agile Intelligence Ran a report on the fastest growing property management businesses and the top 40% of those all use managed. So we've helped agencies start with zero and within two to three years get between 400 to 800 properties under management and start streamlining a lot of those payments without having to do any of the end of month. You don't even need to run. Especially up in Queensland and New South Wales. You don't need a trust accountant within your business because you know bonds are lodged directly up to the bond board. All the rental payments that are processed between the renter to the owner. The platform has a design smart wallet that actually holds back funds from rent if there's any upcoming bills, whether it's council rates, water or maintenance. So the system can hold those funds and pay it when they for due and it just gets at the end of the day money into your property investors bank account as soon as rent is paid. So when a renter makes a payment within 30 seconds it can be in your property investors offset account. That's a massive growth tool for a lot of our agencies to go out there and win business in their local market.

Kelly Kovacev: Love that. It's awesome. I guess together we're creating a great ecosystem for our clients.

Rohith George: Absolutely.

Kelly Kovacev: Now let's talk about the bottlenecks in property management. What are the top three most time consuming tasks of a pm? It's most definitely condition reports, end of month reconciliation maintenance that we won't touch on too much today. That might be a future webinar but more focusing on the manual data entry and unconnected platforms. Min, you've got a legacy of experience and industry knowledge. Please give us an intro. Tell us about your experience in property management.

Min Ahrns: Thank you for having us Kelly. It's really great to be on the team with you. So I've worked in the industry for over 30 years in property management, sales and then in real estate software. So over the 30 years plus I've used from traditional ledgers right through. So I've used every platform generally out there and I've actually used Managed in the real world as a property manager. So I know firsthand what it's like to use the platform and the savings that it generates by using Managed over the three states. Originally in South Australia, New South Wales and now in the Gold Coast. So I've got licenses in three states so that's always fun. But yeah, it's managed. Coming on as the account manager I work with all of our clients just making sure that they getting the most out of the platform, understanding the benefits and setting up their integrations to make sure that they're key, you know, they're partnered with the perfect integration partners. So it's great to see the success that we're getting with Inspection Express.

Kelly Kovacev: Yeah. And I think originally it was you who kicked this all off a few years ago.

Min Ahrns: Yeah, yeah. Great to see it's all final fruition.

Kelly Kovacev: Yeah. And from your perspective, what are the impacts of manual workflows on PMs and the stress it has on those teams, like. And where do you see the biggest opportunities for time savings?

Min Ahrns: Well, the need for such in depth condition reports is, you know, it's a real strong issue and a lot of companies don't do what they're required to do, so they really need to embrace the software out there to use it. So the condition reports, the ability to get them done so quickly with Inspection Express, it takes, you know, you can basically do it with your eyes shut. You can the 360, what I've seen, it's just amazing how it works. You know, from the old days of using a pencil, you know, pen and paper with a pad, writing, you know, your notes down and then doing that again for your outgoing and then redoing it for your ingoing, what's changed is just incredible. But it's, you know, it's sad to hear that some offices actually still use those, those methods. They still go out with a pen and paper and just take their photos on their phone and just save them somewhere. So, you know, having this function available, it's just a huge, huge time saver. So you can, you could get two or three ingoings done very easily in a morning, whereas you are lucky to get one done in a day with the old method. So the time saving is incredible.

Kelly Kovacev: Yeah. So true. Yeah. It's crazy to think people are still doing it the old way. Especially we've gone into the US recently and I would say at least probably more than 50% of the market are just still doing it that way as well.

Min Ahrns: It's crazy to think, you'd always think that the US would be in front of us, not behind us, wouldn't you?

Kelly Kovacev: You would think, hopefully we can change that.

Rohith George: Yeah.

Min Ahrns: Sorry, I was just. With the end of month as well, not having an end of month to worry about with Managed, you know, there's no daily receipting, there's no reconciliations to do, there's no trying to balance your trust account with your bank statement. There's none of that you need to worry about. So I worked in a support role for three and a half years for our software and you know, we would be daily getting daily phone calls saying they can't balance their trust account or they would change the bank balance amount because that was the only way they could get their trust account to balance. So it's really scary some of the stories I've heard out there on how people do misused trust accounts. So having that removed, there's no trust account to worry about. The money is transferred automatically straight through to your owners, trades the agency. It's just a simple process that works within seconds of the fund, the rent being received. It's just an amazing process. So the risk and time saving for your principals, property managers, it's a no brainer really is.

Kelly Kovacev: Yeah.

Min Ahrns: And the main site, like I said, we don't need to touch that too much but you know, we've got some really strong workflows with that as well. So yeah, it's some really good time saving out there.

Kelly Kovacev: Yeah, you guys have produced some really cool videos on, you know, the issues that can help that can happen with having those trust accounts and you know what happens when you've got a few dodgy agents out there. So it's good to eliminate all of that.

Min Ahrns: Yeah, definitely.

Kelly Kovacev: Cool. All right, so I guess that brings us into our first tip which would be to utilize the best parts of different software to create a great tech stack that works best for your team. So we know that standalone tools can only take you so far. It's the connection between the two systems that really supercharge efficiencies for property managers. And the integration between Inspection Express and Managed App is helping our clients streamline workflows from inspections to leasing and payments with no double handling at all and no steps missed. So I guess how does the integration work from our perspective here at Inspection Express? Manage has a great open API which allows us to pull the data that our clients need for inspections. So at the beginning of the day you can open up your Inspection Express app, view all the tasks or the inspection tasks that you've got due today. Property data, tenancy data, contact information is all there at the touch of your fingertips and then whatever we're going out and finalizing for the day on Inspection Express is going to save seamlessly back into managed where you can then raise your maintenance and share with landlords and tenants. The other side of the integration is with leasing and bringing on new clients with our paperless office where you'll be able to get fully executed documents pushed straight through from our paperless office into Managed which is great for having that one source of truth for all your documents and portfolio data. Did I miss anything there that you guys want to add?

Rohith George: No, I mean, I think you kind of touched on it. You know, like the whole point is like efficiency gains for property management is such an undersold, like problem. I think, you know, just Min and yourself have spent way more time than I have. I've only had like six years in the property management space, but I've got such a big admiration for how much admin there is in property management. I think it just gets more and more complicated year on year. That's why there was a 50% reduction in the workforce in Victorian property management from 2023. Those 30%, like nationwide. It's pretty scary because that workload isn't reducing either. It's just getting passed onto the shoulders of other property managers, causes more stress. So seamless integrations is definitely, you know, I think agency principals out there really need to understand that if you don't go for depth rather than breadth when it comes to products and solutions out there, what you're really missing out on is time. And there's an opportunity cost if you're of your ops managers or your property managers are out there and they're not saving the extra hour or two hours. And that's where we built this off the back of one of our large customers, Marshall White came to us and said, you know, we're using Inspection Express, we're using Managed. How can we help reduce our team's time? And doing a joint engineering scoping session between your team, Martial Arts team and Manage allowed us to kind of focus on what the problems were and how we can effectively do it in one click as soon as they go and do what they need to do on a property. And it is really cool to see how the 360 degree camera and your AI comments work. Seeing them do it out there live and then just clicking Complete and it automatically syncs that report directly into Managed. You know, the owner and your renters can visibly see that straight away is such a big value gain for them and they don't even need to worry about going back to the office, dragging and dropping it in and adding all the comments either. So, yeah, seeing it out there in the marketplace is cool. And I think a lot of agency principals out there should also look at it and see how it can save their team time and what can they do with that saved time as well?

Kelly Kovacev: Yeah, amazing. And I guess with these sort of workflows, how have you Seen it impact the tenant and landlord experience. I guess it's having it available in real time on Managed.

Rohith George: Yeah, absolutely. We have a very highly engaged audience as well. So renters and owners, because we have the payment banking details throughout natively on our platform, they don't just put onto a form and the agent needs to go and put the BSP account number in the profile for the trust account on Manage, they log in and securely add it. 1 It means like no unsecured banking details or personal identified information is left accessible on your own CRM without it's actually stored directly with payment gateway. So those owners and renters have to log into Manage, which means you're already Talking to a 90% engaged community of your renters and your property investors. So for them to be able to log in and actually see not just like how the platform is benefiting them from visibly seeing their financial reporting, but also being able to see inspection straight away as soon as it's done, it's literally within 15 seconds available for the renter and the owner to go and review the inspection condition report.

Kelly Kovacev: Yeah, nice. Great. And I guess that leads us through to our efficiency tip number two, which is condition reports. So definitely our expertise here. So I guess these condition reports before our 360AI used to take two to three hours to complete and I'm sure most of our audience is already utilizing the 360 and we'll know that we can now bring that sort of right down to 30 minutes or even less. It's absolutely amazing. And I've just got a quick video here on how all of that works. But we're definitely giving property managers back about 10 to 15 hours a week alone by them utilizing this product.

Kelly Kovacev: Wow. Isn't that amazing? So 30 seconds. All of your comments can be generated for your whole condition report which is so, so good. Such a game changer. The great news today is we are releasing it for our exit inspections. So now when you compare your move in and move out inspections side by side, it'll produce all the comments and actually compare the two side by side. So that's available to our clients today, which is good.

Min Ahrns: That's fantastic. So I did have a question and I thought I'd just bring it up now because I'm sure there's probably questions out there with the tribunal reports. So if you're going to tribunal, do they accept the 360 or is there flat like printable shots you can use for that?

Kelly Kovacev: So in some states they will, you know, the majority of our client base is in Victoria so it's definitely been tried and tested here. The great thing about the 360 is it's producing a PDF report. So every time you're creating a 360 inspection you're creating that PDF report as well. The 360 imagery is broken down into six separate sections with the tongue twister there. So that allows you to view everything there on the condition report and then you can just QR code scan Back to the360 if you need or even snapshot and compare. There's actually an awesome feature which allows you to compare two snapshots 360 side by side and date and time stamps it which is very effective for tribunal.

Min Ahrns: Yeah, perfect.

Kelly Kovacev: Wouldn't you have loved that when you were a property manager? So I guess that brings us through to your guys area of expertise here to 3. So automating end of month which can be an absolute nightmare. But you guys take the manual matching errors and stress out of it. Min, how long does it typically take property managers to reconcile manually and how has automation changed that?

Min Ahrns: Well, in my experience some property managers or principals that would do their end of month, you know, they would, you know, they get down to a $0.01 issue where they were trying to find that last $0.01 which you know, they could spend hours trying to reconcile their trust account due to that $0.01 which you know, January is a transposed number. But so you know, in a good month you would probably be looking at, you know, at least two to three Hours, that was at a good month. So other days, you know, between Christmas and New Year, New Year's Eve, New Year's Day, owners still want their money. So, you know, you could never plan a holiday. We could never plan a trip away when we were doing support because, you know, you always had to be available for those support calls between Christmas and New Year or New Year's Day. So, you know, something like that. You don't. That's not even a thought anymore. So end of month, the statements get automatically emailed out to your owners. Soon the tenants, rents reconciled automatically. The owner's payments are straight through to their bank account. Their statements are emailed out via a link or a PDF. So, you know, and you don't even. First of the month or the last day of the month is just another Tuesday or Wednesday Visa in it now. It's not even, you know, it's not even a thought. End of financial year is just another day because again, you know, the end of financial year reports go out automatically. So just the stress. There is no stress anymore. You don't have to even consider what day of the month it is. So, you know, that in itself is just a huge relief. And you know, you've always seen trust accountants seeking, you know, or agencies looking for trust accountants and paying thousands and thousands of dollars to get it, you know, to outsource. So, you know, we've taken all of that need away from that. So there's lots of things there that we can, can certainly save the, the principal from doing. And a lot of times the, the property managers, you know, they've got to answer a lot of questions in relating to, you know, funds owners asking for their funds, tenants not paying their rent on time. So we're taking all those frustrations away as well. So, you know, all of those high stress issues, we've removed those for the property manager and the principal.

Kelly Kovacev: Great. Your clients must love you. Now they can take a holiday.

Min Ahrns: They can, yeah. Like I say, you know, first day of the month, go and sit on the beach. Why not?

Kelly Kovacev: Love it.

Rohith George: We've had customers, we've had customers who've been with us for like five, six years and they've never had to think about end of month or end of financial year. So that is, that's cool for them. Like I had a few call me as we're headed towards the center financial year, they were like, yeah, we're going away for the school holidays with their kids. So it is definitely nice to see them living life and enjoying the time with their Kids, the ability to travel without taking your laptop with you is definitely one of the biggest gains that some of the directors have told us. So that's cool to see out there as well from customers.

Min Ahrns: Yeah, I ran a end of financial year webinar just to tell people that they didn't have to do anything. It was like a 5 to 10 minute webinar going, well, it's just another month, there's nothing to do. So I'm just reassuring you that there is nothing for you to do.

Kelly Kovacev: Yeah, let's sit here and meditate. Would you say those are the key benefits of running a trustless solution or is there anything else that you can add?

Min Ahrns: I think just the flexibility. You know, everything's automated so there's so many automations within the system. There's a lot of transparency where the owners and tenants can see, you know, they can self help as well, so they can log into their portal and see, you know, how much money they've got sitting there or if they've got, you know, bills to be paid, they can be notified before the bill's paid. So a lot of those little triggers that we've got set up in the system just remove those, you know, emails. So your inbox, you don't get the, you know, 300 emails a day. Tenants asking for maintenance, they can log that direct through the platform, they can self help, download their statement, they can see their lease agreement, management agreements in there. So you know, all of those things, they can self help. So there's a lot of transparency there for them which once you get over that shock of oh my God, they can see everything that I can do. But there's just so much simplicity in the platform that it's okay for them to see what you're doing because it's so easy for you to be doing it.

Rohith George: Yeah, it's also proof as well. Right. Because I think one of the biggest problems that property managers have is a very good property manager is proactive and sometimes the owner doesn't know how big a problem is. So when you utilize a platform like Managed that you can almost have followers on task, you can add comments and tag your owner and your renter on it. It allows your property investor to log in and see how hard you worked to get that task done. And that's what we're seeing effectively by a lot of agents is they're utilizing the portal to basically prove to the owner, hey, you pay us 5.5 or 6.6%, but we're actually working pretty damn hard for the management fee, and that's one of the biggest benefits for us, is allow property managers to show their worth so that you don't have owners questioning, you know, hey, I only got my paper statement at the end of the financial year. Didn't hear from you very much early maybe I'm going to consider self managing. We want them to utilize the portal so that one, yeah, owners can see how hard PMs actually work. And two, you know, if you do have team members who leave the business, at least everything that happens within that property is logged within the platform and not like lost in someone's email.

Kelly Kovacev: Yeah, got it. And landlords must love having those funds directly in their offset accounts right away as well.

Min Ahrns: Definitely.

Rohith George: I mean, I got a mortgage, like, I mean, I was just saying like, you know, when you getting money into your bank account, you know, even one day sooner is beneficial, but if you can get like 20, 30 days quicker, like you're saving a property investor thousands of dollars before the end of their loan term.

Kelly Kovacev: Yeah. Wow. Awesome. So I guess the key takeaways for today, definitely use that integration that we've built between the two platforms. Get hours back in your week with one click of a button with your AI comments with 360AI and definitely take a look into Trustless for automating those payments and end a month. That sounds fantastic. Yeah. So as we wrap up today, it's clear that the integration between Inspection Express and Managed App isn't just about saving time. It's definitely about giving property management managers the space to focus on what truly matters. Less time on data entry, chasing invoices or, you know, toggling between two systems means more time building those relationships and providing that real advisory support to their clients as well. And obviously looking after their own. Well, being with less stress in their week is very important as well. So. Yeah. Thank you everyone for joining us. If you do have any questions, we've got a bit of time, so we might just hang on the line for a bit of a Q and A. But after the session, if you do have any questions, just email them through to salespropertyexpress.com and we will be in touch soon. Cool.

Min Ahrns: There was one question that came through there about Managed. If it's only for residential property management, so we do do commercial as well. So there is the function of commercial properties within Managed.

Kelly Kovacev: Great. Is there anything else? Yeah.

Kelly Kovacev: What's the average portfolio size for property managers using Managed?

Rohith George: I'd say probably between three to 400 pumps. Yeah, it's kind of like the sweet spot. Yeah.

Min Ahrns: We've got agencies using, you know, three or four thousand properties on there. We've got agencies using five properties on there. So it's not a size matters scenario.

Rohith George: We've also had like some of our greatest growth stories. Like we had agents start with one office with 150 properties and they're now running five offices with 1800 properties within five years. So that is a really cool story. And we have dozens of those agents who have had that kind of growth where they've been able to literally drop a platform like Manage into their local area and just go and win management by saying one thing, hey, I can get you money instantly to your offset account as soon as rent is paid. You'll be surprised how quickly an owner is going to say, hey, how do you do that? Especially when you had, I think it was 12, 13 interest rate rises. Some of our agents use that as the best growth tool for them in their local market.

Kelly Kovacev: Yes, so they just wanted to clarify 300 to 400 property manager. And the other question is, do tenants have to log in into a managed map to pay their rent? If so, how does that.

Rohith George: No. Yeah, no. So it's. We don't have an app. It is definitely a portal and they don't need to log in. We can actually just send them fast BSBN account number as their default payment method and it's free. So 90% of our renters right now are using BSP and account number, which is their unique BSP and account number for their own digital wallet as their primary payment method. But we do offer BPAY as well as another free payment method and they can log into the portal if they want to utilize Visa, MasterCard and Amex is also rolling out in about two to three weeks.

Kelly Kovacev: Perfect. Yeah, that's good. So we have another one for you guys. Can you tell us any plans in terms of managing maintenance request?

Rohith George: Yes, yeah, we have a portal for renters to log maintenance, but I think it's like we could probably spend a bit of time just on maintenance. And I know it's already past the 12 o’ clock, but there is a very easy workflow within the platform for PMs to basically manage workflows. They can actually refer directly to a product property investor to approve or reject it. And if it is approved, you can assign it to trades. We have about 60,000 trades across the country who are registered with Managed as well. So if you are in metropolitan Melbourne or Sydney, and you don't have a preferred trade to go and access the job, you can actually tap into the managed marketplace to utilize those trades.

Kelly Kovacev: Amazing. We'll have to look at integrating that down the track.

Rohith George: Absolutely.

Kelly Kovacev: Belinda just wants to say how great the outgoing AI is going to be. And she's noticed it also picks up additional photos taken. Thanks, Belinda. Anything else? No, that's it.

Min Ahrns: Fantastic.

Kelly Kovacev: All right, thanks, guys.

Min Ahrns: Thank you.

Kelly Kovacev: In person soon. Definitely.

Rohith George: Thanks, Kelly. Really appreciate the spotlight here as well.

Kelly Kovacev: Well, good. Thank you. Thanks everyone who attended. Bye. Thanks. Bye.

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