Nothing in a rental portfolio is urgent
until it’s late.
I built a system that runs my own rental properties and my Airbnb. It watches the leases, prepares the renewals, handles the re-letting paperwork and texts me once a month with everything I need to know. Ten months, without me remembering to look.
Talk to me about your portfolioBuilt for landlords who self-manage. You keep control — and the fee.
An agency charges you every year. This is once.
The average Brisbane investor pays a property manager around 9% of the rent collected. Most people pay it for one reason, and it isn’t that the job is hard. It’s that they haven’t got the headspace to stay on top of it.
9%
Average Brisbane property management commission, on every dollar of rent collected.
~$2,900
A year, per property, on Brisbane’s median rent — commission alone.
~$3,800
In a year where the tenant changes and a letting fee of one to two weeks’ rent lands on top.
Figures based on published Brisbane property management fee ranges, 2026, at the city’s median weekly rent. Your own agency’s schedule will have its own admin, statement and inspection fees on top.
It wasn’t that it took too long. It’s that it didn’t happen.
We have three rental properties. When we started, I was working a full-time job with a very young family, and rental admin is exactly the kind of work that loses to both.
I’d get to it at the end of the year, if I got to it. Tenants were chasing me for their own lease renewals, because I hadn’t got to them. Arrears, inspections, open maintenance — I found out where things stood when something forced me to look.
When I did sit down to do a renewal, it was an hour minimum. Find what similar properties were actually going for. Find the current approved form. Then retype every tenant and property detail by hand, because nothing ever fills itself in.
The Airbnb was its own problem. Once a year we’d work out what it had cost us, hunting back through receipts. We’d have been under-claiming — not because the numbers were wrong, but because you can’t claim what you can’t evidence.
One system, and a text message once a month.
It holds the portfolio — tenancies, rents, inspections, maintenance, end-of-lease — in a secure database, reached only through API requests. I talk to it from an app on my phone.
Every month it checks everything and texts me a summary:
- Who’s in arrears
- Rent received
- Routine inspections due
- Leases expiring within three months and not yet renewed
- Maintenance requests still open
When a lease is coming up for renewal, it researches what comparable properties are achieving — size, location, current conditions in that market — and recommends a rent. Then it assembles the current approved RTA form with the details already filled in, ready for me to check and sign.
It tracks the Airbnb the same way: what it earns, what it costs, what maintenance has been spent. At the end of the year my accountant gets a clean set of numbers instead of a reconstruction.
Three months before a lease runs out, this arrives on my phone. I hadn’t asked for it, and I hadn’t remembered it was coming.
🏠 Tenancy expiry reminder — Sample Street
The current tenancy expires 14 November — that’s 3 months away.
Current rent: $000 / week
You need to decide:
- Renew — same terms, new fixed term
- Renew with a rent increase — new amount, new term
- End the tenancy — issue notice to vacate
A rent increase requires at least 2 months’ written notice, and ending a tenancy at expiry requires a Notice to Leave with the correct notice period. Check the current requirements at rta.qld.gov.au before you issue anything.
What would you like to do? I can pull the tenant details and prepare the next step.
Example message. Property details and figures changed.
The part that costs the most.
The system writes the ad, gets it onto the portals, watches the enquiries come in and tells me who’s asked — not a full inbox, a summary. When it’s time to check references it drafts them and puts them in front of me. I read them and press send.
It doesn’t send anything on my behalf. It never has. It drafts; I decide.
What’s left for me is two twenty-minute open homes, and I wouldn’t hand those over anyway. I want to meet the people who are going to live in my house, not read someone else’s summary of them. Same reason I still walk through at inspection time — I’d rather see how it’s being looked after myself.
The system took the advertising, the enquiry sorting and the paperwork. It didn’t take the two parts worth keeping.
An agency charges one to two weeks’ rent for the letting. This does the work around it, and I keep the fee.
Where I still decide
Everything that matters.
The rent figure is a recommendation, not a decision. No agreement goes out and no rent is set until I’ve read it. The system does the research, the retrieval and the typing — the three things that were actually stopping the work from happening.
The judgement stays with me, which is the only way this should ever be built.
The work doesn’t change with the number.
Three properties or thirty, it’s the same five questions every month — who’s behind, what’s due, what’s still open, what’s expiring, and what it’s worth now.
The only thing that scales is how much gets missed when nobody’s asking.
The work happens now. Renewals go out before tenants have to ask. Arrears surface in the month they occur, not at the end of the year. The Airbnb has real numbers behind it.
I’ll build you the same thing.
Self-Managed Rental Setup
$4,900
Once, not annually. Same price whether you own two properties or twenty.
- The full system, built and configured to your properties
- Monthly summary: arrears, rent, inspections due, leases expiring, open maintenance
- Renewal preparation — market-rent research and the current approved RTA form pre-filled, ready to check and sign
- Re-letting — ad written, pushed to the portals, enquiries summarised, reference checks drafted
- Income and expense tracking, so your accountant gets clean numbers
- Four hours a month for your first two months — two full monthly cycles, so you see it run
- You own it. No lock-in.
How it works
I’ll send you a short list of what I need — your properties, current leases, rents and existing records. Once I have everything, you’ll have the system within two weeks. Your two months of included support starts when it goes live.
What’s not included
The platform it runs on. AI usage, API access and any subscriptions are billed to you directly by the provider, so you own the accounts and you’re never locked in to me. I’ll tell you what it costs to run before you commit. On the setup running my own properties it comes to a few cents a month — the cost of running it is negligible next to what you save. Any listing account you need is yours too.
Legal and tax advice. The system tracks your obligations, points you to the RTA and drafts the paperwork. It doesn’t advise you, and neither do I. After the first two months, changes are at my standard hourly rate — and I’ll tell you when something needs doing rather than letting it break quietly.
You manage your properties. I build the system that means you can.
This doesn’t make me your property manager, and it doesn’t make the system one. You still sign the notices, meet your obligations and front up yourself if it ever goes to QCAT. What it does is make sure you always know what needs doing, and that the paperwork is already drafted and waiting.
Talk to me about your portfolio