Property management technology has exploded in the past few years. There are platforms for every aspect of the rental process—tenant screening, maintenance tracking, rent collection, inspections, compliance.

I manage a rental portfolio and I’m constantly fielding questions from other agents about what tech actually makes a difference. Not what’s trendy or what the vendors are pushing, but what makes the day-to-day work of property management more efficient and profitable.

Here’s the honest tech stack assessment based on what I’m using and what other Sydney property managers tell me actually works.

The Core Platform

Almost everyone I know is using either Property Tree, Console, or MRI Property Tree as their core property management platform. These are the systems of record—where tenancies live, where rent rolls are managed, where trust accounting happens.

I’m on Property Tree. It’s not perfect, but it integrates with most of the other tools in this ecosystem, and it handles the compliance requirements for NSW rental regulations reasonably well.

The main thing these platforms do is centralize data and automate the administrative grunt work. Lease renewals, rent receipts, arrears notices, end-of-year statements—stuff that used to take hours per property is now mostly automated.

Where they fall short is user experience. The interfaces are often clunky and take forever to learn. Training new staff on Property Tree typically takes 2-3 weeks before they’re reasonably efficient.

But the alternatives aren’t necessarily better, and switching platforms is painful enough that most people stick with whatever they started with.

Price-wise, you’re looking at $3-8 per property per month depending on your portfolio size and which platform you choose. Not cheap, but justified if you’re managing more than about 50 properties.

Tenant Screening

This is one area where newer tools have made a genuine difference. I use a combination of Equifax for credit checks and a platform called TICA (Tenancy Information Check Australia) for rental history verification.

What’s changed in the past couple years is the speed. What used to take 3-5 business days now happens in under 24 hours, sometimes within hours.

That matters in Sydney’s rental market where good properties get dozens of applications and whoever processes them fastest often secures the best tenants.

The cost is usually $25-40 per application, which I pass through to applicants as permitted under NSW law. From a property manager’s perspective, it’s about efficiency, not cost.

One thing I’ve started doing: preliminary income verification before running full credit checks. There are services that can verify employment and income in near real-time through API connections to payroll systems. It costs about $5 per check and filters out applications that won’t meet income requirements before I spend time on full screening.

Not every applicant’s employer is in these systems, but enough are that it saves time.

Maintenance and Repairs

This is where I’ve seen the biggest improvement in the past two years. Digital maintenance coordination beats phone calls and emails by a wide margin.

I use a platform called Maintenance Manager that lets tenants report issues through an app, automatically routes them to approved tradespeople, tracks progress, and handles invoicing.

What this solves: the endless back-and-forth of “tenant emails about broken dishwasher, I call plumber, plumber says they’ll schedule it, I follow up with tenant, plumber shows up but tenant isn’t home, reschedule, repeat.”

Now the tenant reports the issue in the app with photos. The system sends it to my preferred plumber. The plumber and tenant coordinate timing directly through the app. The plumber uploads photos of completed work. Invoice gets generated automatically. I approve and it goes to the landlord.

I’m not removed from the process—I see everything and have approval controls. But I’m not the bottleneck for every scheduling decision.

This has cut my average time-to-resolution on maintenance issues from about 8 days to 4 days. Tenants are happier, landlords are happier, and I’m spending less time on coordination.

Cost is about $2 per property per month. Absolutely worth it.

Inspections

Routine inspections are time-consuming but necessary. I’m required to do them quarterly in NSW, and doing them thoroughly for a 100-property portfolio means a lot of driving and report writing.

I use SnagR for inspection reports. You walk through the property with your phone, take photos, dictate notes, and the app generates a professional inspection report that gets sent to the landlord automatically.

It’s cut my inspection report writing time from about 45 minutes per property to 15 minutes. For a 100-property portfolio doing quarterly inspections, that’s saving me about 200 hours per year.

The reports are also more consistent and comprehensive because the app prompts me to check specific things I might otherwise forget.

Cost is about $10/month for unlimited inspections. No-brainer.

Rent Collection

Most core platforms handle rent collection, but I’ve found that integrating with BPay and offering direct debit options significantly reduces late payments.

Tenants who set up automatic payments are basically never late. Tenants who have to manually remember to pay each month are late 15-20% of the time.

My rent collection rate went from about 96% on-time to 99.5% on-time after I started aggressively pushing tenants toward automatic payment setups during onboarding.

The core platform handles this, but it requires some active process management to make sure every tenant gets set up properly.

Communication and Documentation

Everything needs to be documented for compliance and dispute resolution. I use a combination of email, SMS, and a platform called PropertyMe for tenant communications.

The key feature: every communication is automatically logged against the property and tenant record. When there’s a dispute or compliance question, I can pull up a complete communication history in seconds.

This has saved me in NCAT hearings multiple times. Being able to show timestamped documentation of every notice, every request, every response makes the difference between winning and losing disputes.

What I Don’t Use

There are categories of property management tech I’ve tried and dropped:

Smart home integration for rental properties sounded great in theory. In practice, tenants don’t want to use landlord-controlled smart home systems, and the added complexity isn’t worth it.

AI chatbots for tenant inquiries. Tried it, tenants hated it, went back to human responses. Maybe this will improve, but current chatbots aren’t good enough for the nuanced questions tenants ask.

Automated rent pricing tools. I tried a service that uses market data to recommend rent adjustments. The recommendations were generic and didn’t account for property-specific factors. I make better pricing decisions using my own market knowledge.

The Integration Challenge

The biggest frustration is that not everything integrates smoothly. I’m using six different platforms for different parts of property management, and only three of them talk to each other properly.

That means manual data entry and reconciliation. I’ve got a VA who spends about 4 hours a week just making sure data is consistent across systems.

This is getting better—more platforms are building API integrations—but we’re not at seamless interoperability yet.

What’s Actually Worth the Cost

If I had to cut my tech stack down to the essentials:

1. Core platform (Property Tree or equivalent) - non-negotiable
2. Digital maintenance coordination - highest ROI
3. Inspection app - massive time saver
4. Automated rent collection - reduces arrears significantly
5. Centralized communication logging - essential for compliance

Everything else is nice-to-have but not essential.

Total monthly cost for my 100-property portfolio across all these tools is about $800. That’s $8 per property per month. Given the time savings and reduction in late payments, it pays for itself several times over.

Where This Is Going

I’m watching a few trends that might change the tech stack in the next couple years:

More AI for rent pricing and lease term optimization. Current tools are mediocre, but they’re improving fast.

Better integration between platforms. The PropTech vendors are finally building proper APIs and integration partnerships.

Tenant-facing apps that handle everything from applications to maintenance requests to lease renewals. We’re moving toward tenants managing more of the process directly, which reduces administrative load.

Video inspections. Some platforms are offering tenants the ability to do initial inspections via video walkthroughs that property managers review remotely. Not sure how I feel about this, but it could save significant time if it works.

The Bottom Line

Property management technology has genuinely improved efficiency over the past few years. But it’s not about using every shiny new tool. It’s about identifying which parts of your workflow are bottlenecks and finding specific tools that address them.

For me, that’s been maintenance coordination, inspection reporting, and automated rent collection. Those three changes have probably saved me 10-12 hours per week and improved both tenant satisfaction and landlord returns.

Start there. Don’t try to overhaul everything at once. Find your biggest pain point, implement a tool that addresses it, get comfortable, then move to the next one.

The tech exists to make property management significantly more efficient. You just have to be selective about what you adopt and honest about what’s actually solving problems versus what’s just adding complexity.