The problem
MCG hired a new property manager and a receptionist within two months of each other. Both were good. Both asked the senior property manager the same questions every day: how do we lodge a bond, what is the notice period for a routine inspection, where is the break lease template, who do we call for pest control in Nowra. The senior PM estimated four hours a week answering questions that were already written down somewhere, if you knew where.
The numbers
| Senior PM time retired | About 4 hours a week |
|---|---|
| Value at A$45 an hour | Roughly A$180 a week, or A$8,600 a year |
| New hire ramp | Both new starters were working unsupervised on routine tasks inside their first fortnight |
| Build | Knowledge Engine, Standard tier, A$1,800 ex GST, delivered in three weeks |
| Running cost | Under A$25 a month, self-run |
| Payback | About ten weeks |
The ramp time is the bigger saving and I have not costed it, because I do not know what those two hires would have cost in mistakes without it.
What I built
A private chat over MCG's own documents, which live in two places because the office grew that way: procedures, the tenant handbook and templates in Google Drive, and the property folders and older files in OneDrive. The metric definitions from the Insight Engine and the supplier list are in there too. NSW Fair Trading's public guidance is indexed as a clearly labelled outside source.
Ask it how to process a break lease and it answers in a few lines with a citation to the exact procedure, plus a link to the template. Ask it something MCG has never written down and it says so instead of guessing.
It lives in the team's chat tool and on a simple web page. Every Friday the senior PM gets a list of the questions it could not answer. That list became the SOP writing schedule, one procedure a week, and it is the reason the document set is twice the size it was at handover.
What it deliberately does not do
It does not answer questions from tenants or landlords. Internal only. It does not give legal advice, and when a question touches on tribunal matters or trust accounting it points to the responsible person rather than the document. Access follows the team's existing logins, so the receptionist does not see owner financials.
What changed since
The gap report was meant to be a diagnostic. It became the product. Most small agencies do not have a documentation problem so much as a "nobody knows what is missing" problem, and a weekly list of unanswered questions fixes that faster than any workshop.
Tools: Google Drive, OneDrive, NSW Fair Trading guidance, a vector index, OpenRouter, the team's chat tool, a small web chat on Vercel.