The problem
Property management is mostly remembering things on time. Lease expiries at 90, 60 and 30 days. Routine inspections due. Landlords who have not approved a A$380 plumbing quote for four days while the tenant asks again. MCG's property managers tracked most of this in a spreadsheet, a wall calendar and their heads, and roughly six hours a week went on chasing rather than managing.
Leases that slipped to periodic without a conversation were the expensive version of the problem.
The numbers
| Admin time retired | About 5 hours a week |
|---|---|
| Value at A$45 an hour | Roughly A$225 a week, or A$10,800 a year |
| Approval chase | Automatic reminders at 48 and 96 hours, escalated to the PM after that |
| Build | Ops Engine, Standard tier, A$2,200 ex GST, delivered in three weeks |
| Running cost | Under A$20 a month, self-run |
| Payback | About ten weeks |
The lapsed-lease side is real money too, but I have not put a figure on it. Vacancy and rent review outcomes depend on the market, not the software, and I would rather understate.
What I built
Three workflows, one run-book.
The lease pipeline reads a weekly export from the property management system and works forward from every expiry date. At 90 days the PM gets a nudge with the tenancy history and current comparable rents. At 60 days a renewal notice is drafted from the office template and saved into the property's folder in OneDrive for them to review and send. At 30 days anything still open is flagged in the Monday status email.
The maintenance chase watches every quote sent to a landlord for approval. If nothing comes back in 48 hours a polite reminder goes out from the property manager's Gmail. At 96 hours the PM gets a WhatsApp with the property, the quote and the days elapsed, and two choices: Y to escalate and the Engine books a call reminder, N and it sends one last nudge in the PM's own words. Urgent items skip the queue entirely and go straight to a phone call.
The Monday status is one email to the principal: leases in play, approvals outstanding, inspections due this fortnight, and anything the Engine escalated.
What it deliberately does not do
It does not sign, serve or lodge anything. Notices in NSW have rules about form and timing, and the Engine drafts while the property manager decides and sends. It does not talk to tenants directly. It never moves money.
What changed since
The first version only knew about leases. Maintenance approvals were added in week two because the property managers asked, which is the pattern for most of the MCG series: build the smallest useful thing, watch it run, then extend it. The status email later became the seed for the Insight Engine.
Tools: Property management system exports, Google Sheets as the working ledger, OneDrive property folders, Gmail and Google Calendar, WhatsApp for escalations, a scheduled worker on Vercel.