I’ve worked in property management for the better part of two decades. People complain, constantly (and sometimes fairly), about the standard of property management in Australia. Some talk about property managers as though they are universally incompetent, morally bankrupt, failed sales agents who have somehow found themselves holding a set of keys (thanks, guy from Reddit, for the quote).
I’ve even had strangers tell me, to my face, that I’m a parasite, that I contribute nothing to society, simply because they’ve learned I’m a property manager. It’s really not a surprise that good people don’t exactly queue around the block to make a career of it.
The reality is, there are around 40,000 property managers in Australia. It’s worth asking what we actually want those 40,000 people to be.
There are some shit property managers
Let’s get the obvious bit out of the way first. Not only have I been an employer for the last 10 years, I’ve also spent enough time taking over poorly managed properties to know that some of the criticism directed at our industry is entirely deserved. I’ve seen missing critical paperwork, urgent maintenance ignored for months, non existent communication, and situations that should never have been allowed to get as far as they did.
Pretending otherwise doesn’t help anyone, but it’s probably worth being clear about why property managers exist in the first place. At its simplest, we’re engaged by a landlord to administer their property and the tenancy on their behalf. They might be perfectly capable of doing it themselves, but they’ve decided they’d rather engage someone with the experience, systems and time to do it for them.
That puts us in a pretty strange position in the rental relationship. We’re administering somebody else’s property, under an agreement with them, while dealing directly with the person who pays to live there. We’re often the one delivering a decision, enforcing a requirement or explaining something that somebody doesn’t really want to hear, even though the decision itself may not have been ours.
Rent increases are a great example. The fairly boring reality of most rent reviews is that the PM will (should) pull a couple of months of comparable data from REA or CoreLogic, run a CMA and send it to the owner with observational commentary. I’ll give them a view on where the property sits within a range and what the market might support. But ultimately it’s the landlord’s property and they decide what they want to charge. We just get the glamorous job of telling the tenant and issuing notices in compliance with the legislation.
Judging by some of the talk I see around rent increases, you would think the property manager was sitting in the office rubbing their hands together over an extra $50 a week. I can promise you the PM earning $80k a year probably doesn’t give a shit. Their salary hasn’t changed. Even the agency, on a fairly typical management fee, might make another $3 a week from it. They’re not exactly “lining their pockets”, as I’ve also been told (many times) before.
Rent is only one example. Across any given tenancy, there are plenty of things that affect the outcome without being the property manager’s decision. Legislative restrictions, poor communications from a body corporate or tradesperson, or perhaps an owner’s frugality has turned a simple maintenance job into five quotes and six weeks of unnecessary back and forth.
And, of course, property managers can shit the bed too. We’re hardly immune from that, and I really don’t think any profession is.
If you’re the tenant and the hot water has stopped working, you don’t care that the plumber isn’t answering my calls. You want a hot shower. If you’re the owner, you don’t care that I didn’t break the hot-water system either. I’ve just called to tell you it’s going to cost $2,500.
That’s the job. We’re paid to deal with these things, and I don’t think property managers deserve sympathy for doing what they’re employed to do. But we do become associated with every unpopular decision, unexpected bill or frustrating delay that happens along the way, whether we had control over it or not.
We’ve also designed a pretty terrible career
I’m sure the argument can be made that the real estate industry has contributed enormously to its own problem. Property management should be a profession in which experience is valued. The work has so many layers: market assessment, research, negotiation, inspections, maintenance, project management, dispute resolution, budgeting, accounting and financial reporting.
Do that for long enough and you accumulate an enormous amount of practical knowledge. You learn how buildings are put together, how to negotiate, how to problem solve and triage. Most importantly, you get very good at dealing with people when they are unhappy.
In practice, we have traditionally built property management businesses around how many properties each person can reasonably look after. Don’t get me wrong, I completely appreciate staff are generally the largest expense in a property management business and wages have increased substantially over the last decade. A national industry survey in 2015 found most property management professionals were earning less than $55,000. Today, advertised salaries of $80k and upwards are the norm for a relatively inexperienced property manager.
At the same time, the cost and complexity of running a rent roll hasn’t exactly gone backwards. Legislative requirements have increased, compliance has increased and clients expect considerably more communication than they did 10 or 15 years ago. Agencies are businesses and they have to make money. Technology was inevitably going to become part of the answer, and a lot of it has genuinely made us better at the job. The problem, in my view, is what we’ve done with the time it saves.
If software takes a repetitive task off someone’s desk, there are two ways to use that capacity. You can give the property manager more time to know their properties and clients, follow things up properly and deal with problems before they become bigger ones and generally lift your standards. Or you can keep adding properties until they’re just as busy as they were before. Too often agencies have chosen the latter.
The result is a property manager who can technically administer a large number of properties because the software is sending the arrears notices, inspection reminders and maintenance updates for them, but who has less and less time to actually know what’s happening across their portfolio, and that’s where I think we’ve confused efficiency with good property management.
Once the workload gets beyond a certain point, people naturally become reactive. The urgent things get done, sure, but the maintenance request that can survive another day gets bumped. It’s not necessarily because the person doesn’t care or isn’t good at their job, there are simply only so many things one person can properly keep across. And judging by what property managers themselves are reporting, plenty are feeling the effects of it.
MRI Software’s Voice of the Property Manager research found 54% of property managers were struggling with their mental health, 51% identified workload as a problem and 53% reported dealing with aggression or abuse from owners and tenants. The proportion intending to leave the profession had climbed from 13% in 2018, to 29% in 2024. More recent Australian research isn’t particularly encouraging either. A 2026 national survey of property management professionals, commissioned by Kolmeo and independently analysed by Kantar, found around 37% were either considering leaving the profession or uncertain about staying, while more than 60% felt overwhelmed by their workload. That’s a pretty extraordinary trajectory for any profession!
To me, it’s evidence that we’ve designed a job that is burning through people fast. It’s not an excuse for poor service either, more so an explanation for why poor service keeps appearing across the industry.
And then we advertise the resulting job to a young person as an exciting career opportunity. Come and manage an enormous portfolio of properties. Carry significant legal and financial responsibility. Spend much of your day resolving conflict between people who are perpetually annoyed with you. Have strangers regularly tell you that your entire profession is parasitic and contributes nothing to society…
If everyone is the enemy, how does anything improve?
This is where the broader conversation becomes less useful. Criticise bad landlords, tenants, and property managers. There is absolutely nothing wrong with any of that. But if property managers are treated as inherently part of the problem, we also exclude a group of people with an enormous amount of practical experience in how the rental system works.
Someone who has spent 15 or 20 years in property management has seen thousands, if not tens of thousands of tenancies play out. We’ve seen where legislation and industry practice works, where it creates problems, where landlords are being unreasonable, where tenants are being treated poorly and where the same disputes keep appearing again and again… That doesn’t mean we’re always right, or that the industry should get to write the rules. But that experience has to be worth something.
If we want better rental policy, I’d hope the people who administer it every day are at least considered and consulted.
Property management could actually be a very good career
This is the frustrating part. Done properly, property management should be a genuinely good career. You spend years learning buildings, legislation, markets, negotiation and, probably more than anything else, people. That experience should make you increasingly valuable.
Instead, we’ve often treated property management as the less glamorous sibling of sales, where career progression means getting out of the job rather than becoming exceptionally good at it. The industry owns a lot of that. Agencies need sensible workloads, proper support and a career path that gives good people a reason to stay. But if we want better property managers, we also need capable people to choose the career in the first place.
Around 40,000 Australians currently do this job. Criticise them when they get it wrong as you would anybody. But treating the profession itself as scum, parasitic or worthless isn’t going to improve the standard of property management. Treating property management like a profession worth being good at might.