Australia: it’s time to break up with your agent
If your agent’s agreement is all that’s keeping you there, we’ll give you Propero Pro free until it ends, and here’s how the move works.
Words by
Toby Martin
Why it feels harder than it is
Most landlords I talk to have a complaint about their agent. When I ask what’s stopping them, the answer is almost never the service. It’s the agreement they signed, the phone call they’d rather not make, and a quiet worry that leaving will somehow unsettle the tenancy.
I understand where that comes from. For most people the agent arrived with the property. You bought, someone handed you a management agreement, and it became part of owning a rental. Leaving feels like dismantling something, not cancelling a service.
It’s smaller than that. Your tenant still lives there under the same lease, at the same rent. What changes is who keeps the records and who your tenant writes to. I want to walk through what that looks like, and then take the biggest reason to stay off the table.
What the fee is paying for
Agent fees in Australia are typically a percentage of the rent, with letting fees and admin charges on top. Because it’s a percentage, the fee rises every time the rent does, whether or not the work does.
Think about what actually happens for that money in a normal year. The rent comes in and gets reconciled. A statement arrives each month. A repair request is passed along, and someone rings you to ask whether to approve the quote. At the end of the financial year there’s a summary for your accountant.
Most of that is record keeping. The decisions inside it, which tenant, which quote, whether to renew and at what rent, were always yours. Your agent relayed them.
What Propero does instead
You add the property, then the lease and your tenant: the rent, how often it’s paid, the dates and the bond. From there Propero builds the rent schedule from the lease and tells you when a payment is late, keeps the ledger, and gives you a tax summary at the end of the year instead of twelve statements to add up. Maintenance requests and expenses sit with the property they belong to. Propero Chat answers questions about your lease, your dates and the tenancy legislation in your state, grounded in the legislation itself.
All of that is free for your first property.
Two parts of Propero Pro take over the jobs your agent most visibly did. Propero Mail gives the property its own email address. Your tenant writes to it instead of the agency, Propero works out what the message is about and how urgent it is, and drafts a reply for you. Nothing is sent until you press send. Condition Reports replace the inspection report: you record a video of each room, Propero writes up the report, and later inspections are compared against the first one.
And when the property is next vacant, you can list it on realestate.com.au, Domain and rent.com.au from the app, with the cost shown before you commit.
It’s worth running your own numbers through the savings calculator.
The agreement is the real reason, so we’ll cover it
Many management agreements run for a fixed term or need notice to end. That’s usually what keeps people where they are: nobody wants to pay an agent and a new app at the same time, and nobody wants to sit out the clock doing nothing.
So don’t wait. Give your agent notice when your agreement allows, start on Propero today, and set the property up while the agreement runs down, so the handover is finished before the last day. For the rest of your agreement, Propero Pro is free. If it ends in four months, that’s four months of Pro, with Propero Mail and Condition Reports from the first day, at no cost to you. After that, Pro is A$24.99 a month or A$199.99 a year, and if you’d rather not continue, your first property stays free.
How to take us up on it
It takes one email. Write to support@propero.app or use the contact page, and include two things: the date your agent’s agreement ends, and the email address you use for Propero. We’ll credit your free Pro months and reply to confirm.
If you’d like a hand setting up, book a walkthrough and we’ll do it with you on a call. You’ll be talking to the people who build Propero, not a ticket queue.
Breaking up with your agent sounds bigger than it is. The tenant stays, the lease stays, and the property was always yours. Only the middle layer goes.
Download Propero, add your property, and send us your end date. Get it on the App Store.
