In a few weeks I’ll stand up at PM/ONE, our two days at the Hilton Sydney where property management finally takes centre stage, and open the whole event with this.
Because I’ve spent the last twelve months working in property management businesses around this country, city, coastal, country, and everywhere I go I can feel the same thought sitting in the room, the one nobody quite says out loud, because saying it makes it real.
“Fiona, what do you make of all this AI? What should we be doing? What’s actually going to happen to us?”
We don’t ask it, I think, because we’re afraid of the answer. And here’s the honest thing: there isn’t a clean one. Nobody has it exactly. Anyone who tells you they know precisely how this plays out is selling something.
What we can have, and what we’re all quietly craving, isn’t a tidy answer at all. It’s a considered, expert, grown-up conversation about it.
It comes from principals watching the tech bills climb.
From senior property managers wondering if the role they’ve mastered will exist in five years.
From the 22-year-old in leasing who’s brilliant with people and terrified a bot is coming for her Saturday.
And here’s what I’ve come to understand. People aren’t fearful of the bot. They’re fearful for themselves. For their future. For what it means for the job they love, the parts of it they actually enjoy, and the way we connect, make money and fund our lives.
They don’t want to be running blind. They want to be ahead of it.
Not so much unafraid as clear eyed, minds not broken by the noise but made aware of the reality, and then shown how to move forward. Guided on what to do and what not to do.
Not by the people building the bot, but by people who understand how it actually lands, in the hands of a human, in an economy, for a property owner and a tenant.
Because when you strip it all back, it’s rarely a question about artificial intelligence at all. It’s a question about us. Our value. Our craft. Whether the human bit still counts.
So when I built the program for PM/ONE this September, I didn’t book anyone to demo software. I booked three people to have that conversation properly, from three completely different directions.
The futurist who told me what not to book
Anders Sörman-Nilsson is at the frontline of the future, and when we first spoke I was very clear about what I didn’t want: the nitty-gritty of AI execution.
That subject is too broad for anyone, and it dates faster than milk.
What I asked him for instead was a bespoke understanding for our industry. What every one of us needs to know, whether it’s your first day in real estate or your twentieth year, so that we’re touching AI without it engulfing us.
AI as a tool that creates speed. A support mechanism that works for us, not the other way around.
Anders sits at the international cutting edge, and he’ll share not what we need to be prepared for, but what we need to be excited about. Read that sentence again.
When was the last time anyone talked to property managers about the future in the language of excitement?
The legend who says the future lies in our past
Then I rang Chris Hanley OAM, and I asked him the same question everyone asks me: what will our future look like?
His answer, and he’s done the research to back it, is that our future lies in owning the great things only humans do. The empathy. The resilience. The communication and the interpersonal moments that no machine will ever replicate.
His session is about honing exactly those skills, because when we truly stand in the human element of our work, we value it more. And so do our clients.
Put Anders and Chris side by side and you have the whole conversation: what’s changing, and what never will. I booked them both on purpose.
The business already living the answer
If that sounds theoretical, meet Pamela Medeiros, who leads investment property management at Di Jones, a business with thousands of properties under management across multiple locations.
They’re not debating the future of the role. They’re redesigning it.
The property manager becomes an investment manager: an adviser to property investors, maximising the return on their asset, while outsourced and offshore support carries the administrative back end.
The human moves up the value chain. The machine takes the admin. That is not a threat to your career. That’s a promotion.
Pam will show you what it means for every seat in the business: senior PM, property manager, leasing and BDM.
The conversation happens in the room
This is one thread of what we’re unpacking across two days at PM/ONE, 13–14 September at the Hilton Sydney: the event where property management takes centre stage, as one profession and one community.
I’ll share more of the program, and the problems each speaker is there to solve, in the coming weeks.
One housekeeping note that isn’t marketing, just maths. Early bird has closed, but that was never the real deadline. The real one is the room filling up.
There are fewer than 90 seats left for PM/ONE, and this event will sell out. If you’ve been circling the decision, it’s about to be made for you.
Fewer than 90 seats remain. Register your team before they’re gone: PM/ONE, 13–14 September, Hilton Sydney, pm1.com.au