While most real estate professionals are still figuring out how to write a decent ChatGPT prompt, one Queensland property management leader has carved out an entire day each week to build the future of her business. In an industry where no one ever reaches the bottom of their inbox, that kind of discipline is rare – and it’s paying dividends.
Candice Whinnett’s journey began in 2006 at a boutique Tasmanian agency that quickly converted to Harcourts. After years as a sales consultant, state trainer, and commercial franchise owner, she sold up and headed north to Queensland, eventually launching two distinct operations: Code Property Group, a traditional agency with a substantial rent roll, and Greenhouse Property, a behind-the-scenes support brand for independent agents.
The Greenhouse model is innovative: Independent agents get all their backend administration handled while simultaneously building a rent roll they actually own – managed entirely by Code.
“Most sales agents don’t want the headache of starting to run property management,” Candice explains.
“We do all of it for them. They don’t have to touch a thing.
Why Candice Whinnett Dedicates One Day a Week to AI
Every Wednesday, Candice works from home with a single focus: AI. No client calls, no team meetings – just dedicated time to experiment, build, and break things.
“The day I try to keep completely free of any other tasks,” she says.
“There’s always a particular project that’s the priority – a task I’m wanting to automate or a problem I’m wanting to solve.”
Some Wednesdays involve deep work on automation workflows. Others are spent trialling six different products, signing up for free trials, and determining what earns a permanent place in the tech stack. Her team has developed a running joke about Thursdays: “Don’t come in Thursday, Candice is coming in with 47 ideas.”
The return on investment justifies the time.
“If I can spend six hours building something that then saves my entire team two hours a week across a team of 20-odd people, the return on investment for my time is justified within a four-week period.”
When Candice first started championing AI internally, she met resistance – but not the kind she expected. “They weren’t resistant to change. They were just frightened of the product.”
She sat the entire team down, including remote professionals, and asked everyone to share their concerns. The fears were predictable: job losses and robots taking over. Her remote team members were the most nervous – yet they’ve since become some of her biggest AI advocates, and the team has doubled rather than shrunk.
“I reassured them that the more effective we were, the more time efficient, the more cost efficient, we would be able to free them up to do more dollar productive jobs, which to me was spending more time with clients.”
Treat AI Like a New Employee
Perhaps Candice’s most useful reframe is thinking of AI tools as staff members rather than software.
“If you’re training a staff member and you spent two hours with them and they produced good content, but it wasn’t great, would you get rid of the staff member?” she asks.
“I dare say you’d spend more time with them, training them more effectively.”
She applies this patience to everything from custom GPTs to digital avatars. Her HeyGen twin, for instance, has been through countless iterations.
“The very first one I built, I basically looked like a giant cheesy McDonald’s smiling freak,” she laughs.
The instructions are virtually the same now, but improvements in the underlying technology mean the output is dramatically better.
Looking ahead, Candice sees AI fundamentally reshaping how landlords interact with property managers.
“I’d love to see the ability of landlords being able to choose whether they use an AI-driven network or whether they choose a traditional model,” she says.
With wages in property management increasing by 70–80 per cent (deservedly so, she notes) while fee pressure intensifies, she believes the industry needs to create “AI-driven opportunities for landlords rather than continually altering our processes and offering the same product.”
For anyone feeling overwhelmed about where to begin, Candice’s advice is refreshingly specific: build one custom GPT for one time-consuming task.
“You can build a custom GPT in an hour once you know how to do that, and the time saving can be absolutely huge,” she says.
Get a paid ChatGPT subscription – not free – and start with something you actively avoid because it’s difficult.
“I left school at 15. I don’t have a traditional higher education background. We didn’t have computers at my school because I’m so old, they didn’t exist,” Candice adds.
“You don’t need to be brilliant at computing. You don’t need to have a degree. You have to be curious.”
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