The Alternative Property Management Show

Recorded live in front of around 200 people at Renti HQ in Auckland the night before the PMC, with David Faulkner, Harrison Vaughan and incoming co MC Samantha Arnold.

The show opens with news closer to home. David has finished up at Property Brokers after fourteen years and is joining Property Me, and Sam is leaving Wolfbrook to start at Property Brokers on 30 November. Both are, as David puts it, on gardening leave. There is also a preview of the two days ahead and the thinking behind this year’s lineup, which deliberately pushes past AI toward relationships, psychology and what the job actually does to people.

Then two guests. Tal Messa marks ten years of Tapi, now seventy people across New Zealand, Australia, the UK and Ireland, with a quantum computing PhD on the team and something to announce on stage tomorrow. His view on why AI will not displace property managers is blunt: your landlord can download the same tools you can, so the reason they stay is you.

Claudia Smith of Renti and Apply ID walks through the journey from Move Me to Renti Rewards, and the Uber One partnership that Uber has never done anywhere in the world before. Then she premieres a concept video for what Renti is building next, an assistant that pulls the systems together and drafts the work nobody enjoys, built in partnership with property managers rather than at them.

Also: Sandy Dobson expectations, a plea to be kind to Tenancy Services, the basketball hoop nobody thought through, and Harrison allegedly on curfew.

David Faulkner and Harrison Vaughan are joined by Greg Watson of Watson Integrity, a Manawatū family business that turned thirty this August, and a name that was the face of New Zealand property management a decade or so ago. He is on the intergenerational panel at the PMC.

Greg has the trophy cabinet to back it up: REINZ office awards, LPMNZ and Inspired Growth halls of fame for BDM work, a national small business award, and a global benchmarking award won by an eight person Manawatū office up against Canon India and the thirty thousand strong Dubai Police. His explanation is almost boringly simple. Kaizen. Make the flyer slightly better. Make the phone call slightly better. Do that continuously and the awards follow. Notably, the push to enter came from his team, not from him.

Harrison adds the other side of it, on what winning a small business award did for Tommy’s when two young blokes in Wellington were still being written off as a scam.

There is practical advice throughout. How to actually work a networking room when you would rather not be there. The $75,000 spreadsheet error that taught Greg to stop doing his own books. Why he hires almost entirely from outside the industry. And on AI, a view worth hearing: roughly sixty percent of the job is admin, and if that collapses, the property manager becomes something closer to a relationship manager. He also walks through the tech stack and a warning about free AI tools and where your tenants’ details end up.

David Faulkner and Harrison Vaughan are joined by Greg Watson of Watson Integrity, a Manawatū family business that turned thirty this August, and a name that was the face of New Zealand property management a decade or so ago. He is on the intergenerational panel at the PMC.

Greg has the trophy cabinet to back it up: REINZ office awards, LPMNZ and Inspired Growth halls of fame for BDM work, a national small business award, and a global benchmarking award won by an eight person Manawatū office up against Canon India and the thirty thousand strong Dubai Police. His explanation is almost boringly simple. Kaizen. Make the flyer slightly better. Make the phone call slightly better. Do that continuously and the awards follow. Notably, the push to enter came from his team, not from him.

Harrison adds the other side of it, on what winning a small business award did for Tommy’s when two young blokes in Wellington were still being written off as a scam.

There is practical advice throughout. How to actually work a networking room when you would rather not be there. The $75,000 spreadsheet error that taught Greg to stop doing his own books. Why he hires almost entirely from outside the industry. And on AI, a view worth hearing: roughly sixty percent of the job is admin, and if that collapses, the property manager becomes something closer to a relationship manager. He also walks through the tech stack and a warning about free AI tools and where your tenants’ details end up.

David Faulkner is at the bach in Foxton Beach with Ryan Steven of realestate.co.nz, joined by Harrison Vaughan from the Tommy's office in Wellington, for a data heavy look at the rental market with the PMC a week out.

Ryan came to real estate via the Navy, spent fifteen years selling, swung the gavel at several thousand auctions, and now runs sales at realestate.co.nz. He brings the numbers. Nationally, asking rents are up just 1.9 percent year on year, which means in real terms they are going backwards. But that average hides everything. Central Otago Lakes is up 7 percent, Canterbury 5.8, the West Coast 5.4, and Christchurch has become one of the most liveable small cities going. Meanwhile Auckland’s average asking price has dropped below a million for the first time in six years.

There is a clear shift in what renters want. Apartments and townhouses are losing interest while houses with outdoor space win, a change both Ryan and Harrison trace back to lockdown.

The second half turns to marketing, and it should make a few GMs sit up. Why property management marketing budgets deserve a hard look, what a $30 upgrade does to days on market and what that is worth in a landlord’s pocket, and the awkward dilemma of private listings on an industry owned portal. Then AI: why the site is now optimising for how people search in Claude and ChatGPT, how semantic search surfaces a property with a vege garden the listing never mentions, and the surprising figure for how much traffic actually comes from AI platforms today.

David Faulkner and Harrison Vaughan are joined by Tal Messa, co-founder of Tapi and principal sponsor of the PMC, with the conference now a fortnight out.

Tal tells the origin story properly for the first time on the show. Dropping out of uni, the Creative HQ incubator, an investor asking what on earth he knew about property management, and the answer being nothing. So he and Florian booked forty hours of rental viewings a week until Wellington property managers started asking them to please just take the house or leave. The idea was called Flatfish. Harrison, one of the first doors they knocked on, politely told them to get lost.

Nine years later Tapi sits on just under 600,000 active properties, an estimated 95 percent of New Zealand’s managed stock, with Australia growing fast and the UK and Ireland live since March.

The meat of the conversation is AI, and Tal takes a position that cuts against the hype. He walks through the shift from systems of record to workflow to action to coordination, then argues the next move is back toward the human. Tapi announced a voice agent a year ago and deliberately pulled back from it, because that was not the future they wanted to build. His case is about accountability: a landlord hands you their biggest asset and wants someone to answer for it, and you cannot blame an AI. There is a drive thru comparison that makes the point better than any slide would.

David Faulkner is in Wellington with Harrison Vaughan at Tommy’s, and joined from Melbourne by Jason Colbey, head of community at Tapi, for an announcement. After six conferences on the bounce, David is handing over the microphone. Jason will co-MC the PMC with Samantha Arnold on 29 and 30 October at the Pullman.

Jason has MCed BDM summits, PMP awards and industry conferences across Australia, plus charity work with the Starlight Foundation. He also lasted two years and nine months in property management himself, after telling a manager that only a pathetic person would quit inside three years, and he has never forgotten it. That experience is behind the message he wants to bring to Auckland: property managers are the most important people in this industry, and he will die on that hill.

The conversation gets pointed on value. Why management fees in Victoria sit at five to seven percent while Tasmania runs at eleven to seventeen, what that does to a rent roll multiplier, and why cutting fees to chase doors leaves everybody poorer. Why property management is still treated as a stepping stone to sales rather than a career. And what Jason thinks New Zealand does better than Australia, which comes down to competing brands actually talking to each other.

Also: the Wellington market lifting after a dead winter, what the election is doing to owner decisions, Labour’s flip on interest deductibility, and the PMC Awards judges revealed, eventually.

David Faulkner is joined by Rico Gomez of Neurofit, a Christchurch based neuroscience coach who works with elite athletes and business owners, and who keynotes day two of the PMC.

Rico came to this work the hard way. He and his wife went through serious mental health struggles about eleven years ago, and after nothing else worked he went looking for answers in cognitive neuroscience himself. What he found changed both their lives, and it became the basis of the rewire process he now runs with clients.

His core argument will challenge how most of us think about burnout. The answer is not to remove pressure. Pressure is the hand squeezing the toothpaste tube, and what comes out of you under pressure was already inside you. What determines whether someone lasts forty years or five is not the performance itself but where their head is three days afterwards.

For property managers caught between landlords and tenants, and for the managers leading them, there is plenty here that lands straight away. Why your hard conversation should never be your first conversation, and what relational equity means in practice. The trust box and the performance box, and what happens when a leader lives in only one of them. Why scrolling and outsourcing your thinking to AI is quietly making you less resilient. And a story about imposter syndrome that turned into the most important yes of Rico's career.

David Faulkner is joined by Sarina Gibbon of Tenancy Advisory, alongside Samantha Arnold and Property Brokers' Sarah Green, to flag a case the whole industry needs to watch.

Earlier this month the High Court gave a tenant leave to take a question of law to the Court of Appeal: just how far does a Section 78A rent refund for unlawful premises actually go? Sarina walks through how we got here, from the 2013 Anderson decision that pushed unlawful premises outside the RTA, to prohibited transactions under Section 137, to Winton v Pabu and the "footling breach" line, and why the binding authority everyone has relied on since 2018 may not apply to Section 78A at all. In this case the tenant is seeking $113,000.

The heart of it: if the Court of Appeal decides the benefit of accommodation is no longer a good enough reason to discount a refund, tenants will start ringing councils to check consents, and plenty of agencies will not know what is sitting on their rent roll. Sarina's argument is that this is an opportunity rather than a threat, and she gives three moves to make this week.

Also: where liability actually lands between the agency and the owner, whether your indemnity clause would hold up, what happens to fees already collected, the granny flat rules and why consent free does not mean compliant, and the question of why the only intervener in this case is a tenant advocacy group.

Sarina and Sarah are speaking back to back at the PMC on 29 and 30 October, with the Renti soiree the night before.

David Faulkner and Harrison Vaughan are joined from Singapore by Matt Ball of the New Zealand Property Investors Federation for an election special, recorded ahead of the 7 November vote and the PMC at the Pullman on 29 and 30 October.

Matt has stood for both the Greens and ACT, worked in Parliament and spent three decades around politics, so he takes the panel through what each party is actually proposing and what it would do to rental property.

The Opportunity Party's land tax at 1.75 percent, why it hits your whole land value rather than your equity, and the universal basic income that comes with it. Labour's 28 percent capital gains tax from July 2027, and the missing piece that makes it worse than Australia's: no indexing for inflation. Why Matt thinks interest denial is the real danger, what a 50 percent version does to your weekly numbers, and the grandfathering and portfolio size options that could soften it. Plus the death spiral that leads from bad tax policy to rent controls, National's 5 percent deposit scheme with its new $300,000 income threshold, and a prediction on who forms the next government.

Also: the NZPIF conference in Tauranga, with a political panel moderated by Heather du Plessis Allen and a workshop featuring Tenancy Tribunal principal adjudicator Brett Carter.

David Faulkner is joined by Sasha Lockley of Money Sweet Spot, a former KPMG forensic accountant who now runs a lender built to get people out of debt rather than keep them in it. She's speaking at the PMC in October.

Sasha explains the moment on the Harbour Bridge that changed her career, and the principle behind everything she's built since: people are good and bad things happen. The finance system, she argues, is designed as though life is predictable, then punishes people with fees and default interest when it isn't.

The conversation gets practical for property managers. Why a text and a 14 day notice tells you nothing about the why. What empathy mapping actually is, and how listening properly makes tenants call you before they miss the rent, not after. How to spot who is spinning you a line sooner. Finding the halfway house between a tenant who needs six weeks and a landlord who says they've got none. And Sasha's challenge to anyone proud of low arrears: at what cost to the human?