FEATURE FOCUS | MEPAY AND TRUSTLESS
When Paula Staracek took the stage at our first Feature Focus session, she made one thing clear upfront: she wasn’t there to sell anything. She just wanted to tell the truth about what moving to Trustless has been like for her agency. So here’s the story: the nightmare before, the six months of homework and the quiet week when most of her landlords didn’t even notice their world had changed.
“It was a bit of a nightmare, actually.”
Paula runs the Brisbane portfolio at Housemark, around 2,300 properties. Like a lot of agencies, the business had grown up handing out the trust account details to anyone who needed to pay in. Over time that meant more than a thousand tenants depositing rent straight into a single account, day after day.
Somebody had to make sense of all of it. So Housemark put two people on receipting for four hours a day, matching payments by hand and hoping nothing slipped through.
“It allowed for a lot of mistakes to happen. Manual entries. It was a really labour-heavy procedure that we needed to float across our other portfolios as well. It was a pretty prolonged day, just with trust accounting.”
— Paula Staracek, Housemark
If any of that sounds familiar, you’re in good company. It’s how rent has worked for years: money lands in the trust account on the old direct debit rail, takes three to five business days to clear and reconciliation becomes a daily grind that ties up your people and holds up your owners.
Where Trustless comes in
MePay gives you three ways to handle rent and they build on each other. Direct Debit is the original: reliable, but slow to land and manual to reconcile. MePay Fast runs on the New Payments Platform instead, so the same automation clears in 24 to 48 hours rather than days. Trustless is MePay Fast with an automation layer on top: PropertyMe handles the receipting, the bill payments, the disbursements and the reconciliation for you.
In practice, that’s the receipting job Housemark had two people doing, gone. Payments match to the right folio automatically, owners and suppliers get paid without a manual run and there are no more ABA or BPay files to upload. Rent shows up the moment it moves, so nobody’s refreshing the screen wondering who’s paid.
One honest caveat, because it matters: a trust account doesn’t disappear under Trustless. You still need one for the occasional items like bond refunds, holding deposits and special contributions. It’s just handling far less than it used to.
Nobody flips a switch on 2,300 properties
The part Paula was keenest to stress is that Housemark didn’t rush. The decision took about six months of real investigation, compliance checks and a lot of questions to make sure it would work exactly as promised across portfolios of every size.
“It wasn’t just something where we went, oh yeah, we’re being sold this, let’s just do this because we were promised the world. We wanted to make sure we were meeting compliance. So it took us a little while to get comfortable.”
— Paula Staracek, Housemark
When they did move, they moved in stages: five portfolios in all, starting with the smallest and newest and finishing with Housemark itself only a few weeks ago. Each switch taught them what to ask before the next one.
“It was learn from our mistakes, but also learn what questions we needed to ask PropertyMe that we might not have asked. By the end, Dan and I just were on the screen together for the last portfolio and it was like we didn’t even need to talk, we knew what steps to take.”
— Paula Staracek, Housemark
The real work was people, not payments
The trickiest part wasn’t the technology. It was knowledge and nerves. Change makes people anxious and anxious people push back. Paula’s answer was to get ahead of it: explain exactly how it worked, spell out the benefits for the team and hand everyone a list of the questions their tenants and landlords were likely to ask.
“So long as I gave them enough understanding and education before we rolled out, then once we did, it was almost seamless. It’s taking that time first, rather than just going ‘hey, we’re doing this next week’ and letting that nervousness run through your business.”
— Paula Staracek, Housemark
Tenants got clear notice, 14 days for the smaller portfolios and a month for the big one, using PropertyMe’s templates, tweaked to sound like Housemark. For landlords, Paula learned to time the switch for just after an end-of-month disbursement and go live on the first of the next month, so the first wave of questions had somewhere clean to land.
And then… most people didn’t notice.
Here’s the twist Paula clearly enjoyed telling. When the dust settled, the reaction from owners was mostly silence.
“If I’m really honest, 50% don’t even know.”
Half of her landlords, she reckons, don’t read their emails closely enough to have registered the change at all. The other half, the ones who watch their finances, noticed and they liked it. The money reaches them faster, the owner portal is clearer and they can see their tenants paying in real time instead of staring at a pending payment on a statement.
“Suddenly the control of how they get their money is in their hands. And I am landlord-centric, everything I do is for my landlords. I have not had one negative piece of feedback from a landlord.”
— Paula Staracek, Housemark
Tenants adapted more easily than she expected, too. The one thing that made the difference for less tech-savvy renters was the unique BSB and account number PropertyMe can generate for each tenant, with no app required. A tiny handful of elderly tenants who found any change too much were simply left as they were, paying into the still-open trust account. That’s about 1% of the business.
But what about the cost?
It’s the question every agency asks and Paula didn’t dodge it. Yes, there’s a fee. MePay Fast and Trustless both start at $200 plus GST per month (billed at $100 per 100 properties per month, with a 200-property minimum) and Trustless costs no more than Fast, so the automation layer comes at the same price. It’s available on every Manage PM plan, with no plan upgrade required.
What changed the maths for Housemark wasn’t the price. It was what happened to the four and five hours a day their people had been spending on receipting.
“Those resources have been able to be moved into other areas where we’ve been lacking. This has actually just covered it.”
— Paula Staracek, Housemark
Her advice, if you’re on the fence
Paula’s pitch to anyone still weighing it up was refreshingly unglamorous: do the homework she did.
“If you’re on the fence, it’s because of the uncertainty, the unknown or the cost. Go and get all those questions answered. Then take that leap of faith for your business, because it is moving you in the right direction.”
— Paula Staracek, Housemark
When you’re ready, the move itself is smaller than the decision. Going from MePay Fast to Trustless is a subscription-level switch, with no new payment rail to configure. You modify your subscription, select Trustless and confirm. If you’re coming from Direct Debit there’s a short cutover period and a step-by-step guide to walk you through it.
And you won’t be doing it alone. There’s the MePay Fast Upgrade Guide, tenant message templates you can clone, the MePay dashboard and Knowledge Base and a Support team on chat. If you’d like someone to talk through what a rollout could look like for your agency, book a demo to get started.
Frequently asked questions
The questions that came up most often in the live Q&A, answered by the PropertyMe team.
Does Trustless remove the need for a trust account or a trust accountant?
No. The trust account stays for bonds, holding deposits and owner-contributed funds for works and some people will always pay the “wrong” way. You may review your need for a full-time trust accountant, but the advice from Housemark is to let everything run for a quarter before reworking resourcing, since it takes time for everyone to move across.
Can an owner contribute funds to pay bills through Trustless?
Not at this stage. The owner pays those funds directly to your trust, to be receipted and handled manually. Owner contributions through the MePay platform are being looked at but aren’t available yet.
If an owner contributes part of a bill, say 50%, can it be mixed with Trustless funds?
You need to split the bill into two payments. Edit the current invoice to the amount available in Trustless, raise a new one for the amount against your agent (trust) balance and pay both with what’s available.
What about bonds and holding deposits?
Both are processed through the agent trust. Trustless doesn’t currently support either.
What if a tenant’s bank doesn’t support the payment?
NPP uses PayTo. If a tenant’s bank doesn’t support PayTo, they can’t set up the payment through the app, so they use the individual BSB and account number you can generate for them instead. Not all banks support PayTo and that’s up to the banks.
What about a tenant who pays in person at a bank branch?
MePay is 100% digital. Even with the individual BSB and account number, the tenant needs online banking to use it and an over-the-counter transfer may not work if their account isn’t set up for online banking.
Is it workable for tenants who aren’t tech-savvy?
The unique BSB and account number has been the game-changer and it works for tenants who won’t use an app. For a very small number of elderly tenants where even setting up a change is too much, they can stay as they are, paying into the still-open trust account.
How quickly are funds ready for disbursement?
Roughly 24 to 48 hours. A payment made this morning shows within a few minutes, clears overnight and if the owner is due for disbursement the next day, they receive it then.
Are Trustless disbursements automatic?
Yes. Set an owner up on a recurring disbursement, daily, weekly or fortnightly and funds go out on the due date automatically. Change the due date if the timing needs to shift. The owner doesn’t go in and withdraw the funds.
Disclaimer: This content relates to the MePay payment product and has been prepared by MePay Holdings Pty Ltd (ABN 55 638 819 575 / AFSL no 528836) (MePay Holdings). Any financial services provided in relation to MePay (including the issue of MePay) are provided by MePay Holdings.
To the extent any information provided to you in this content constitutes financial product advice, such advice is general advice only and has been prepared without taking into consideration your objectives, financial situation or needs. You should consider your needs prior to acting on any advice or making any financial decisions and seek independent financial advice regarding your own personal circumstances. Cooling-off rights do not apply to MePay.
A product disclosure statement (PDS) has been issued by MePay Holdings for MePay and is available at https://www.propertyme.com.au/mepay/pds. The PDS explains the features, risks and benefits of the service and you should consider it in deciding whether to use the product.