OPINION: Talking to NU Management founder Grant McKay has been eye-opening because he has shown that success can come from breaking the rules.
When McKay sat down with me for The Property Management Excellence (PMX) Podcast and revealed the origins of NU Management, I expected a success story about growth. What I got instead was something far more valuable. He provided a case study on why the industry’s received wisdom about building a rent roll is not just outdated, but actively holding good operators back.
Here’s what McKay did. He built a 300-rent roll property management business from scratch in eastern Sydney – one of the most competitive property management markets in Australia – in under four years. There was no trust account, no acquisitions, and no inherited rent roll. He funded the startup by downgrading his own lifestyle. And he did it from a studio apartment, without any of the infrastructure that most agencies consider non-negotiable.
Now, a lot of people in this industry will hear that and say it’s impressive but unorthodox. What they miss is that Grant didn’t succeed despite breaking the rules. He succeeded because he broke them.
The trust accounting model that most agencies still treat as a legal requirement rather than a business choice is precisely what prevents new entrants from competing. It creates overhead, complexity, and an administrative burden that has nothing to do with delivering value to property owners. Grant removed it entirely, and in doing so, he freed himself to focus on what actually matters: being a genuine custodian of someone else’s most valuable asset.
This is the uncomfortable truth that legacy operators don’t want to confront. The apparatus of traditional property management – the trust accounts, the manual reconciliations, the fragmented systems – is not a feature. It is a tax. A tax on time, on focus, and on the ability to grow.
What McKay proved is that when you strip that away, the fundamentals of property management become remarkably simple: great communication, five-star service, and an obsessive attention to the owner’s experience. Alongside this, principals must have a willingness to build systems around what actually works, not what has always been done.
His obsession with five-star reviews is instructive. Most agencies treat Google reviews as a marketing metric. McKay treats them as an operating metric – the signal that tells him whether he is actually delivering the service owners want. That is a fundamentally different mindset from the one that treats property management as a compliance function.
The real lesson from McKay’s story is not about scrappiness or bootstrapping. It is about the opportunity that exists for anyone willing to question the fundamental modes of operation in this industry. The legacy model is not inevitable. It is a collection of choices, many of which were made decades ago by people who never imagined a world where technology could replace a trust account, or where an owner could see every transaction in real time from their phone.
The next generation of property management agencies will not be built by doing what has always been done, only slightly better. They will be built by people like McKay, who looked at the rulebook and decided it was wrong.
The question for every principal reading this is simple: what rules are you following that you have never stopped to question?
Alex Whitlock is the director of REB and co-founder of Managed.
Managed was built to help next-generation agencies win market share fast. It is the only comprehensive property management platform that exclusively delivers secure, instant, and automated direct payments from tenant to landlord, eradicating the need for a trust account.
If you’d like to find out how Managed can help power your growth, call Conor on 0452 298 394 or book a discovery call today.