The Cost of Hiring Employees in Property Management: Local Hire Versus Outsourcing

What does a property manager on $85,000 really cost your agency in the first year? The salary is the number you budget for, but the bill is bigger. The cost of hiring employees also covers super, leave loading, insurance and payroll tax. Then come the recruiter, the slow early months and the chance they leave. I’ve priced each line for 2026-27 and set a local hire beside outsourcing, so you can see which your rent roll can carry.

The Short Answer on the Cost of Hiring Employees

The cost of hiring employees in Australia starts with the salary. Add 12% super, workers’ compensation and any leave loading your award requires. Payroll tax depends on your whole payroll, not one person’s salary. You pay it once your business’s total taxable wages pass your state’s threshold. For a property management role, the first three add about 14% a year. With payroll tax at standard rates, the total is about 18% to 22%. In the first year, add recruitment and expect less output while they learn.

What an Employee Costs Beyond the Salary

Labour is usually the biggest cost in a business, and property management is no different. A viewer once asked me on my show if she had to pay super and taxes on a virtual assistant. My answer listed what an employer carries.

It covers wages, sick pay, employment taxes, insurance, office space, equipment, supervision, training, support and supplies. You carry every item on that list when you employ someone yourself.

Here is how each line looks for a local hire.

Start With the Right Salary

The award sets the floor and the market sets the price. Under the Real Estate Industry Award, rates rose in July 2026. A Level 1 employee after 12 months now earns at least $1,063.90 a week, or about $55,300 a year. Level 2 is $1,119.10 a week, or about $58,200 a year.

Market pay sits well above that floor. Placed’s 2026 salary guide puts property managers at $65,000 to $75,000 base. It gives the same range for property management admin support in NSW and Queensland. As at September 2026, Indeed’s averages sit at about $84,000 for property managers and about $66,500 for assistant property managers.

The worked example below uses $70,000 for a property management assistant at Level 1 and $85,000 for a property manager at Level 2. Check your roles against the award, since duties set the level. For state and seniority details, see property manager salaries in Australia.

Superannuation and Payday Super

The compulsory super rate is 12% for 2025-26 and stays at 12% for 2026-27. On a $70,000 salary, that is $8,400 a year, but that covers the base salary only.

What changed on 1 July 2026 is timing. Under Payday Super, you pay super for each payday instead of quarterly. It must reach the employee’s fund within 7 business days.

The 12% applies to qualifying earnings. The ATO counts annual leave loading in those, unless it is clearly linked to lost overtime. With super on the loading, the assistant’s super comes to $8,489.

Leave Loading and Paid Time Away

This is the easiest line to double count. Full-time staff get four weeks of annual leave and 10 days of paid sick and carer’s leave a year. Those days are paid from the salary, so adding them on top counts them twice.

The extra cash is the leave loading. Clause 20.6 of the award adds 17.5% for annual leave. It is calculated on the award minimum for the employee’s level, not on their actual salary. Over four weeks that is about $745 a year at the Level 1 rate and $783 at Level 2.

The bigger question is cover. Sick and carer’s leave only applies when someone is sick or injured, or caring for a family or household member who is sick, injured or has an emergency. If all 10 days get used, annual and personal leave add up to six weeks away, before public holidays. On a $70,000 salary, six weeks is $8,077 of pay. That is not an extra cost, because the salary already pays it. It becomes extra cash only if you pay someone to cover the work.

Cover is not only a cost in dollars. We saw that with Teresa, Operations Manager at a large student accommodation agency in Brisbane. Once our assistants were handling the receipting under the agency’s direction, one of its directors took holidays “for the first time in seven years”.

Workers’ Compensation

Each state and territory runs its own scheme. For 2026-27, the real estate services rate is 0.514% in Victoria and 0.517% in South Australia. NSW has held its rates at 2025-26 levels, which leaves real estate agents at 0.633%.

In NSW, the wages for your premium include super and leave loading. As a simple illustration, 0.633% of the assistant’s $79,234 in salary, loading and super is about $502 a year. It is not a quote. Your actual premium adds GST and levies, and larger employers can have their claims history built in.

Payroll Tax and the Threshold Question

Whether you pay depends on your whole payroll. In NSW, you pay once the total Australian wages of your business or its group pass the threshold. Those wages count employer super and leave loading as well as pay. So a $70,000 hire in an agency already over the NSW threshold adds $4,318 a year.

Victoria and Queensland add surcharges or levies above $10 million. Related businesses can be grouped to share one threshold, so check with your accountant.

The Recruitment Bill Before Anyone Starts

Before a new person does a day’s work, you have paid to find them. ManpowerGroup Australia puts agency fees at 15% to 20% of the package for junior roles. Mid-level roles run at 18% to 25%. The package usually means salary plus super. On a $70,000 assistant, that is $11,760 to $15,680. On an $85,000 property manager, it is $17,136 to $23,800.

The ELMO 2026 HR benchmark report surveyed 904 Australian HR professionals in January 2026. Across all industries, it puts the average cost to hire at $17,000 and the average time to fill a role at 25 days.

Then comes onboarding. It can be difficult to find time to onboard new staff, let alone introduce them to outsourcing. Outsourcing does not end local hiring, since licensed work stays local.

So for agencies that already work with us, we take the pressure of onboarding off. When their local team changes, they tell us when the new person starts. Our Australian consultants and trainers then induct that staff member on the agency’s internal systems and processes and introduce them to their assistant and our team.

Paying Full Salary for Part Output

A new starter draws a full salary from their first day, and their output takes longer to arrive. It takes a lot of time to train anyone to do any job, and to do it well.

Picture a new local hire at half pace for their first three months while they learn your software, owners and systems. That is an illustration, not a benchmark. Three months of half output is worth $8,750 on $70,000, or $10,625 on $85,000.

On our side, we do most of the industry-specific training before an assistant starts. In our records, every PMVA assistant does more than 200 hours of property management training in our academy. Each one is tested for competency before handover. Then comes a structured six-week onboarding, with our Australian consultants meeting the agency twice a week.

Part output is not only a new-starter problem. A principal once called me in to see why her property manager was struggling. The property manager had about a hundred properties and almost two years in the role. Yet she stayed back three nights a week on average. With no plan or system to follow, there was a lot of activity, but little got done. A lack of focus and planning like that is one reason turnover is rife in our industry.

What Staff Turnover Does to a Rent Roll

Turnover is where a hire gets costly, and property management has more of it than most. Macquarie’s 2023 benchmarking report found 25% of all agency staff moved to a new employer in FY2023. For property managers, it was 35%. ABS job mobility data still puts Rental, Hiring and Real Estate Services at the top of all industries. It was 11% in the year to February 2026. Kolmeo’s 2026 survey asked more than 400 people in the field about their plans. Nearly two in five were thinking of leaving the profession or were unsure of their future.

How Turnover Leads to Inconsistency

Every departure starts the fee and the slow months again. The principals who come to us describe three core problems, and each one leads into the next. The first is high turnover of local staff. 

That leads to the second: the daily work gets done a different way each time. That brings compliance and legislation problems, and key tasks get missed. The third problem is growth. With constant change in the back office, it is hard to keep staff focused on the rent roll and on clients.

We saw this with Sarah, Head of Property Management for a large Canberra agency. Before we worked together, “Everyone in the office had their own way of doing things, which led to inconsistencies.” Once her team had one consistent process, she called it “crucial, especially with the frequent turnover in property management.”

When a New Hire Changes Your Systems

Turnover also has a hidden version I find so often in agencies. A principal hires a new property manager who used different software in their last job. The new hire says the team needs to change systems because that is their comfort zone.

I have seen principals spend around $10,000 to $20,000 changing their software and systems to suit a new hire. If that person leaves 18 months later, it is long after the three to six month replacement period that ManpowerGroup says recruiters usually give. The principal is left to retrain people and wait for the next person who wants changes.

The fix is to set the systems first. Here is my business, here are our procedures, and if you want to work here, this is how you will work. Keep the business steady, rather than at the mercy of whoever works in it. That is the key to better productivity and stability, and it flows on to the service your clients get.

Adding It Up: One Local Hire Costed Line by Line

This worked example uses NSW rates for every line. It prices two common hires in an agency already paying NSW payroll tax.

Cash Costs

Workers’ compensation and payroll tax are both charged on the salary, loading and super.

Add your own costs for a desk, a computer, software and supervision. Long service leave is left out too.

Time Away and the Slow Start

The salary already pays for these, so they are not in the cash totals.

Each year, cash on-costs add about 20% to the salary, or about 14% below the payroll tax threshold. With an agency fee, the first-year cash comes to about 1.4 to 1.5 times the salary. If you paid someone at the same rate to cover a full six weeks away, the ongoing cost would be about 1.3 times.

In my experience, profit margins in property management run from about 6% to about 20%. Most sit around 10% to 12%. Take the assistant’s $11,760 recruitment fee. At a 10% margin, it takes $117,600 of fee revenue to earn that back. I have set out the details in margin benchmarks for property management.

Local Hire Versus Outsourcing: Comparing Like With Like

The fair comparison is not an assistant against a property manager. An outsourced assistant takes admin work off your team. That frees them to do what they do best: manage properties and take care of your clients. Routine inspections, licensed decisions, client care and trust account authority stay with your local team. So compare the admin load with the admin hire.

Two Ways to Outsource

There are several ways to set up outsourcing, and here I compare two. In the DIY model, you do it all yourself. You recruit, make up the process and train your assistant. The upfront cost is low, but the time wasted and the risk are higher. That is why we built our EOS technology, which stands for Effective Outsourcing System.

The other is a done-for-you provider, and I’d recommend a done-for-you provider any day. The fee covers work you would otherwise do in-house. With us, that means we recruit and train your assistant before they start. It also covers six weeks of onboarding support, backup cover and replacement.

Local Hire and PMVA Side by Side

Our backup assistants work from the same documented processes as your assistant. They can cover for five minutes, an hour or many days on end. Assistants leave jobs too, so replacement is included.

After the six-week onboarding, bring your assistant into your team and keep the work loaded. Your time goes into managing the work you send, not micromanaging the assistant.

We’ve seen the backup side tested with Sarah’s team. Her backup assistants “have been needed a few times, and it’s amazing how seamlessly they step in.”

In the worked example, a $70,000 local assistant in NSW costs about $84,100 a year in ongoing cash. An outsourced assistant has to cost less than that to win on cash alone. For the local hire, recruitment, leave cover and replacement risk sit on top. Any financial benefit from outsourcing depends on your agency’s size, how the work is set up and how well it is rolled out.

How to Run the Numbers for Your Own Agency

1. Define your team structure: Split what the hire would do into licensed or client-facing work and admin.
2. Map the administration: Write down each task and who does it today. When agencies start with us, our Australian consultants build a rollout plan with them. They also prepare process maps showing approval points, software access and when to escalate.
3. Cost the hire in full: Put your own salary, state rates and hiring method into the worked example. Then add your overheads.
4. Price the risk of losing them: Use your own turnover history. If one in three people left last year, plan for the fee and the learning time to come around again.
5. Get an all-in annual quote for the same administration: Ask what is included and what is extra. I have seen some outsourcing firms charge extra for 13th-month pay. In the Philippines, it is mandatory for rank-and-file private sector staff who have worked at least a month in the calendar year. Ask whether statutory costs like it are included.
6. Turn both into a cost per property: Divide each annual figure by the properties the work supports. Then set it against your management fee revenue.

The more properties you manage, the more you spread the fixed costs and the more profitable the business becomes. It is one of several profit levers for property managers.

Splitting the work pays off in speed too. Kellie, Operations Manager for a large New Zealand agency, saw it when her team handed invoices to dedicated assistants. She found, “With one person focusing on the same task daily, invoices are processed much quicker.”

Frequently Asked Questions

Cost the Work Before You Cost the Hire

A salary tells you what one person earns, not what the work costs your agency. Put super, loading, insurance, payroll tax, hiring, learning time and turnover on one page, and the real number is clear. Set it beside an outsourced option for the same admin work, then let the numbers decide. If you would like a second set of eyes on them, our team is happy to work through them with you.