A maintenance-coordination layer between Queensland property managers and a vetted trades network. Travis pulls strings; trades swing hammers; agencies get one number, one invoice, no surprises. The market is in distress, the dominant venture-funded competitor collapsed last year, and the supply side is actively shopping. This is the brief that takes Wagner Property Care from tradie with a Google profile to operator running a coordination layer inside one quarter on existing infrastructure.
The product. A thin layer that takes a property manager's maintenance load — bond cleans, gurney work, repairs, trade-out — and runs it end-to-end with vetted trades. One number to call, one invoice, every trade rated, photo evidence on every job. Travis Wagner is the operator. He does not swing hammers.
The buyer. The Head of Property Management at a 150–500 door QLD agency, plus the agency principal at 50–150 door Gympie hinterland shops. Sales agents are not the buyer; they don't handle maintenance. Twenty-three percent of QLD property managers intend to leave the profession; fifty-three percent flag mental-health pressure from always-on inboxes and compliance load. Wagner removes one of the three biggest weights from their week.
The wedge. :Different — Sydney proptech, A$36M raised from CBA's x15ventures and Antler — collapsed into administration in 2024 specifically because they could not make maintenance dispatch quality scale. HiPages, the dominant trade lead platform, retained only fifty-eight percent of MRR in H1 FY26, meaning forty-two percent of subscribed trades churned. Supply side is unhappy. Demand side is in distress. There is no dominant residential maintenance-coordinator brand in Southeast Queensland.
The model. Hybrid pricing. A$10/property/month subscription plus 12.5% coordination fee on every trade invoice. Floors at recurring revenue, scales with usage, avoids the failure mode that took :Different down. At 200 properties under coordination: ~A$84K gross / ~A$67K net annual contribution at solo scale on amortised supporting infrastructure.
The shape. Travis is the operator. Network owner. Trade-quality enforcer. Final say on PM partnerships. The platform — dispatch automation, intake, scoring, dashboards, hosting, payments rail — comes pre-built. Travis steps into the chair, not into a six-month build cycle.
The ask. Sharpen five questions on the next page (§12), book the discovery call with Travis, then ship the build.
Total addressable maintenance-spend market in the launch radius (Gympie + Sunshine Coast + Brisbane LGAs combined): ~600,000 maintenance jobs/year × A$400 average ticket = A$240M/year. Wagner's serviceable share at 12.5% coordination fee on a 1% market penetration after Year 2 = A$3M annual gross. That's the realistic Year-2 ceiling, not the floor.
Tapi — NZ-founded, AU/NZ deployed — sits on roughly 450,000 properties at last public count and has raised approximately A$49M. Their model is per-property SaaS sold to agencies. They are the substrate, not a coordinator. Wagner does not compete with Tapi; Wagner integrates into a Tapi-using agency or runs alongside it.
Eighty percent of the addressable spend is concentrated in 20% of the agencies — the 150–500 door PMs who have enough volume to feel the maintenance burden but not enough scale to hire a dedicated coordinator internally. That cohort is the entire Year-1 funnel. Everything else is noise.
:Different ran the flat-fee subscription PM model from 2018 to 2024. Raised approximately A$36M including a A$25M Series B led by CBA's x15ventures and Antler. Placed in administration in 2024 after failing to close a follow-on raise. The failure mode was operational — they could not make maintenance dispatch quality scale.
The corollary: dispatch quality is a tradie-operator problem, not a venture-funded software problem. Wagner is the right shape of company to solve it.
HiPages MRR retention in H1 FY26 was 58%. Forty-two percent of subscribed trades churned. Trades pay A$10–A$200 per lead, A$109–A$419/month subscriptions, twelve-month auto-renewal lock-ins. ACCC made HiPages rectify after a misleading-conduct finding in 2023.
The corollary: "no lead fees, guaranteed warm work, paid weekly" is a sharper supply-side wedge than the original brief assumed.
Twenty-three percent of QLD property managers intend to leave the profession. Fifty-three percent cite mental health pressure. Industry flagged a "structural breaking point" in November 2025. The maintenance load is the second largest weight on the role after compliance.
The corollary: "one number, one invoice, vetted trades" is not a feature pitch. It's a retention pitch to the agency principal whose head of PM is about to quit.
Wagner sits in the gap none of the three structural failures address — a tradie-led, regionally-grounded operator with vetted panel, transparent markup, photo SLAs, and no software-platform overhead.
Hybrid. A$10 per property under coordination per month subscription, plus 12.5% coordination fee on every trade invoice processed through the platform. Billed to the agency, paid by the landlord through the agency's existing trust-account flow.
| Properties under coord. | Sub revenue / yr | Coordination fee / yr | Gross / yr | Net contribution |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 50 | A$6,000 | A$15,000 | A$21,000 | A$17,000 |
| 200 | A$24,000 | A$60,000 | A$84,000 | A$67,000 |
| 500 | A$60,000 | A$150,000 | A$210,000 | A$168,000 |
| 1,500 | A$180,000 | A$450,000 | A$630,000 | A$504,000 |
| 5,000 (Y3 stretch) | A$600,000 | A$1,500,000 | A$2,100,000 | A$1,680,000 |
Assumptions: six maintenance jobs per property per year (industry rule of thumb); average ticket A$400; variable cost per job under A$1 on existing infrastructure (or A$6 once payments rail is wired); twenty percent platform overhead amortised across the supporting stack.
Pure markup is fragile — PMs already pocket their own 10–20% markup and won't surrender it without reason. Pure subscription is the failure mode that took :Different down. Hybrid wins because it floors the recurring revenue, scales with usage without punishing heavy-use agencies, and gives the buyer a low-base price ("the system costs ten dollars per property") with a fair pay-for-action layer they can audit.
Question: "If the CRM is shit, we'll scrape targeted — or should we do that anyway?"
Answer: scrape anyway. Both lanes run in parallel. The CRM is the demand-side accelerant; the targeted scrape is the de-risk and the supply-side requirement.
Three reasons. First, the CRM is age-unverified and ICP-coarse — eleven thousand "real estate contacts" likely conflates sales agents with property managers, and the latter is the actual buyer. Until migration confirms the QLD residential PM subset, plan for it to be smaller than 2,500. Second, the trade side needs a fresh extraction regardless. The QBCC Licensed Contractors Register is a public CSV download — Travis's vetted-trade network is a one-day automated pull per region. Third, the cost of running both lanes is days, not weeks. Insurance is cheap when the alternative is a dependency on an unmigrated list.
Operationally: CRM migrates into the operator database in week one, filtered to QLD residential PMs. Targeted extraction runs in parallel on REA, Domain, Google Maps and the REIQ directory, also filtered to QLD residential PMs and de-duplicated against the CRM cohort. Trade-side extraction runs against the QBCC public register. Both demand-side lists feed the same five-touch outreach sequence on the automation engine. The CRM saves CAC on the records that survive the filter; the fresh extraction catches everything the CRM missed and provides recency.
HiPages charges trades A$10 to A$200 per lead, plus subscription tiers from A$109/month to A$419/month, plus twelve-month auto-renewal lock-ins. The number-one complaint on productreview.com.au, Whirlpool, and tradie Facebook groups is lead quality — "half are tyre-kickers, half are already-sorted, the rest are price-shopping." The ACCC made HiPages issue rectifications in 2023 over misleading conduct on subscription terms. Trade reviews on Oneflare, Service.com.au and Hi5 echo the same complaint set.
Wagner's offer to the trade is structurally different on five axes.
| Axis | HiPages / Oneflare / Hi5 | Wagner |
|---|---|---|
| Lead source | Cold homeowner, one-shot, often shopping multiple quotes | Property manager partner, recurring portfolio, pre-qualified job |
| Lead fee | A$10–A$200 per lead, paid up-front, no guarantee of work | Zero. Wagner pays the trade trade-rate; the coordination fee is on the PM side |
| Lock-in | 12-month subscription auto-renewal | Month-to-month panel agreement, exit any time |
| Job confirmation | Trade chases the homeowner; conversion 10–20% | Job pre-confirmed by PM at dispatch; conversion 80%+ |
| Payment terms | Trade chases the customer for payment; 30–60 days typical | Wagner pays the trade weekly via the platform's payments rail |
The supply-side acquisition cost is genuinely small. A targeted extraction of the QBCC public register and Google Maps in the launch radius produces ~1,200 trade businesses across the priority categories. Cold SMS opt-in (single message, single click to a Travis-recorded thirty-second voice memo on the offer) converts at 8–12% to a network application. Acquisition cost per onboarded trade lands at A$0.60–A$1.00. Cycle time from list-build to first dispatched job: seven days.
The non-obvious supply-side play is HiPages reverse-recruiting — pull the trade names with bad HiPages reviews on productreview.com.au and pitch them directly. They've already articulated the pain. Wagner is the answer.
A property manager handling 100 doors spends a proxy ~7.7 hours per week on maintenance coordination — chasing trades, fielding owner complaints, approving invoices, dispatching urgents. Sixty-three percent of QLD PMs report being "far too busy"; forty-three percent work 41-hour-plus weeks. Twenty-three percent intend to leave the profession.
The agency principal's KPI is not "did the maintenance get done well." It is "did the head of PM stay another year." Wagner's pitch surface to the principal is therefore retention insurance, framed in the principal's own units.
The buyer split matters. The brief originally framed this as "real estate agents + property managers" — these are two different buyers. Sales agents do not handle maintenance. The actual ICP is:
Head of Property Management at 150–500 door agencies in Sunshine Coast metro and Brisbane. Reachable via direct LinkedIn outbound, REIQ event sponsorship, and the warm CRM cohort.
Agency Principal at 50–150 door Gympie hinterland shops. Reachable via direct mail (A$2.50/letter, 4–7% B2B response in regional QLD, no spam-filter exposure) and Travis cold call.
Discovery cycle from first touch to booked first job sits at fourteen to twenty-one days. Realistic close rate at PM level: 8–12%. CRM-warm cohort skews higher, fresh-scrape skews lower. Targeted CAC per booked PM: A$30–A$40 inclusive of all touches.
| Component | Function | Status | Effort |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lead extraction (PMs + trades) | Targeted public-source data extraction | Shelf | Hours |
| Prospect enrichment + scoring | Internal scoring scaffold, ICP-weighted | Shelf | Days |
| Operator CRM / pipeline | Pre-built schema for PMs, Trades, Jobs, Invoices | Shelf | Hours |
| Cold outreach (email / SMS / DM) | Automation engine + templated sequences | Shelf | Days |
| Marketing site / landing pages | Managed web stack, single-file deliverables | Shelf | Days |
| Voice / SMS gateway | Inbound voice + outbound SMS layer | Shelf (extend) | Days |
| Reporting / Travis dashboard | Operator dashboard on shared data layer | Shelf | Days |
| AI intake bot | Voice → triage → write-to-CRM | Build (light) | 1–2 weeks |
| Dispatch + scheduling loop | Custom matching + offer + booking service | Build (the moat) | 2–4 weeks |
| Trade quote → confirm → assign loop | Custom — automated flow + thin web form | Build | 2 weeks |
| Invoicing + payments | Payments rail + accounting integration | Buy + integrate | 1 week |
The compounding automations — the ones that pay back monthly without further build — are five.
Once 1–4 are live, Travis's honest weekly hours sit between five and twelve. Closer to five if exceptions are bedded in; closer to twelve if rules are still tuning. The ceiling on solo operation is approximately 500 jobs per month — past that, a coordinator hire becomes the lower-cost option.
4,495 rentals. ~1,000 professionally managed. TAM ceiling A$1.34M/yr at full penetration. Defensibility comes from Travis being local, HiPages being thin, and no dominant maintenance-coordinator competitor in market. Target: 50 PMs onboarded with paid first job, 80 trades on panel. Gympie is the validation lab, not the revenue lane.
34,900 rentals, 400 active agencies, 1,462 active agents. ~10,500 professionally managed rentals. The first leg where Wagner can hit 500–1,500 properties under coordination. Trade scrape per region runs in one day on QBCC public CSV. Sunshine Coast is reachable from Gympie in under ninety minutes — Travis can credibly run both as one launch market.
~165,000 rentals, ~50,000 professionally managed. Coordinator hire likely required at this stage. Wagner is no longer a regional operator — competitive pressure from any surviving Sydney/Melbourne player begins here. Margin discipline matters. Stretch target: 5,000 properties under coordination.
Townsville, Cairns, Mackay, Gold Coast. Two paths. Path A: hire regional operators on revshare. Path B: license the Wagner platform to existing regional trade-coordination shops as a franchise model. Decision lands at the Brisbane-150-jobs-per-week milestone, not before.
NSW Fair Trading and VIC Consumer Affairs each impose their own contractor-licensing regime, but a coordinator-only role sits cleanly outside builder-licence requirements provided Travis never directs or supervises on-site work. Same posture extends nationally. The path past QLD is defensible but requires a dedicated state-launch playbook each leg.
Important regulatory unlock: Travis does not need a QBCC builder licence to coordinate. The coordinator role sits outside both the QBCC Building Industry Fairness Act and the Property Occupations Act, provided he stays a string-puller and never directs on-site work. Insurance posture: professional indemnity for the coordination layer, plus a disclaimer routing on-site liability through the contracted trade's existing public liability cover.
Floor case (CRM migration delays, reply rates underperform, trades slow to opt in): 15 PMs / 50 trades by day 90. Base case: 30 PMs / 80 trades. Stretch case: 50 PMs / 120 trades — predicated on CRM yielding ≥1,500 ICP-matched residential PMs after filter, plus first case study landing inside day 30.
| Risk | Likelihood | Impact | Mitigation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trade reliability collapses — a no-show or quote-inflation event burns a PM partnership in month 1 or 2. This is the failure mode that took :Different down. | Medium | High | Quote-inflation flag in dispatch loop. Photo evidence required on every job. Travis personally on-call for first 50 jobs. Three-strike de-panel rule. |
| Demand-side conversion stalls — PMs in distress still hate switching workflows. Sub-10% close + 21-day cycle stretches runway. | High | Medium | CRM-warm cohort lifts conversion. Direct mail compresses the regional path. First-job-free hook for PM partner #1–#5. |
| Gympie TAM caps — the beach-head doesn't scale fast enough to fund the Sunshine Coast leg. | Medium | Medium | Treat Gympie + Sunshine Coast as one launch market from day 1. Don't wait for Gympie to "complete" before opening Sunshine Coast. |
| HiPages or Different-revival fights back — incumbent reaction, regional pricing dump, exclusive PM contracts. | Low | Medium | Lock month-to-month panel agreements with trades. Avoid exclusive PM contracts. Speed is the moat — out-execute the regional response window. |
| Regulatory shift — QLD or NSW imposes coordinator licensing or trade-referral restrictions. | Low | High | Maintain coordinator-only posture (no on-site direction). Transparent invoice line item, not kickback. Insurance: PI plus contracted trade's PL. |
CRM ingested from external HDD into the operator database. QLD residential PM filter applied. QBCC public-register pull per region. Targeted PM extraction on REA + Domain runs in parallel as the de-risk lane. Two landing pages live on staging (PM-facing, trade-facing).
Five-touch outreach sequence active on the CRM-warm cohort. Cold SMS opt-in active on the QBCC trade list. Trade panel seeded at 30+ verified trades across priority categories. AI intake bot v1 live (intake → triage → write to operator CRM).
Dispatch + scheduling loop in production. Quote-inflation flag, rating-weighted matching, three-strike de-panel rule. First 5 PM partners signed. First 25–50 jobs dispatched. Travis personally on-call for every first-job-with-new-trade event.
100+ properties under coordination. Weekly PM partner reports auto-emailed. Payments + accounting loop live. Trade payment runs weekly. Travis hours drop to 8–12/week. First case study published.
Sunshine Coast ICP outreach launches. Trade list-build for SC LGA. 10–15 SC PMs onboarded. Properties under coordination 200–350.
Brisbane scoping. Coordinator hire decision. Properties under coordination 400–800. Year-1 net contribution A$48–A$84K base case, A$120K+ stretch.
Can Travis name thirty trades by category × suburb across Gympie + Sunshine Coast he'd vouch for today? If under ten, the supply side becomes a 90-day extract-and-onboard build, not a day-1 asset — and the Phase 1 calendar resets accordingly. The QBCC public-register pull and reverse-recruit lanes still work, but the "first 50 jobs with trades I personally trust" cushion disappears.
Any property managers, agency principals, or BDMs at the major PM software vendors who'd take a first call as a favour? Even one warm intro on day 1 saves a month of cold-CAC and unlocks the first case study. Worth the question even if the answer is "I'll think about it" — surfaces the network we already have.
What is the minimum monthly revenue Travis needs to clear by month 3, month 6, month 12? Hours per week he can put in pre-revenue? Cash to invest in direct mail, ads, tooling, or strict bootstrap? The hybrid pricing only works if the floor maps to ~150 properties under coordination by month 12. If it maps higher, the geographic plan compresses; if lower, Sunshine Coast launches earlier.
Stay on Wagner Property Care — tradie feel, Logan-registered Google profile, lifts existing equity — or stand up a new operator brand with a cleaner buyer surface? Same ABN or new Pty Ltd? Coordinator-only PI insurance instead of trade-contractor liability cover? The unlock to flag in the call: he does not need a QBCC builder licence to coordinate.
Is Gympie a beach-head Travis expands from — Sunshine Coast Year 1.5, Brisbane Year 2, national Year 3+ — or a lifestyle business capped at A$1.5M/yr regional? The answer reshapes the build budget, the geographic timing, and the size of the operator role. Margin and split between Travis and the supporting platform stay open — that conversation lands separately, after the model is locked and the first jobs are in market.