Rex Cirrus8 Virtual Assistant: a VA for the lease register, not just the inbox

Commercial property management fails quietly. Nothing dramatic happens on the day a market rent review date slides past unactioned, or a tenant’s option window closes with no correspondence on file, or a bank guarantee expires while the tenant is three months behind. The cost surfaces a year later, in a rent that stayed flat when the lease said it should not have, and by then nobody can even say whose job it was to notice. If your agency runs on Rex Cirrus8, the reminders were probably firing the whole time. The question is whether anyone had the hours to act on them.

That is the gap this page is about. Cirrus8, Perth-built and now owned by Rex Software, is one of the few Australian platforms designed for commercial property management specifically: lease management with critical-date tracking, outgoings budgeting and reconciliation, integrated trust accounting, automated monthly invoicing and an owner portal. Base plans start around $600 a month, so the agencies running it are established operations with real portfolios, and almost every one of them has the same staffing shape: senior property managers doing administration because there is nobody else to do it. A Rex Cirrus8 VA is that somebody else, working inside your platform on Australian business hours.

The daily rhythm a VA runs in your Rex Cirrus8

The register comes first, because everything downstream depends on it. A critical-date reminder is only as good as the data behind it, and lease records migrated from a previous system, or entered in a hurry at settlement, are where the gaps hide. Your VA audits each lease record against the executed document: rent review dates and their method, whether CPI, fixed percentage or market; option exercise windows with the notice period the lease actually specifies; expiry and make-good obligations; bank guarantee amounts and expiry dates; tenant insurance certificates and their renewal dates. Once the register is true, the daily work is responding to what Cirrus8 surfaces. A review reminder fires, and the VA pulls the lease clause, preps the calculation or the comparable request, and drafts the tenant correspondence for the manager to review. The manager makes the call. The VA makes sure the call gets made on time.

The monthly invoice run is the second anchor. Cirrus8 generates recurring rent, outgoings and recovery charges automatically, which is genuinely one of its best features and also exactly why it deserves a pre-check: a wrong charge multiplied across a portfolio is a very efficient way to annoy every tenant at once. Your VA reviews the run before it goes, confirms recent rent reviews and new recharges are reflected, adds the one-off items like tenant-responsible repairs, and then handles the tail that follows any billing cycle: reissues, remittance questions, the tenant who wants a charge explained. Anything that turns into an argument about what the lease means goes straight up to the property manager with the clause attached.

Arrears in commercial property is its own discipline. The amounts are larger than residential, the tenants are businesses, and the escalation path runs toward default notices rather than tribunal forms, so the tone is commercial and the record-keeping matters more. Your VA works the aged list to the ladder you set: statement, email, phone call, each contact logged against the tenancy, promised payment dates diarised and actually checked. Where the lease provides for interest on late payment, that gets flagged for the manager’s decision. What lands on the manager’s desk is a current, per-owner arrears summary, so the conversation with the landlord about issuing a default notice happens on evidence. The cadence behind it is the same discipline as our invoice chasing work: the list gets worked every week, including the weeks everything else is on fire.

Outgoings is where a commercial VA earns the most quiet gratitude. Someone has to key the annual budget for each property so tenants are billed monthly on estimates. Someone has to keep the actuals coded to the right ledger through the year, which is really a disciplined data entry job wearing a property hat. And someone has to build the year-end wash-up: actuals against budget, each tenant’s share against their recovery provisions, supporting invoices attached, ready for the manager’s review and the auditor’s file where a retail lease requires an audited statement. In most agencies that reconciliation eats a senior manager’s June. In a placement that runs well, the manager receives it assembled and spends their time on the judgement calls instead.

The property management inbox threads through all of it. Tenant requests, owner questions, contractor invoices and agents’ clauses arrive in one shared mailbox, and because your VA works Australian business hours from Manila, two hours behind AEST, the triage happens across your day rather than overnight: maintenance goes into Cirrus8 as a work order, an invoice goes to coding, a lease question goes to the manager with the file reference attached, and nothing sits unread until Thursday.

Around those anchors sits the operational hum. Maintenance requests become work orders against the right property and contractor. Quotes get requested and then chased, because Cirrus8 sends the request but nothing in any software rings the electrician who ignored it. Contractor insurance certificates get tracked so nobody steps onto a site uninsured. Completed jobs get closed with the invoice matched to the work order before it heads to trust for payment. And at month end, the owner report pack gets prepared and checked, and the owner portal kept current, so landlords who want their statement at 9pm on a Sunday can get it without anyone answering a phone.

The honest bit

Three things worth saying plainly before you brief a VA into Cirrus8.

First, the platform already automates a lot, and you should switch that on before paying anyone to do it manually. The recurring invoice run, the critical-date reminders and the owner portal are included in what you are already paying for. A VA’s value is not generating invoices; it is the checking, chasing, correcting and preparing that the automation leaves behind, which across a commercial portfolio is still a genuine part-time role.

Second, candidates with direct Cirrus8 experience are rarer than for the big residential platforms, and we will not pretend otherwise on the discovery call. Cirrus8 is a specialist tool for a specialist market. What we recruit for is commercial property administration ability, because a person who understands why an option window matters and how an outgoings recovery works learns the software quickly, while the reverse is not true. The supervised first week exists precisely so that the learning happens inside your account, on your procedures, with your manager checking the output.

Third, Cirrus8 is commercial software. If your agency also runs a residential rent roll, that side lives in a different system with a different rhythm, and this placement does not cover it. Our PropertyMe and PropertyTree pages cover the residential story separately.

What stays with you

Commercial agency work is licensed work, and the boundary is enforced by permissions rather than promises.

Your VA does operations and administration: the register, the invoice run pre-check, arrears correspondence to your script, outgoings assembly, work orders, owner reporting. They do not negotiate lease terms or renewals, decide a market rent, advise an owner or a tenant on their position, issue a default notice, or determine what is recoverable under a lease. Those calls need your licensed property managers, and the VA’s job is to hand each one over prepared, with the clause, the numbers and the draft already attached.

Trust money is the hardest line of all. Cirrus8’s integrated trust accounting is one of the reasons agencies buy it, and receipting into trust and authorising payments out of it are licensed agent functions in every Australian state. The VA’s login is scoped so those functions are simply not present: they prepare and match creditor invoices, flag receipting oddities to your trust accountant, and stop there. If a client asked us to put payment release on a VA’s seat, the answer would be no.

What it costs and where to start

A Rex Cirrus8 VA sits on our admin tier at $12-17 AUD an hour excl GST. Most commercial placements run 10-15 hours a week, roughly $500-1,100 a month, for someone carrying the critical-date register, the monthly run, arrears and the work order loop across the portfolio. Heavier analysis or reporting work steps up to the specialist tier at $18-25.

Placement takes 7-10 business days from the discovery call. The first 5-7 days are supervised inside your own Cirrus8 before any solo work, starting with the register audit and the invoice run pre-check because both produce output you can verify line by line. A $500 refundable deposit credits to your first month, the first 30 days carry our recalibrate-or-replace guarantee, and there is no lock-in beyond 14 days notice. We have made 87+ placements into Australian businesses since 2024.

For the wider vertical, the property management page covers how agencies structure a VA around their licensed team, and the real estate page covers the sales side of the office. The VA cost guide sets the full pricing picture against a local hire. When you are ready, book a discovery call with Jenn, who takes every call herself. Bring your lease expiry report and your aged arrears list, and she will tell you honestly whether a VA is the fix.