HiRUM Virtual Assistant: a VA inside the front desk of your management rights building

You search “hirum virtual assistant” from the manager’s unit, probably after hours, because buying the management rights came with a building full of owners, a letting pool full of guests, and a front desk where the receptionist, reservations manager, debt collector and statement preparer are all you. The caretaking half of the job has a mop and a schedule. The letting half lives inside HiRUM, and it follows you upstairs every night.

HiRUM has earned its place in that world. It is Gold Coast software, built around the management rights model rather than adapted to it, servicing more than 1,200 properties, and it is close to the default system for Queensland holiday apartment buildings run by onsite managers. Guesty acquired the company, but the product is still sold and supported as HiRUM, with an Australian support team who understand what end of month means in this industry. The software is not the problem. The problem is that HiRUM assumes someone is sitting in it for a couple of hours a day, and in a two-person management rights operation that someone is also unblocking the pool filter.

A DotVA placement puts a Manila-based VA inside your HiRUM on Australian business hours, 10 to 15 hours a week, working the reservations, the channels, the debtors and the end of month grind, while everything that needs a licence or a key stays exactly where the law puts it: with you.

The daily rhythm a VA runs in your HiRUM

Before reception opens, HiRUM Front Desk gets its first read. Today’s arrivals and departures, unit by unit: who is coming, which apartments turn over, which bookings carry a note about a cot, a late arrival or a repeat guest who always asks for the ocean side. Anything that landed overnight through HiSITE gets checked, because a booking that arrived on the right unit type at the right rate is invisible, and the one that did not is a conversation you want at 8:30am, not at the intercom at 9pm.

Allocation gets particular care, and this is where a management rights building is nothing like a motel. Every apartment in your letting pool belongs to a different owner, and every booking is that owner’s income. Two identical two-bedroom units with very different occupancy is not a rounding error, it is a phone call from an unhappy investor. Your VA places comparable bookings across like units deliberately, keeps the reasoning recorded, and hands you the pattern instead of leaving it to whoever the system defaulted to.

Then guests. Balances collected before arrival under your policy, confirmations sent, and the pre-arrival email that apartment buildings live and die on: parking height limits, lift PINs, where the lockbox is and what happens if the flight lands at 11pm. Reception in a management rights building keeps short hours because reception is you, so the guests who arrive after five need their instructions to be perfect, and your VA makes sure they went out, on your template, days ahead. During business hours the same person can take booking calls live against Front Desk, which is the virtual receptionist shape of the placement, and it means the phone stops deciding how your afternoon goes.

Rates and availability move through HiSITE on your instruction. September school holidays open for booking and you want the two-bedroom rate lifted and a three-night minimum on: the change goes in once, HiSITE pushes it to every connected channel, and then, because trusting a sync is how a building oversells, your VA opens a channel or two and confirms the new numbers are actually showing. Stop-sells go on before event weekends. Mapping gets re-checked when a new unit joins the pool. None of it is glamorous, and all of it is revenue.

Money runs on its own track. Failed cards re-run, outstanding guest balances chased politely while there is still time to resolve them, and recharges to owners for the plumber’s callout followed up on the chasing cadence you approve. Housekeeping runs off the morning pass: departure cleans listed for the cleaners, unit statuses updated as they report back, and the apartment with the failed hot water system blocked out with a return date so it cannot be sold broken.

And then the rhythm that makes HiRUM placements different from every other accommodation system we work in: the month itself. End of month in management rights is not a report, it is an event. Owner statements, disbursements, the trust account reconciled, every dollar of income and every cleaning fee attributed to the right unit. The buildings that suffer through it are the ones reconstructing the whole month in the last two days. Your VA’s job is to make end of month boring: charges entered against the correct unit the week they happen, income coded as it lands, queries flagged mid-month instead of discovered at the deadline, and the statement pack prepared and checked so that what reaches you is a review-and-authorise job, not an archaeology project.

The honest bit

A few things worth hearing from us before you book a call.

HiRUM Front Desk grew up as an installed Windows program, and it shows its heritage in places. For a remote VA that means the access path needs sorting before day one: a hosted setup or remote desktop into the machine that runs Front Desk. It is a solved problem, but it is a week-zero conversation, not an afterthought, and we would rather you know that now than discover it in onboarding.

The Guesty acquisition changed the letterhead, not the product you use. HiRUM is still sold and supported as HiRUM, the support team is still Australian, and nothing about a VA placement depends on what Guesty does with the roadmap. If that changes, the working knowledge transfers, because the VA’s real skill is your building’s routine, not one vendor’s menus.

The trust accounting module records; it does not absolve. HiRUM will keep the ledgers straight if the inputs are right, but the trust account is still the licensee’s under Queensland law, the annual audit still happens, and no software or assistant changes who answers for it. A VA makes the inputs clean and the deadline calm. That is the whole claim, and it is enough.

And the obvious one, which matters more in this industry than any other we serve: half of management rights is physical. Keys at midnight, tradie access, the body corporate’s gardens, the caretaking agreement’s checklist. A VA shrinks the letting half of the job to its proper size. The caretaking half still needs a person who lives where you live.

What stays with you

Management rights is a licensed trade, so the line here is drawn by legislation before we draw it in a job description.

The trust account stays yours, entirely. Under Queensland’s Agents Financial Administration Act the account belongs to the licensee, so authorising disbursements, running the end of month payment run, and everything that touches banking is done by you, on your login. Your VA prepares, reconciles and checks; they never authorise, and the permission structure means they cannot.

The licence functions stay yours too: signing letting appointments with owners, setting commissions, negotiating a new owner into the pool or an unhappy one out of it, and anything connected to the body corporate or the caretaking agreement. Rate strategy stays yours, executed by the VA. Refunds, compensation and any guest dispute heading toward a chargeback escalate to you before money moves or a reply is sent.

Inside the software, the boundary is enforced rather than promised. HiRUM Front Desk gives each staff member their own login with configurable security levels, so the VA’s user covers reservations, guest correspondence, housekeeping and reporting while trust accounting functions, end of month processing and banking stay restricted to the licensee, and everything they enter is stamped against their named user. Credentials live in 1Password, with confidentiality signed on day one.

What it costs and where to start

HiRUM work sits on the admin tier at $12-17 AUD an hour excl GST, and a building of 30 to 80 letting pool units usually settles at 10-15 hours a week, in the region of $500-1,100 a month, which is a fraction of what a part-time receptionist costs a body-corporate-bound business once super and cover are counted. If you want the same person going deeper into the books behind the statements, that is the bookkeeping tier at $25-35.

Placement runs 7-10 business days from the discovery call, and the first 5-7 days are supervised inside your own HiRUM before any solo work, starting with Front Desk and the arrivals routine, then HiSITE, with anything near the money coming last and only ever to the prepare-not-authorise line. The $500 deposit is refundable and credits against your first month, the first 30 days carry a recalibrate-or-replace guarantee, and there is no lock-in beyond 14 days notice, which matters when your income moves with the school holidays.

For the wider picture, the short-stay managers page covers the booking-platform side of this world and the property management page covers the owner-and-tenant side; a management rights business is the unusual case that straddles both. The VA cost guide sets out the full pricing structure with the on-costs compared honestly.

Or go straight to a discovery call with Jenn, who takes every one herself and has made 87+ Australian placements since 2024. Bring two things: last month’s statement deadline story, and the number of nights this week you were still in Front Desk after dinner. She will tell you plainly which of those hours a HiRUM VA takes off you, and if your building is too small to justify it, she will tell you that too.