In this Adelaide Success Stories interview, Sally Curtis talks with Xenia, founder of Alexa Real Estate, about how she revived and grew her property‑management business after a five‑year hiatus. Xenia explains that she returned when she noticed the business was merely covering salaries and not expanding. She identified costly under‑performing staff, made them redundant, and personally took on their duties, effectively treating her own salary as a reinvestment. Within a year the agency doubled in size. Key to that growth was systemisation and specialisation: new hires were placed into narrowly defined roles—leasing consultants, maintenance manager, arrears officer—preventing the industry‑wide burnout that property managers face. This allowed the firm to take on difficult, high‑maintenance portfolios that other agencies rejected, building a reputation for handling “hard” properties. Xenia also emphasises staff development, providing emotional‑resilience training and strict legislative compliance education, which empowers employees to handle abusive tenants and illegal client requests without personal stress. She stresses the importance of vetting clients to match the agency’s systems and educating them on what is acceptable. Finally, Xenia shares broader advice for small‑business owners: persistence and embracing the boring, repetitive aspects of business are essential for long‑term profit, while passion should be pursued outside work. She likens this to caring for a child—exciting at first, then steady work that must be sustained.
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Welcome, Xenia, and welcome to everyone to another video of Adelaide Success Stories. And we have Xenia from Alexa Real Estate that's going to share with us some insights as to how she's grown here in the Adelaide marketplace. Now, Xenia and I go back a long, a long time, and so we've grown up in business here in Adelaide, and we've had lots of evolutions and lots of changes So recently in the last few years, Zenia has gone back into her real estate business. So first question would be, what opportunity did you see that prompted you to go back in?
Thanks, Sally. Thanks for having me here. This is actually a lot of fun. So I've been in real estate for about 15 years now. So when I first started and the business got to a stage where I thought it was stable, running automatically, I stepped right back out. So I thought I'll step out of my core business and do what I love doing, which is motivational speaking, being on stage, all of that kind of thing. But I actually let the business go for about 5 years. And once I stepped back in 5 years, I realized that it was exactly the same number of properties that I had left. So that rang alarm bells. So I quickly just did some numbers and thought, okay, this business is actually existing to pay salaries, which is nothing wrong with that if you just want to keep a business sort of there idling, but it wasn't actually doing anything. So I had to step back in and grow it. And it was one of those things where you go to all of the seminars and all the business strategies and stuff like that, and everyone's saying, work on your business. business, don't work in your business, let, you know, you've got to automate it, you've got to do all of that. You know, that's fine if you own Virgin Airlines, or, you know, if you own a big, a big company that can actually run itself. But, you know, with small business, you know, I think you actually need the owner's energy in there to be able to run it. And it doesn't mean that you have to do every single job, but you've got to be in there to make sure that, you know, that the systems are running better, or, you know, whenever something goes wrong, or there's another— growth curve, you've got to change your systems and the staff aren't going to do that. You know, you need a business owner in there. So, you know, one of the things that I did when I looked at the numbers, I realized that the, 2 of the staff members which were not really performing that well, were carrying about $110,000 in salaries and cars and whatever. So, They both went, so we both— I made both of them redundant and I took over both of their jobs. Now, the way that I've thought of it is if somebody offers you a salary for $110,000, would you take it?
Yeah.
Of course you would. So that was my salary for stepping back into the business, so that's what I did. And as soon as I walked in there, I just realized that we're not charging here, we're not, you know, there's not enough of a margin in this area, there's not enough here, there's not enough promotion. You know, I realized all of the systems that weren't actually working. And I think within a year of me stepping back in, the business actually doubled.
Yeah.
So we actually doubled in size.
Yeah, that's the key, I suppose. My second key question was, what was your wake-up moment? So obviously going back into the business and realizing that the costs as it related to the staff, coming back in with a concept of fresh eyes back into your business and being able to see the pitfalls in the magic, in the numbers, so you were able to find leverage through understanding your business better and where you could make it work better. What were some of the— Yeah. And you've actually changed systems. So what were some of the key things that you changed that enabled you to double your growth? Because I watched you grow literally on 3 months, on 3 months, on 3 months. growing very rapid and doubling very rapidly. So what were some of the things that were critical in that moment?
Yeah, so this, yeah, sure. This is actually real estate specific or property management specific. And I'm talking about just the property management side of things. So one of the key fundamentals in property management is it's got a really, really high burnout rate for property managers. So, you know, imagine a property manager, you know, they're driving in their car, this is where they get all their phone calls and they get phone calls about a SACAT hearing, that's like a court hearing that's pending, or why is this tenant in arrears, or there's leaking taps, or can you show me this property, that Saturday doesn't suit me, can you show me on Monday? It's so diverse. So this actually causes a burnout in property managers. And within 3 months, so this is actually an industry thing, within 3 months they go either brain dead Or go into apathy, or they leave the industry altogether. But either way, within 3 months, it's actually the time they burn out. Right. So what I did, stepping back in, and the 2 people that were made redundant were actually pretty burnt out. They were really good people, but it just was not— the focus was so big that they weren't able to actually do anything right. And when things go wrong in a business, it's never the people. It's always the systems behind it. So one of the things I did was specialization. So when we hired new people eventually, they were hired into specialized roles. So vacant properties, we've got leasing consultants now for that. And all they do is look at vacant properties. They don't look at maintenance, they don't look at rent arrears, they don't look at the whole broad spectrum of things. They just lease properties. That's what they do. We had a— somebody stepped in with— we hired a maintenance manager. So leaking taps, all of that kind of thing, they just go to one person. Yeah. There's another person that takes care of all of the areas and stuff like that. So it's highly specialized now. And that's actually enabled us to take on a lot of really challenging properties that would burn out other agencies. And that's how we've been able to grow. So we've been taking properties with 2,300 needles on the floor that were just dumped by another agent. You know, they just walked in and thought, I can't handle this, give it to someone else. So we took that on. And the reason why it didn't burn out our staff is because it went straight to maintenance. They took care of that. Somebody else took care of arrears. Somebody else took care of leasing the properties. There was a team approach on that. Yeah. So that's one of the things I've been able to do. And then we started getting a reputation for taking on really challenging properties. So yeah, that's actually enabled us to grow the way that we have.
Yeah. And with those challenging properties, because that was certainly something I saw, I saw this evidence in your social media posts and the conversations I've had with you around the ability to be so agile and so problem-solving specific. You were able to spot You can solve, as you said, a lot of problems that people, other people in your job would walk away from just with them being too hard, and that's where that specialisation, as you said, enabled that to happen. Along with the systemisation and the specialisation, what else do you reckon attributes to your— has attributed to your growth?
I think really taking care of your staff and identifying the customers that are actually burning the staff out. So we don't mind challenges and I actually don't mind a really good challenge and we don't mind demanding. I don't mind demanding clients. What we don't like is unreasonable. So the unreasonable expectations the clients have, you're never going to be able to please no matter what.
Yeah.
So, or the ones that are asking, especially like a property management agency to go against legislation. bully the tenants, you know, all of that kind of thing that are putting a lot of pressure on the staff that, you know, you need to go bully these tenants and, you know, don't worry about legislation, don't worry about this. And, you know, all of those clients had to go.
Yep.
So, yeah.
And we
said, you know, you need to find, yeah, the clients that fit your system.
Yep, perfect. And something that you've just tipped on, and I remember having a conversation with you previously, was the the level of— obviously there's a level of care and you understand your people, so you understand your people dynamics very, very well. But you've actually helped, I'm going to say train or educate people as to what is acceptable, what's not acceptable, so they actually have that level of resilience and they understand, okay, where— so you've helped them create their own boundaries. Would I be right in that assumption?
The staff, you mean? Yeah, yeah. So the staff have all done— because I was a motivator, I actually brought all of that training into my own business. So the staff get training on emotional resilience straight away. So that means that if somebody is being abusive, you don't take it personally, not ever, ever. And with that, I mean, we've had— I've had now 4 tenants, 4 sets of tenants where we have actually evicted from properties and they have come back years later with their own property, with their own rentals that they've given us to manage. Yeah. It's because there's no emotion involved. You know, it's like, it is just a process. It's got nothing to do with the person. It's got nothing, you know, we don't put any emotion into what we're doing. It's just a process. We follow processes. So that's how we run the business. But yes, the staff are actually trained to, they know legislation. They're all licensed anyway. So if somebody's going against legislation, I mean, one of the things last week was one of my staff was talking to a landlord who said, okay, so you've been offered this application for $450 a week, go to the rest of the applications and see if somebody's willing to pay $500. Not legal.
No.
Not legal for that. So she just said to them, I'm sorry, but I'm not willing to risk my licence to do something illegal. So either take this application or not. So yeah, so they know that, you know, what they can and cannot accept.
Yeah, beautiful. And by the sounds of that, they also educate their clients as to what's appropriate and not as well, which is awesome.
Oh, absolutely. Yeah.
Excellent. So from working in Adelaide, and obviously you've had great success in Adelaide through a lot of your own understanding and helping people have their own self-understanding and self-responsibility. What actions, tips, or keys would you pass on to other people that are in this marketplace in business?
In specifically the real estate industry?
Either specifically or in general.
Or any other small business. I think persistence. Persistence. So my number one motivational thing is keep with it when it gets boring, because boring is actually what makes money. Like, people always go to the most exciting thing and they want to live their passion. And, you know, bring passion into your own life. You know, go to the beach or whatever. You know, have a nice dinner. That's my passion. Business is not my passion. Business is supposed to be boring. And the reason why I say that is because it's only exciting in the beginning, and it's only exciting for the first 300 clients or something. Yeah. After that, it does become a repetitive system, and once it becomes repetitive and boring, that's when you start making the money. A lot of businesses actually fall off before that time. Yeah. They get bored of that, they don't want to push through to the next level. Sometimes cash flow goes down or whatever, you've got to push right through that and keep going because that's just the reality of business. And keep your eye focused on it even if you've got— like I've got 14 staff members, I still work 60 hours a week.
Yeah, yeah.
Right now, just, you know, try working in the business and on the business and everything and motivating staff and making sure that, you know, if something goes wrong, a new system is written. So yeah, I've got my eye on the ball and on the business for sure.
Yeah, yeah. And as you said, I think that's an absolute gold. And I see that so much out in the speaking industry where you've got small business owners that are chasing the next bright shiny thing outside of themselves, outside of their business. And outside of their passion, and they're wondering why everything's either plateaued or not moving forward. So I love the analogy of stick with it when it's boring, because that's where the money is. And that's where the systemization and leverage comes from too.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. It's like having a child, you know? They're really exciting when they're born. You know, everyone comes with flowers or whatever, and it's, you know, then you take them home and it's It's work.
Yeah,
it's work. But, you know, just like you wouldn't give up on your child when they become monotonous, you know, you wouldn't give up on your business either. You ride it through until they grow.
Yeah, yeah, great. Absolute gold. Thank you very much.
