Frequently asked questions

Yes. Vestly hosts a curated catalogue of Australian investment properties direct from developers. Filter by state, property type, bedrooms and price ceiling, see projected weekly rent and gross yield on every card, and use the one-tap 'Run your own numbers' link to open the Planner with the listing's price and state pre-filled. Enquiries go straight to the developer - no rep in the middle, no marketing list. Browsing the catalogue is free, like the rest of Vestly's tracking.

Vestly is free to track your portfolio - cashflow, tax position, CGT, depreciation, multi-entity portfolios, the accountant share, bulk import, and every calculator. A fully-worked example tax pack is free to preview - every page, exactly what an accountant receives. The only paid thing is the EOFY Tax Pack, $79 AUD per tax year ($99 from 1 November 2026): it generates the user's FY 2025-26 pack from their records and unlocks the export and email-to-accountant, plus 12 months of full access - the AI document import, receipt scan and tax narrative that build the pack are included, never sold separately. GST included, tax-deductible, money-back guarantee. For scale: accountants commonly bill $300 to $500+ per property just to assemble the rental schedule the pack organises for them. The public calculators stay free without an account too.

No. Some competitors charge upwards of $365 just to onboard, and TaxTank charges about $180 a year before you see anything. Vestly is free to track your portfolio - no setup fee, no onboarding charge, no card, and your full tax pack builds free. The only optional cost is the $79 EOFY Tax Pack when you want to send it to your accountant.

Vestly is built for Australian residential property investors, whether you own one investment property or a large portfolio. It suits investors who are time-poor, currently rely on a spreadsheet, and want a clear cashflow and tax picture without missing deductions. All tax calculations are aligned with ATO rules for the current financial year (FY 2026-27) across all 8 states and territories. It is not built for renters, commercial investors, or non-residents.

It replaces the admin half of the job - the part done from a desk. Vestly tracks rent and arrears, keeps tenant, lease and bond records, generates state-compliant rent-increase notices for all 8 states and territories, logs maintenance from open to done, sends reminders, stores your documents and builds the EOFY tax pack. It does not advertise your property, screen tenants, do in-person inspections or represent you at a tribunal - that work stays with you, or you outsource it per job. Many self-managing landlords run the whole tenancy on the free core.

Published fee guides put the national average management fee around 7.5% of rent, plus GST, with a letting fee of roughly one to two weeks' rent when a new tenant is placed. On a $550-a-week rental that is about $2,145 a year in management fees alone, at average advertised rates. Vestly's core tracker - rent and arrears, leases, compliant notices, the maintenance log, documents, the tax pack - is free, with no subscription and no card. The honest trade-off is your time: software carries the admin, and the in-person work stays with you.

You enter your employment income and Vestly calculates your total taxable income by adding rental income and subtracting deductible expenses (including loan interest, rates, management fees, depreciation, and more). It then estimates your tax payable using the current ATO individual tax rates and shows your tax saving from negative gearing.

No. Vestly is a planning and tracking tool, not a registered tax agent or licensed financial adviser. Every figure is an estimate calculated from the data you enter and the ATO's published FY 2026-27 schedules. For your actual tax return, and for personal financial advice, consult a qualified Australian accountant or adviser.

Enter a hypothetical sale price and selling costs. Vestly calculates your capital gain (sale proceeds minus cost base), applies the 50% CGT discount if the property has been held for more than 12 months, then estimates the additional tax payable at your marginal rate.

Vestly's AI works on your records, not as a chatbot: the AI document importer turns statements and spreadsheets into draft records, receipt photo scan extracts the amount, date and vendor, document auto-tagging files what you upload, depreciation-schedule ingest reads a Quantity Surveyor PDF in seconds, and the FY tax narrative explains your tax year in plain English. All of it is included in the EOFY Tax Pack's 12 months of full access - never sold separately. Built on Claude with strict prompt-injection defense and 'never make up numbers' grounding rules.

Yes. Vestly is hosted on Australian servers (Sydney) with row-level security, so your data is isolated from other users at the database level. File storage uses private buckets with short-lived signed URLs. We never sell or share your data.

Yes, there is no limit on the number of properties you can add. The portfolio dashboard aggregates cashflow, equity, yield, and tax across all of them.

Council rates, water rates, strata/body corporate, insurance, repairs & maintenance, property management, advertising, cleaning, gardening, pest control, land tax, legal/accounting fees, depreciation (Div 40 and Div 43), loan interest, and other.

Yes. From the Reports page you can print or save a PDF of your full FY tax summary (the Tax Pack, organised by ATO deduction category with interest totals, Div 40/43 depreciation, and CGT events), or download a CSV of all expenses, already formatted for your accountant.

Pick a property and enter a new rate. Vestly shows your new P&I repayment, monthly and annual savings, break-even point including switching fees, and 10-year net savings. It also flags that your deduction drops when the rate does, so you see the real after-tax saving.

Yes. The serviceability calculator models bank-style borrowing capacity using the APRA buffer (assessment rate ~9% rather than your actual rate), shades rental income to 80%, and factors in existing loans and credit card limits. It is indicative, not a pre-approval, but gets you close to what a broker will quote.

Yes. Pick the property, set the new weekly rent and effective date, and Vestly generates a print-ready notice with the correct minimum notice period and frequency rules for your state (NSW, VIC, QLD, WA, SA, TAS, ACT, NT).

Yes. The dashboard shows upcoming reminders for lease expiries, insurance renewals, rent reviews, refinance opportunities (rates above 6.8%), and land tax season for NSW/VIC/QLD/SA based on when notices are typically issued.

Yes. Every property has an ownership percentage. Cashflow, equity, deductions, and tax figures throughout the app are all calculated against your share. Your tax pack also labels ownership % and ownership structure so your accountant can match it to your return.

Not hard, and you do not start from scratch. On the Properties page click "Import", download the template, paste in your existing CSV, Excel or even a Word table, and bulk import up to 200 properties at once. Each row is validated and a preview shows exactly what will be imported before anything saves. Most people are up and running in about ten minutes. Unlike a spreadsheet, Vestly then keeps your tax brackets, stamp duty and depreciation current so one stale formula does not quietly cost you for years.

The ATO requires rental records to be kept for 5 years, and for CGT purposes effectively for the whole time you own the property plus 5 years after you sell. Every record in Vestly - income, expenses, receipts, capital works with photos - stays organised and exportable for exactly that long-horizon job, which shoeboxes and old spreadsheets handle badly.

Yes. A manager’s annual statement covers rent and their own fees, but not your loan interest, insurance, rates you pay directly, depreciation, or the substantiation the ATO expects. NSW Fair Trading is also explicit that the landlord remains legally responsible for tenancy-law compliance regardless of who manages the property. Many investors keep Vestly as their independent record even with an agent in place.

Industry fee guides put ongoing management at 6-10% of rent (published guides average around 7.5% plus GST), plus a leasing fee of 1-2 weeks’ rent per new tenancy, advertising, and admin fees. Our property manager fees calculator adds up the full stack for your rent. Vestly does the paperwork half - rent, maintenance, notices, tax records - free forever; the judgment half stays with you.