FMG has been a TwentyTwo client for around four years now, and in that time, Head of Property and Procurement Jonathan Parsons has watched the portfolio – and the way it’s managed – mature substantially. They now hold 30 properties across New Zealand and as the country’s insurer for farmers and growers, their footprint follows their customers with offices in almost every region.
Partnering
TwentyTwo provides full property and lease management support for FMG, working as an extension of the team as a true partner. Our engagement, led by Principal, Chris Ware, draws on our broad reach and market knowledge across all regions and strong networks. It is also underpinned by our own proprietary property management system, Portfolio22.
Outgrowing the spreadsheet
Before adopting Portfolio22, FMG ran the portfolio through a single master spreadsheet – a sensible starting point when the portfolio was small and simpler to track. About six people had access internally, plus TwentyTwo staff over the years. As the portfolio evolved, the tool that had worked well enough started showing its limits.
“It was this messy period where our team might update something and then someone at TwentyTwo had updated something too,” Jono explains. “It was all in this master sheet and hard to track who edited and who was leading what.”
It’s a familiar stage for any portfolio. A shared spreadsheet works fine until enough people need to touch it at once – then version control and audit trails become the constraint, not the team using them. For a portfolio spanning nearly the whole country, the tool needed to keep pace with the operation.
A clean handover
The switch to Portfolio22 in early 2025 reflected that next stage when FMG “locked the spreadsheet” as Portfolio22 went live and from that point, Portfolio22 became the single place for everything related to property.
Today, a small number of people at FMG have access, all read-only. Chris and Paula at TwentyTwo manage the portfolio day-to-day: tracking lease events and renewal or rent review deadlines, negotiating rent reviews, updating the tool as deals settle and keeping documents current as leases are varied.
Day-to-day, in practice
Ask Jono which parts of the platform he uses most, and two answers come immediately. The Executive Summary gives him a snapshot of the whole portfolio, including upcoming events which he checks it regularly. For deeper work on a specific property, he drops into the Timeline view.
Custom Reporting gets the heaviest use. He pulls an accurate, complete spreadsheet straight from Portfolio22 – lease rates, property metrics and more and builds it into his internal reporting.
Jono doesn’t log in every day, and he doesn’t need to. Most of the day-to-day activity sits with the TwentyTwo team. “It just means I’m not going back and forward onto a spreadsheet and then making phone calls. I can just jump in there, and it’s intuitive, it’s live.”
What it replaces
Asked how he’d explain the difference between Portfolio22 and running things on a spreadsheet, Jono comes back to reliability and reduced overhead.
“It’s a single source of truth that can be relied on at the touch of a finger. It’s not another platform we need to maintain and manage internally.”
The platform also holds all of FMG’s lease documents – no more digging through shared folders trying to work out which version is current. “You can click in there and understand everything about one of our properties at one click, and look at the documents at the same time, knowing they’re the latest versions.”
Does portfolio size change the proposition? Asked whether ten leases and three owned properties would be too small to justify the platform, Jono said there’s still value in it. Ten properties is ten different folders to manage with ten different timelines.
More than a platform
For Jono, the value isn’t just the technology – FMG sees itself as a relationships-based organisation and that shapes what it wants from a property partner. Chris and the team at TwentyTwo act as a genuine partner who represent FMG directly rather than working purely behind the scenes.
That matters most in market searches, where TwentyTwo can approach landlords without FMG’s name attached which keep options open and preserve relationships that took years to build. It also matters when FMG needs to push for a hard commercial outcome and the two goals don’t always pull in the same direction.
As Jono puts it, TwentyTwo has “been really good at helping walk that line” – being commercial when it counts, while protecting FMG’s longstanding relationships with landlords. That balance draws on local market knowledge built across years of transactions FMG would never see on its own.
