If They Can Buy a Pair of Shoes Online They Can Pay Their Rent Online, Too.

There’s no doubt that the Internet has profoundly changed the way we live our lives. From shopping, booking travel plans and even banking, the average person has embraced the ease and convenience of this technology at the speed of their desktop computers, laptops, tablets and smart phones. With that said, there’s no reason why renters won’t find paying their rent online to be a natural progression of this phenomena.

The prevalence of online shopping and online bill paying is destined to grow exponentially as more technology becomes available to the masses and as the world becomes more digitally savvy. Add to that a recent trend toward renting vs. owning and the appeal of online rent payment is sure to increase.

Online rent payments are particularly appealing to the Millennial Generation. A range of young people from college students to newly marrieds largely comprise this group. They’re not only computer savvy having been raised on technology, they’re young enough to be renting for many years to come. Additionally, they expect to be able to handle all their bill paying responsibilities online and often find having to write a check to be an imposition.

Given these new studies, landlords and property managers are seriously looking into instituting online rent payment services. The feeling is that the benefit of online rent payment may be so great that it may cause the selection of one unit as opposed to another.

The benefits of online rent payment are numerous for both parties. Tenants enjoy the ease and convenience of knowing they can pay their rent from any computer or mobile device 24/7. What’s more, if they choose to elect to schedule automatic payments from their bank accounts, they need never think about the task of paying rent again. For landlords, not only do they no longer need to contact individual tenants for their rent, online payments are credited to their accounts instantly improving cash flow to make repairs, upgrades and otherwise invest. What’s more, since online rent payment will have to be administrated by a financial institution, landlords and property managers enjoy accounting expertise from the selected bank.

One important thing to keep in mind is that there is an issue of transaction fees. Will the tenant absorb the cost or will the landlord or property management foot the bill? This issue will need to be resolved before any online rent collection process can be put in place.

Another issue to consider is whether to accept credit cards. The card’s issuing bank charges fees and while the rent funds are almost immediately available in the landlord’s account, the fees imposed by the bank eat into profits.

Finally, before you institute an online rent payment service you will need to provide a website for your tenants to access in order to pay their rent. Make sure the site you build is user-friendly, easy-to-navigate and secure against hackers.

How to Get Your Tenants to Make Your Job Easier

Whether you’ve got one unit or 100 units, being a landlord or a property manager is no easy job. You’re constantly dealing with repairs, upgrades, complaints, counter-complaints and perhaps the worst part, collecting rent on time. And all from numerous tenants at various properties. Keeping who has what problem straight at which location is enough to make the average person’s head spin. One area that can be greatly improved is rent collection thanks to online rent payments.

No one has to tell you that the world has gone digital. As ecommerce expands, collecting rent electronically is fast becoming a new trend. Every day, millions and millions of people pay bills, make purchases, buy movie tickets and more online. And with prescheduled payments deducted automatically from tenants accounts, landlords enjoy the immediate transfer of funds to their accounts while tenants enjoy the peace of mind of knowing that their rent is definitely paid on time.

Besides a mortgage, a monthly rent payment is probably the single largest expense any individual or family is responsible for. And it’s important to both landlords and tenants. Online rent payments eliminates the possibility of forgetting to write the check or even forgetting to mail it. Of course, you then have to worry about having a stamp and on top of that, the payment can still get lost in the mail. A harrowing experience for both parties involved. Paying rent online takes the hassle and the worry out of paying rent for both sides. It offers tenants the benefit of paying their rent in just a few keystrokes from any computer or mobile device, and it offers landlords better cash-flow and easier bookkeeping.

Naturally, some people will resist paying online. This is often the case with many senior citizens. If some of your tenants do not wish to pay rent online you must be prepared to accept the traditional mode of payment; the check. This means that whatever accounting software program you choose to manage your rent payments must be adaptable to both forms of payment. Of course, you’ll want to back-up records of your rent payments–be they checks, cash or online–in case of a computer malfunction. While online rent payments can clearly make collecting and accounting for rent payments much easier and a faster, a software glitch can wreak havoc with your books without proper backup.

When instituting an online rent payment arrangement, the issue of transaction fees must first be settled before any program is put in place. Will the tenant pay the transaction fee or will that responsibility fall to the landlord or property manager? Many financial institutions offer extremely affordable programs that wave the typical fees if the rents are deposited in an account with that institution. Important Note: If you chose to deal with a bank or other financial institution please be aware that holidays and weekends will interrupt the processing of deposits.

As a final note, you will need to create a corporate website where you’re tenants can go for information and to pay their rent online. Be sure to hire a top notch web developer who can create an intuitive, stable, secure site free of opportunities for hackers.

Rent Collection: The Good, The Bad & The Easy

With the housing market depressed, more and more people are waiting to see an improvement before they make a 30-year commitment. That’s good news for landlords and property managers everywhere. What’s now easier for landlords and tenants alike is rent collection thanks to the advent of online rent payment.

Whether you’ve got one unit or several hundred, you know exactly how difficult it is to coordinate and collect rent payments. Not everyone moves in on the first, so not everyone’s rent is due on the same date. Timely collection is another issue. Tenants forget to pay their rent, run out of checks, and have unforeseen expenses. One way to make rent payment and collection easier for both parties is to offer online rent payment via debit or credit cards. Let’s face it, the whole world is one line. Be it on their desktop computers, their laptops, their tablets or their smart phones. Why not make paying one’s rent as easy as paying one’s utilities, ordering a book from Amazon.com, or winning a bid on eBay, task millions of people already do countless times every day.

One of the best things about allowing your tenants to pay their rent online is that they’re already very familiar with the process so there’s very little education or ramp up time involved. And for the landlords, the benefit is more timely payment and almost immediate transfer of funds to your accounts, and who couldn’t use better cash flow these days? What’s more, it’s quick and easy for both parties and it can be done from any location with an Internet connection or WiFi.

In the past, it was the landlord’s or property manager’s duty to knock on doors trying to collect rent. Tenants were often upset by this intrusion into their privacies and many were unaware of their grace period if any. This was not only exhausting for the landlord, but often created a hostile relationship between the two parties which lead to an even greater degradation of the landlord/tenant rapport. Allowing your tenants to pay their rent online eliminates these awkward and often tense situations.

Tenants can even schedule their rent payment to be automatically transferred to your account. The main advantage of this is that those monies have already been accounted for having been deducted from renter’s budgets. This means that these funds are available in your account almost instantly for you to pay bills, pay for repairs and otherwise invest. The beauty of this process is that while your tenant may have cash flow issues, with automatic transfer you never will.

Online rent payment has other benefits as well. Given that all transactions go through your financial institution, your bank essentially handles your bookkeeping for you. This makes it easy to see exactly how much you have currently have in your account at any given time and by whom payment was sent. Additionally, you can check your available balance and incoming payments 24/7; a tremendous aid when you’re dealing with several properties.