The Pitfalls of Property Management: How To Do It Better
Being a landlord or a property manager is no easy task especially if you have many units to manage spread out over many locations. While there’s no preventing the occasional flood or misbehaving appliance, proper maintenance can go a long way to saving you lots on repairs. Another way to save money, time and stress is to consider allowing your tenants to pay their rent online. Collecting rent online is easy and convenient for your tenant and allows you to devote more of your time to the upkeep of your current units and the rental of your empty ones.
As a property manager you know that managing your time effectively is as important as managing your properties. In fact, excessive time spent on simple tasks is one way to ensure that your other responsibilities will suffer. Creating an online rent payment system is an idea that’s gathering steam among property managers to eliminate the chunk of time typically spent collecting rents and issuing and keeping track of late fees.
No one knows better than you how difficult and time-consuming collecting rents from multiple units can be. Tenants forget to write the check, forget to mail it and sometimes are late paying which means you need to leverage late fees. And, of course, not all rents are due on the first; many people’s tenancy in the same property begins on different days of the month making keeping track of which unit’s rent is due when that much more difficult.
The online rent scenario is frankly well-suited to anyone who is comfortable using the Internet for online shopping, travel reservations and bill paying. This is especially true for the Millennial Generation. This group includes everyone from college students to young marrieds. Not only did this group grow up using technology but they’re young enough to expect to be paying rent for good time into the future. In fact, recent studies indicate that the option of paying one’s rent online may well be the deciding factor for this group whether to choose one apartment over another.
Instituting an online rent payment system offers benefits to both the property manager and the tenant. For the tenant, there’s the ease and convenience of being able to pay your rent from any computer or mobile device 24/7. And if you preschedule your rent payments to be automatically transferred from your bank account every month you never have to think about your rent payment again. For the property manager, there’s the ease of having fewer rents to collect and keep track of. What’s more, since the payments are transferred from the tenant’s bank account to the landlord’s, the landlord has immediate access to these funds to pay bills, reinvest in his properties or take as profits.
Of course, not every system is perfect and any online rent collection system needs to be carefully monitored and upgraded consistently to ensure that funds reach their intended destinations and that security of the system is never breached.
