Has anyone had experience using PayPal or Vemo to collect monthly rents. One resident asked me today if I would accept PayPal. A lot of my residents pay by money order which must be a pain. Some money orders will not process through my bank check scanner so that is also a pain for me.
There are some free services out there if you only have a few tenants. Cozy is one i used before switching to Buildium (which has a great integration with Pay Near Me for folks who pay cash/money order). Some people just give deposit slips and have tenants deposit directly too.
I have a number of tenants that pay with Venmo, ApplePay and/or Paypal. It works fine for me. I have had chronically late payers suddenly become model rent payers because of the ease of it. They don’t look forward to writing a check, mailing it or stopping by the bank to deposit the money but can quickly initiate a rent payment using one of the payment systems. Probably no surprise that it is primarily from younger tenants who are a little more tech savvy.
If somebody has a downside to accepting rent this way, please share it. Works well for me.
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If you accept Venmo, make sure you sign up for Venmo for business. If Venmo determines you’ve been doing business transactions and collecting rent payments, they will ban you from the platform. I’ve seen a few landlords get banned. The algorithms are set to determine if something is a consistent rent payment.
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I just accepted a PayPal rent and they charged me $10.13 fee. I looked into Venmo and they are beginning to charge 1.9% after April 1, 2021. I hate to lose money just to make it easier for the tenants to pay. Is there a free service?
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I have accepted CashApp with no fees.
You can do business Venmo. It works fine if you pass the fee onto the tenant. All my tenants were used to paying a fee anyways to get a money order. Now they still pay the fee but don’t have to take time out of their day to go get a money order. To someone who works 2 jobs to makes ends meet any extra time out of their day not standing in line is worth it to them…so I’m told.
Hi @Joe_in_OH,
I did offer the ability for tenants to use PayPal for longer than I should and I did absorb the fees which are excessive. I then started using PayLease (now called Zego) that allows users to set-up their own profile and pay how ever they want. If they do ACH it costs me $1/transaction. If they pay using a credit card they pay all the fees, they can also be issued a CashPay number that allows them to go o and Walmart, Ace, Kmart to pay with cash and it costs them $4.00 to make the Cash Payment.
Once I started offering PayLease, anyone that did not make the switch from PayPal to PayLease was charged the PayPal fees. I still have one stubborn tenant to this day that continues using Paypal and it costs him $25/month in PayPal fees. Since I now offer Free if they use ACH through PayLease/Zego, credit card and CashPay, I also charge anyone sending me payments by mail (checks, cashiers checks, money orders etc.), a $10 check processing fee. I have one Hispanic property that uses CashPay 100%. I have other properties that use a mix of Zego and CashPay, AND I still have three (3) remaining tenants paying by mail and paying the extra $10 processing fee.
If you want to learn more about Zego here is the link: Rent Payment App: Simplify Rent Collection with Zego
Good Luck…
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I second this @PFM Paylease/Zego is a great way of collecting especially when paired with Rent Manager. The one place I’ve found issues arise is when one tenant goes and pays for 3 neighbors and accidentally mixes up the payment amounts. Other than that it has very little issues.
@K.Hodges…AGREED! We corrected that issue by adding the CashPay number to the monthly statement so the amount paid is connected to the CashPay number. We are in the process of adding a QR Code to the monthly statement that will allow the resident go directly to TWA.
Is the QR something Paylease is offering? I’ll have to check that out.
I have tenants pay at the bank (deposit money into my checking account), pay online, and/or pay me PayPal.
Works great for me. I give them options.
Not at PayLease/Zego. I use a free QR Code generate (uploaded image attached), and add that image to the monthly in Rent Manager.
Both are actually cool, whether paypal or venmo. They are both fast and easily accessible. The only problem you can have is if your tenants are not young people because most old folks does not know how to navigate through this platforms.
My bank tells me that I should not give my checking account number to my tenants because of security reasons. Do you all have experience with a tenant using your banking information for bad purposes or have thoughts on the security issues related to giving out your checking account information to a tenant?
Your checking account number is on every check you write, presumably including any deposit refunds you would have to send. I don’t understand how the number, without more, is useful to anyone.
You’re right, @Brandon, although writing a check to a tenant is not a typical action I do until the tenant is leaving and I’m returning a security deposit.
I should ask somebody at a higher level at the bank for other options for this type of money transfer, since I suspect there are simple safe easy ways to do this type of transaction. I appreciate the note of common sense!
At my bank (BB&T FLorida) I setup a card that is inbound money only. So I could give that to my tenants and they could direct deposit money without being able to draw money out. Unfortunately most of them are either unbanked, or to afraid to setup automatic payments so it didn’t work out for me.
When I asked the bank about giving out my regular check acct/routing, one person said I wasn’t responsible for any fraudulent charges.