HiCan anyone tell me where they purchase their rent collection boxesand entrance signs for the parks. Frank you mentioned this once before but I misplaced the info.
We don’t use rent collection boxes unless we inherit them with the park and they are working well, so I can’t help with that one. On the signs, we use FastSigns in Overland Park, Kansas. Our contact there is Kathy.
Thanks Frank, How do you collect rent in parks where the onsite manager is in charge of collections.Do they knock on managers door and give it to them. What if the managers home is the office and they are not there.I am closing on a park and wondering. My other two parks, I inherited the collection boxes.
Our first rule is to not change things if they’ve been working. If a park has 100% collections by the 5th of the month, then leave that system alone. However, in most of our parks, the collections stink when we take over, so we change the system completely. We have a range of methods we use, based on the size of the park, the manager set-up, the demographics of the clientele. In some parks, they mail their rent into a P.O. Box. Others have the manager take the rent and deposit it. We also have collection boxes in some parks. Keep and open mind and see what works, and move fast to change what isn’t working.Even if the manager is in their own home, the tenants can drop off the rent there, or maybe put it through a mail slot in their door. Almost all the activity is within the first 5 days of the month, so it does not bother the manager too much.
For rent and other document collection we buy locking mailboxes from home depot, lowes or mernards. If we need a door slot- they sell those as well.
There was a thread a few months ago about having tenants make the rent payments to a bank account set up for that purpose in a nearby bank. I’ve never tried it but it strikes me as genus – the banks staffs your collection office, provides you with online accounting as well as a hard copy backup at no cost to you – or if they do it is just a matter of pocket change. You don’t need buy and install a collection box, or worry about it getting broken into or need to visit the park to empty it and process the checks. Some members of this forum say they use this method and it works well for them.
I who ever has access to your bank records is adding payments into your tracking direct deposit works. If not- you still need to get the data to whoever is adding that data into your tracking. Maybe there is a report of some sort that is emailed? Anyway…we like the mail- or in some cases our managers collect…
Randy,That system works fine if your clientele is upscale, but a disaster with lower demographic customers. It does work well in many parks, but definitely is not for everyone – same results as auto debit.
Jim – I can’t quite crack the code of your first sentence. Could you please state it differently?Frank – I too would think that is true with lower demographic tenants, but someone here, I forget who, claims there are no tenants lower then his and he has them all trained to make the payments in a bank. The reason I never tried the bank system is I had heard that if you are evicting someone and they make a partial payment into your account, it voids the eviction and you have to start all over. I brought that up in the original thread and was assured by several posters that it is not true (except, maybe, in a primitive state like CA.)
So our bank, to see a copy of a check or deposit slip you need access to the accounts. The task of entering deposits is not done by one of the few that has access to our account records, but rather a person that is more on the data entry side. So- if you used direct deposit you would maybe need to PDF deposit statements or something like that to the person entering the payments. Or maybe- the bank sends emails of the the deposit slips… I am pretty much with Frank on this though… I do not think our tenants do very well asking them to drive to the bank and make the deposits themselves.