It seems most rent collection systems like RentRedi are based on the assumption that all tenants have smart phones. A lot of mine do but a fair number of them don’t. I would guess most low income parks have the same situation.
Do you use or know of collection system that works not only for tenants with smart phones but also without?
My dream is to automate the collection system, so the late fees are automatically charged on the 6th and no partial payments are accepted, and I can add the water bills.
I use Buildium, offers cash payments at cvs and Walmart or online payments. Lots of others use Rent Manager. I used to use the free options— once I hit 50+ lots the full software is so nice to have.
Andrew - we use Rent Manager for our portfolio of 20+ parks and 1500+ pads. They offer cash pay or online payments through Zego (formerly Paylease) and we have had great success. Like others have said Buildium is another popular option. Overall I’m happy and would recommend Rent Manager for someone looking to scale and systemize collections.
I think the best system is to have a variety of choices including drop boxes, pay by mail, EFT, credit and debit. We also strive for full automation, but it is not easy to achieve.
For those who are technologically impaired, you can use systems allowing payment at Walmart and other stores. The can integrate with Buildium and Rent Manager, so they are automatic for you even though they are manual for the tenant. We used Buildium for 6 years and recently switched to Rent Manager. If you are a small operation, Buildium is good enough. However if you are a larger operation, we have found that Buildium is immature and doesn’t have enough features to effective manage a large portfolio. When they were acquired by Property Ware they published the number of units under management and the number of property management companies and using these two numbers we calculated that the average portfolio size of a Buildium property manager was under 100.