What have owners done to collect rent when manger quits or has been fired and looking for a replacement.
Brian, my Husband and I have two Mobile Home Parks.However, our situation is a little different than yours in that my Husband is the Manager.We do monthly invoices and have the Tenants mail their Rent to our P.O. Box in the form of Money Orders or Checks. We use the USPS Post Mark Date to determine if the Rent is on time or late.The Previous Owner of the one Mobile Home Park used to have a drop box (as the Owners lived across the street).However, once you train the Tenants to mail you the check it is a very nice system.Even if one day we hire a Manager, we will still continue to have them mail their checks to us.We like a see the mailbox money. It puts a smile on our face :-). We wish you the very best!
I can see tenants saying that they mailed it and you not receiving it blaming the post office. I know one trailer park that makes all the tenants deposit the money into his account at the bank. Has anybody else tried this? I thought about trying this with my rentals.
Stargazer, you are correct that Tenants have ‘tried’ to say that they mailed the Rent and they have blamed it on the Post Office that it had not arrived.However, this is easy to combat. Money Orders have phone numbers that you can call and check the status of the Money Order to see if it was cashed or not. They would need to have the Money Order Receipt to do this (which they should keep for their records) and this is a simple process. If it is not cashed, they can request a refund.I have also seen a Mobile Home Park Owner who has the Tenants deposit the rent into their Bank Account. This process seemed to work well for that particular Mobile Home Park Owner. It would just be a process of training your Tenants to do their deposits at the Bank.There was another Mobile Home Park Owner (maybe the same Owner…I can not remember) who stated that each Lot Rent Amount was tied to the Lot Number. For example Lot Number 1’s Rent Amount would end in $.01; Lot Number 50’s Rent Amount would end in $.50. This allowed the Mobile Home Park Owner to see who had deposited their Rent and who had not. It is a pretty clever approach.Unfortunately, in our MHPs the above approach would not work as our Tenants could not seem to pay the $.50 in the Rent Amount. They would round up or round down or round to whatever number they wanted. For us only whole dollar amounts have worked. It is just your preference on how you would like to proceed. Any option is a process of training your Tenants.We wish you the very best!
The mail in system is a good idea if you temp don’t have a manager. But on a regular basis I like the manager collecting rent. I have a drop box outside his home.
I do not want to deal with the lost in the mail b.s. Collecting rent is the managers job and let’s you stay out of it for the most part,
I don’t want anybody collecting my rent for me unless they are working right in my home office. We offer a few payment options - mail check or money order to the main office, call in a payment by credit/debit card (for an additional fee), OR go to the local bank that we have conveniently opened an account specifically for receipt of rents. Said bank has numerous locations around our park and we send deposit slips to each tenant along with a billing statement every month a week or two before rent is due. We use the free blank deposit slips available from the bank, bought an ink stamper with our account number and a blank line next to the words “lot number ____”. All they have to do is write their lot number on the deposit slip, the payment amount, and walk into the bank. Works great and with online banking, I can see who has paid their rent almost up to the minute. The branch teller’s know the routine and remind tenants that they need to put their lot number. They even know how much is due each month and I didn’t tell them!We transfer money out of this account regularly so there is never much of a balance for security reasons. This quickly solved the manager that worked for the previous owner that had a counting problem. His idea was “one for you, three for me”, which was a problem before we came to town. This also cured obvious trust issues with our tenants as well, many of whom had issues with the previous manager.