3 ways to take make rent collection stress free

The property market is one of Australia's leading areas of growth. Not only do you as a property manager have challenges with receiving rent payments on time, this also affects landlords. 

Here are three ways you can take the stress out of rental payments and make the property manager, landlord and tenant relationship a more fruitful one.

#1 Avoid late payments 

It’s important to avoid late rental payments to keep your landlords happy. How can you avoid late payments? One of the easiest and most effective ways to stay on top of late payments is setting up a direct debit rent collection facility. 

By using a direct debit payment facility, you can automate rent collection directly from a tenant’s nominated bank account or credit card, which can remove the friction of late payments. How many times have your tenants forgotten to make the bank transfer? Using a direct debit payment facility allows the landlord to get paid on time, leading to a better relationship between you and your tenants and in turn, your landlords.

#2 Tenant convenience

Manually transferring rent or cash payments is inconvenient for tenants. Using an automated direct debit solution for rental payments is set and forget, meaning once it’s set up, they don’t have to manually pay rent. 

Many direct debit services will also send the tenant an SMS reminder the day before the rent is due to be taken, so tenants have the convenience of knowing when their rent payment is due. 

Setting up tenants with direct debit at the start of their tenancy agreement is the best way to bring them on board - however some agencies also prefer to invite all their tenants to the direct debit program by using bulk on-boarding, so they can start reaping the benefits of automated payments sooner. Just make sure you let your tenants know in advance if you are looking to switch their payment methods mid-lease. 

#3 Automatic rent receipting and access to cleared funds

How much time do you spend on receipting rent? The benefits of setting up direct debit for rent collection doesn’t only sit with the landlords and tenants. As a property manager, using direct debit to collect rent, firmly puts you in control of important information such as tenant reference numbers and ensuring payments are received on time. 

Being able to control all of this information as a property manager means that you can automatically receipt rent (because you know the reference numbers will match).

By using direct debit with some providers, you can also benefit from being able to access cleared funds as soon as they hit the trust account - that means no more rent receipt reversals and embarrassing calls to landlords. 

Using a direct debit solution will take the stress out of rental payments and will soon become the preferred choice when it comes to rent collection for many agencies throughout Australia. 

This article originally appeared on Console and has been republished with permission.