Cozy.co reviews
Real Estate Investor · Cary, NC · Member since 2014 · 27 posts · 3 votes
I bought my first property a year ago (a triplex with 8 total bedrooms). I inherited renters and used Cozy for the first set of leases I created after the legacy tenants left. I'm currently setting up leases for the second time.
Just wanted to weigh in on Cozy from my limited experience:
On the ACH payments: I shared @Matthew David's perception on the timing, but I recently went back and looked at the calendar for every payment I've received, and the variability was actually due to weekends, holidays, etc. In every case, the deposit was exactly 5 days after tenant payment.
They've added an express payment feature, which reduces that to 2 days or so, and is the first pay option service that has been offered to landlords. I cocked an eyebrow at their explanation (5 days due to obsolete bank network technology, express uses new tech), but am taking them at their word.
As a small property owner, the extra 3 days of waiting really isn't making enough difference to justify even the modest fee. I just keep a month's mortgage buffer in the account so it doesn't matter if that payment comes out before rents come in.
But I'm considering signing up for it anyway, just to support their move to a monetized model. I like them and want them to make it. (They make some money now from brokering tenant-paid screening reports, but I think that's it.) The expedited payment would just be a bonus for me.
So, on balance an endorsement for sure. Just know that some others may have more complete feature sets so you know what to expect. But in my survey of the other ones, they look sort of old school in ways that aren't always great, so I'm putting my money on the startup.
@robert
@Robert LenfesteyI have a property mgmt company for my properties so I don't use it but I got to know the Cozy.co team really well last January and can tell you the reviews I heard from people who used it were really good.
@Robert Lenfestey I have two rentals and I use Cozy to collect rent each month. I recently had to switch my rent collection process to Cozy when SparkRent decided to shut down. I have found that for me it was easy to set up and my renters did not have any problems. I have used it for the last 3 months and it has been a good experience. The price of "free" is also an upgrade from SparkRent.
I don't use any of their other tools yet, but I would be open to using more services from them in the future.
Derrick
I also am considering cozy.co. I sent a few questions to the company's tech support team and received a very prompt, thorough reply. One down side I see is that tenants can't schedule payments near the end of the month so that I would get paid on the first or second day of the month. They have to schedule the transfer to start within the first five days of the month. The company says it takes four to six business days for a debit to go to the tenant's bank, funds to go to cozy.co and a credit to go to the landlord's bank. This is more of a delay than I have now with tenants mailing checks, but it's not as bad as having a property manager in the middle.
I recently switched to Cozy, and think it's great. In addition to being free, it's more user friendly than SparkRent (which is no longer available), and I receive the deposit faster.
Hi, I've been looking into automated ways to accept checks. Brandon Turner mentioned Dwolla on a recent podcast. I've also looked at buildium. Another user mentioned cozy.co which seems ideal. It's free and includes ach as well as tenant application and screening. Does anyone have experience with this site is there a catch or might there be one in the future?
I have no affiliation with any of these sites
Thanks
Rob
I use Cozy.co and it works great the ACH takes about 4-5 business days to transfer after the date of initiation so if you want to receive the funds on the first you'd have to initiate payment the 25-26th of the prior month as an example.
Its free and easy to use.
I use mostly professional management but I do use cozy.co on a couple roommates/units and its worked pretty well so far.
I wish they could have an integrated credit & local/state/nationwide background check together but hopefully they will upgrade this feature for an increased fee to screen potential residents.
I have been thinking of using Cozy.co as well. Does anyone have experience with the background check they do? I use SmartMove right now and it provides credit, eviction background, and criminal. I want to keep all of those reports when I am screening...
Not sure why it takes them 4-6 business days to process a payment when the typical ACH transaction is cleared in 3-4 business days. I don't see a reason to hold the funds longer as I hope they aren't making money on the "float" time.
Does any doe business in Panama? Do the banks there use ACH? WOuld like to use in the future but don't know if Cozy works outside the USA
@Lucas Hall I have just started using Cozy and I had a couple questions:
a) How do you issue one-time discounts to tenants?
b) How do you bill tenants for non-recurring charges? For example, the water bill comes quarterly and it won't be the same amount every quarter.
Thanks!
I am looking into this as well and narrowed it down to 3 options so far.
First month using Cozy. It's the 7th and although the payment was supposed to initiate on the 1st, I still don't have the money. So the 4-5 days mentioned in advertising information is a bit mis-leading. I've also had a couple tenants who tried to sign up and aren't getting the emails so they wound up paying me manually.
On the plus side, it's very easy to setup and you can designate multiple bank accounts so if you have different properties, it's easy to indicate which property goes to which bank account. I also like that it sends emails out.
With the missing features I mentioned above, and the REALLY long lag time to receive the money, at this time I give Cozy a C+. If the long lag time was fixed then I'd probably go up to a B.
First month using Cozy. It's the 7th and although the payment was supposed to initiate on the 1st, I still don't have the money. So the 4-5 days mentioned in advertising information is a bit mis-leading. I've also had a couple tenants who tried to sign up and aren't getting the emails so they wound up paying me manually.
On the plus side, it's very easy to setup and you can designate multiple bank accounts so if you have different properties, it's easy to indicate which property goes to which bank account. I also like that it sends emails out.
With the missing features I mentioned above, and the REALLY long lag time to receive the money, at this time I give Cozy a C+. If the long lag time was fixed then I'd probably go up to a B.
Hi Dawn,
So you won't receive the rent until the 10th of the month at the earliest? I work in the rent payment industry and as far as I know that is the longest processing time in the entire industry. I'm not here to plug our service but with our service recurring payments set up for the 1st were deposited on the 5th for our standard processing time to give you an idea of other processing times.
And I don't understand why a landlord would have their tenant pay that much just for their credit score as couldn't the tenant just go to Credit Karma or directly to Experian and get their credit score for free or a $1 and then forward that to the landlord? That seems pretty deceptive and it doesn't appear I am the only person to think that as they already have at least one Better Business Bureau (BBB) complaint:
So you won't receive the rent until the 10th of the month at the earliest?
I'm not sure if it will be the 10th, I'll watch my bank account and post back when I see the money. I was thinking if it was 4-5 days, I'd see my money on the 5th or 6th at the latest. So I'm kind of disappointed.
I am disappointed in the speed of the transactions with Cozy, but I'm going to give them a few months to see if it speeds up. I don't want to inconvenience my tenants by having them reapply for another service and the few extra days isn't hurting me financially: the money is coming before the mortgage is due. That is what is important to me. As for the timing, their website states that these transactions are not done on weekends or federal holidays. So this month, Monday the 3rd was the 1st day and we are currently on Day 5.
@Rick S.
The BBB link you provided lists Cozy as having an A rating and the complaint was from a tenant who applied for a rental and paid to have the credit check done. In my opinion, $20 isn't a lot of money to apply for a rental and now that they bundle background checks for $35, I think it is a great resource for landlords. At least where my property is located, a $40 application fee is not unusual and if you have a desirable property, people will pay it.
Some landlords are willing to pay a premium to get their rent checks faster. But I won't pay more money for another company that facilitates and ACH transfer, since the ACH system is arcane and the transactions are inherently slow.
If you think your company provides a better service, then state your case why landlords should switch and pay $3 per transaction; calling your competition "deceptive" reflects poorly on your company.
I am disappointed in the speed of the transactions with Cozy, but I'm going to give them a few months to see if it speeds up. I don't want to inconvenience my tenants by having them reapply for another service and the few extra days isn't hurting me financially: the money is coming before the mortgage is due. That is what is important to me. As for the timing, their website states that these transactions are not done on weekends or federal holidays. So this month, Monday the 3rd was the 1st day and we are currently on Day 5.
@Rick S.
The BBB link you provided lists Cozy as having an A rating and the complaint was from a tenant who applied for a rental and paid to have the credit check done. In my opinion, $20 isn't a lot of money to apply for a rental and now that they bundle background checks for $35, I think it is a great resource for landlords. At least where my property is located, a $40 application fee is not unusual and if you have a desirable property, people will pay it.
Some landlords are willing to pay a premium to get their rent checks faster. But I won't pay more money for another company that facilitates and ACH transfer, since the ACH system is arcane and the transactions are inherently slow.
If you think your company provides a better service, then state your case why landlords should switch and pay $3 per transaction; calling your competition "deceptive" reflects poorly on your company.
Hi Jennifer,
Here are a few of the reasons we believe we provide a great service:
- 2-3 business day processing time compared to 4-6 business days.
- Phone support, you can actually call and speak with an agent if you ever need assistance instead of only having an email option like Cozy.
- One-time and recurring payments as not every tenant wants a recurring payment. We also offer a form option for tenants that may not have access to a computer.
- Recurring payments for any day of the month as not every tenant pays just once a month or just the 1st through the 5th. We also offer weekly and bi-weekly recurring payments.
- Customizable online application instead of a basic template everyone has to use.
- Monthly and Late Reminders that you can customize to send on set days of the month.
- Credit reporting so tenants can elect to have their payments reported to TransUnion to build their credit history, which is included as part of our transaction fee.
- We provide the ability to export transactions from our Transaction Search section along with multiple reports to review data, such as a Monthly, Deposit, and Accounting Report.
- The ability to track expenses and payments collected outside the service.
- The ability to collect late fees for late payments.
- We aren't venture backed so we don't have any outside investors to influence our strategy or product direction.
Those are some of the reasons we believe we provide a great product.
Also, if you read the BBB compliant it states the Run My Credit Report is selected by default instead of having the renter opt-in for the credit report, which we believe would be a better business practice.
If you any other questions please let us know as we would be happy to discuss the post with you by phone if that would be easier. Thank you.
Well, once they get in the features for one-time payments that will be nice. I can give them a couple more months and see if they address the speed issue of getting me payments.
Just registered, so I'm sure I'm lacking any credibility at this site, but I was searching for reviews of Cozy.co and found this forum and wanted to share my recent experiences with Cozy.co.
Now in my second month using the service. Alliant CU is my financial institution. ACH push from Alliant generally takes 2 business days if initiated before 10am Central time.
First month, July's rent payment was initiated by tenant on Thurs. July 2. July 3, Friday was bank holiday, money physically in my account on Friday July 10.
For August, tenant initiated Aug. 1, Saturday, processing not started until Monday Aug 3, got an email @ 7:00pm on Aug 6 (Thurs) saying rent was depositing, however depositing takes 1-2 business days. Friday Aug 7 10pm, no deposit, nothing even showing pending, will hopefully finally deposit August 10, Monday. Since according to Cozy.co their ACH payer batch pays their ACH's @ 2pm Pacific Time.
Overall, the service is slow, I had read in another forum about similar complaints and how Cozy was claiming to be working on speeding up this process, however, it does not appear to have gotten any faster, or if this is the faster version, it's not very timely.
This is from their website;
Payments typically take 4-6 business days to reach the receiving account. Since weekends and bank holidays are not considered business days, the overall payment time may be greater by up to 3 further calendar days.
Next month September, if tenant initiates on 1st, a Tuesday, with Labor Day on Sept 7, figure it will be around the 9th or 10th to finally receive the rent again. In reality it seems like the 10th of the month is about par for this free service.
Hi Matthew,
You mention that July 3, 2015 was not a banking day. It actually was a day that the ACH payment network was operating on. You can find a list of Federal bank holidays on the Federal Reserve's Website here:
http://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/k8.htm
Since July 4th fell on a Sunday this year, there was no bank holiday for the July 4th payment.
Sorry, correction to the above post, I meant to say that July 4th fell on a Saturday this year. Which doesn't change the point that Friday, July 3rd 2015 was a banking day.
Just an update, it's the 10th of the month and I finally received my rent payment that was from the 1st. I actually think it's faster NOT to use Cozy because otherwise the tenant would have given me the check on or before the 1st, and it would take 4 days to clear, but then it would have been in my bank account by the 4th.
Also interesting to note, that the ACH came from STRIPE INC which appears to be an ACH 3rd party service.
Just an update, it's the 10th of the month and I finally received my rent payment that was from the 1st. I actually think it's faster NOT to use Cozy because otherwise the tenant would have given me the check on or before the 1st, and it would take 4 days to clear, but then it would have been in my bank account by the 4th.
That's too bad that it takes so long. Ten days is not reasonable in my opinion. I was actually thinking about switching to Cozy for rent collection on one of my tenants next month because she claimed to have problems using another service, but now I may have to reconsider. Do they at least let you know when the transfer has been started and that it's in progress? I'd hate to wait 10 days only to find out the transfer was never done in the first place.