All Forum Posts by: Nathan Miller

Hi Anthony, including setup instructions at the time of the lease, and even possibly an incentive to use ACH, is a great way to get people enrolled.  A lot of landlords will offer $10/m discount for 6 months to get somebody enrolled just because the automated nature of ACH saves them so much time the $60 cost is nothing.  Plus I've seen plenty of evidence in my own rentals, that the tenants that setup on ACH stick around longer because they don't have to write a check or think about the big rent payment every month.  It's the same reason utility companies and mortgage companies use ACH.

I haven't really had much pushback from tenants on putting their checking account info out there.  It's only the tenants that maintain an extremely tight checking account balance that have troubles with it, and those aren't the ones you want to rent to anyways probably.

As the others have said, you should still be getting your own application so you can collect past landlord references and also verify their information.  Smartmove will be giving you background information, but I do not believe they provide any info about past landlords.  You can do your application in person with pen/paper or there's a number of services that help you accept fully electronic applications these days too.

Hi @Anthony Wienke - it would be normal (in most states) for the tenant to pay any CC processing fees which average about 2.75%.  You might also consider ACH as it's usually a fixed rate of about 50c no matter how much the tenant is paying.  ACH is a far more convenient and popular option for rental payments in our industry.

Here's an article our staff wrote about ACH vs Check last month that might help you make up your mind:  https://www.rentecdirect.com/blog/2016/05/ach-vs-checks-better/

Hi @Erik K. - You can definitely do your own tenant screening if you want.  As you've mentioned, there are plenty of them out there.  If you search the forums here, you'll see there's a number of recommendations for screening providers that other BP members have familiarity with so you can get first-hand advice of how good they are.

You can get it done in two flavors:   

1. There's the smartmove type service where you initiate an order and the tenant then completes it.  They need to have internet access and be familiar with their historical credit data to be able to get through the questionnaire.  These services work well if you do very few screens and don't need immediate results.
2. As a landlord, you are authorized to order your own credit, criminal, and eviction data.  There's usually a small application that may take 10 minutes to complete to gain access, but once you are in you can then order nationwide reports on any of your applicants and get the results immediately.   Disclaimer, I work for one of these services, so I might have a bias, but I truly believe it's far more convenient for landlords that have more than a few applicants per year.

To address the other portion of your question about ordering your own reports from the state or county, I would advice against it.  Or at least don't only count on those.  Your applicant might have committed crimes in another state, and you need to know about that too.  Likewise, they may be a sex offender who's on the "lam" and hasn't yet registered in your state.  You need to be verifying this data on a nationwide level.  

Elizabeth - I'm with you, this is exactly what property management is for.  Hopefully it wasn't that property manager that placed this tenant in there though.  Generally a tenant like this has a history and bad references and would never get placed.  If they didn't have bad references then, they sure do now though don't they.   Sorry to hear about the trouble, but glad you have somebody taking care of it.

I think right now is a good time to set a new precedent for this particular renter.  You want to be her priority #1, not whatever else is occupying her pocket book instead of rent these months.  You could encourage her to switch over to automated ACH payments with a discount perhaps.  Something that would be compelling to her to save a few dollars each month, and compelling to you to get rent on time every single month.  

I see a lot of people mentioning Chase Quickpay, Venmo, Paypal and other transfer solutions.  Those solutions work OK for person-to-person payments, but for rental payments they can be very dangerous.  These solutions generally always favor the payer if there's a dispute.  It works fine and well until a tenant charges back 6 months worth of rent.

My recommendation is to use ACH and always have a signed authorization form from your renter stating they authorize you to withdraw from their account.  Anything less may not protect you when or if they issue a chargeback request to their bank (or the intermediary like Chase, Venmo, or Paypal).

For tenants that do not have a bank account.  Do you really trust a tenant who cannot open a bank account to be responsible enough to pay rent?  My experience that if somebody doesn't have a bank account is they are either here illegally or they have so many collections on their record they fear opening one will get garnished.

@David Luetkemeyer - unfortunately that type of service doesn't really exist.  Probably mostly for legal reasons.  Your best bet is to use the public records available today to landlords which include credit reports, criminal convictions, and eviction history.  These type of reports are easy to access as a landlord.  If you use these reports and check prior landlord references you are upping your chances of getting those 5-star tenants.

To add to the list, Houserentals.com, Trulia, Zillow, Lovely, Rent.com, Apartment Guide, Rentals.com, Hotpads.com, Homes.com, and good 'ol Craigslist -- plus anything else mentioned above.  It can be time consuming to publish to all these when you have a vacancy (figure about 30 minutes each posting descriptions, pictures, etc) or ideally your property management software will let you put the info in once and publish to them all with one click.

Hi Stephen, as Steve mentioned, NARPM is a great place to learn the ropes and hear what others experience in property management.  There's a few here on BP too, but mostly owner managers.  We wrote an article on how to grow a property management business a while back which might have some useful tips when you get to that point:  

https://www.rentecdirect.com/blog/2016/04/grow-property-management-business/