With all the work that goes into unit readiness, marketing and property maintenance of an apartment complex, the day the rent comes in each month is a glorious one indeed. It represents the fruits of one’s labor and enables the owner to pay the bills. Of all events that occur over the course of a month, it ought to be handled with precision and efficiency. This is yet another reason to hire a qualified property management company in Chula Vista like The Property Management Boutique.

Let the tenant know what is expected from the beginning and facilitate his or her paying the rent as much as possible. Have a slotted and locked mail box available where the tenant can place the envelope. Some managers provide marked or preprinted envelopes for the duration of the tenant’s lease.
If a check bounces, have a procedure and follow it. Charge the tenant a penalty within the limits of what’s allowed by law. If it happens a second time, charge the penalty again and this time charge a late fee.

There is something about establishing policies and procedures that help people set priorities. It’s like conditioning.

If you run a tight and effective ship, your “crew” will get on board!

For rent collection, I've been experimenting with online payment taking either through email money transfer or PayPal invoicing. There are extra costs involved in this but if I can figure out a way to automate this it will save loads of time. Let me know if anyone else is doing this.

I offer all my tenants an incentive of $25-50 discount if they pay 5 days before the due date. I have to have payment in hand. Amazing how many of them take advantage of it.

I know paypal has subscriptions which would automatically take care of this each month if they signed up for it. You create the subscription on your end with how much and when its due.

I use buildium for property management and rent collection. It's an online system and the cost depends upon the number of units you rent/manage. Tenants can pay via ACH (cost is 50 cents per transaction, 3-4 business days to clear).

The automatic payment system is just one of many benefits of using the software. The monthly cost is EASILY recouped in time savings and on-time payments.

It is certainly important for a landlord to be able to easily and efficiently collect rent from a tenant.

I totally agree with using an automated system! It helps minimize trouble and time. Paypal really isn't that expensive.

Nice post and really interesting replies. Mostly people prefer to save their time but it also depends how far we have to go to collect it. An automated way will surely be good if we have to go a long distance which is time consuming.

In our office, we use RealPage's [url=http://www.realpage.com]property management software[/url] to collect payments from residents and it has made things so much easier for us and for our tenants to pay online at their convenience. I would recommend looking into it.

Using a property management software system with ACH is the only way to go. We did the quickbooks thing for a while and tried collecting rent manually and it is a pain. Sometimes unavoidable, but a huge time save if you can automate.