Collecting Rent the Easy Way
ByWell, I have to say I love collecting rent automatically.
After a great weekend with my family reading baby books, watching the Seahawks in the football playoffs and postponing putting away our Christmas decorations for as long as possible, I get to the office this morning to find thousands of dollars automatically collected and deposited to my bank account.
It’s all due to an automatic rent-collection service that I try to use with as many tenants as possible with my rental properties. The service is www.ClearNow.com (tell ‘em I sent you for 2 months free, if you decide to try it). They debit my tenants accounts on the first of the month (or another day I choose) and deposit the funds in my account 5 days later after the money has cleared the bank.
No trips to the post office, no bounced checks, no trips to the bank. Nice.
Now, I just wish I could get ALL my tenants to use this service. However, I find the ones who are unwilling to sign up for it at the beginning of our lease are generally the ones who develop payment problems later on, so I try to use www.ClearNow.com as a "screening" checkpoint, if they won’t sign up for the free-to-them service when they apply for the lease, I take that into account when I am deciding which tenant to choose for the investment property.
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4 Comments
January 9th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
Great service, I’ll Stumble this one!
January 19th, 2008 at 8:20 pm
Many of our tenants pay us rent through Email Money Transfer. I am not sure if we have this same service in Canada, but I will definitely check it out. Thanks! Stumbled your site. Thanks.
January 19th, 2008 at 8:51 pm
Hi Terry, Thanks for posting and Stumbling!
Nice to meet you….
Julie – I have never heard of Email Money Transfer… how does it work and what’s the cost? With ClearNow.com they have I believe a $15/month account maintenance fee and a $2/tenant charge… something in that ballpark, I don’t recall exactly.
But it’s still more than worth it to get the money on time and in cleared funds!
Take care!
Emily
January 21st, 2008 at 9:00 am
Hi Emily,
I was trying to find out if any US banks have a similar service as the EMT (Email Money Transfer) and it doesn’t look like it from a quick search. It’s too bad because the service is free to recipient of the EMT, and has a small service charge for the sender (which we will allow to be deducted from the rent so that it is 0 cost to our tenant – it’s usually $2). Cheques are becoming obsolete in Canada thanks to services like this. Wikipedia has a good bit of information on the service. Maybe you can petition your local bank to begin offering it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_Money_Transfer
I like your website.
Cheers,
Julie