Have you ever met an investor who wasn’t interested in making a profit from their investment? It’s highly unlikely. The abbreviation ‘ROI’ (Return on Investment) is practically punctuation in the financial circle. Our clients are no different, they own a rental property and that’s an investment. It would be foolish for them to not be primarily concerned with turning a profit. In fact, that’s one of the main reasons that our clients hire us — they want to make a profit from their rental property. Their time is valuable, and the more of it they have to invest in late night maintenance calls and following up on late rent, the smaller their return. After all, it’s a busy world. How much is your free time worth to you?
Of course, the bulk of the profit that our clients make from their rental properties is gained by collecting a larger amount of money in rent than what is spent in expenses. In addition to a positive cash flow, they also reap benefits from the appreciation that is able to be accumulated from their property.
If you’ve decided to invest in real estate, ensuring you’ll make a profit takes on a slightly different form than you may anticipate, with a more specific set of challenges. To make a profit, investors have to ensure that all rent is collected in a timely manner. Every day that rent is not received will cost more money. If the tenant fails to pay their rent completely, then they may have to pursue legal action, which will cost more and begin to erode profits. That doesn’t include the time that needs to be invested in any legal action on the part of the investor — especially one that isn’t represented by a property management company.
One way to reduce the stress of collecting rent is to hire a professional property management service. After all, it’s not always easy to collect rent on time. There are a number of reasons that this may be true. For example, your tenant may be facing financial issues, or you may just have a hard time tracking them down. It may even be due to your tenant having the thought that requested repairs have not been made, so they are withholding rent. Luckily, with a property management company there’s documentation and signed agreements to protect owners from claims like these. No matter the reasons, when rent is due, you need to ensure you are collecting it. That’s one of the key benefits of using a property management company, we collect the rent on behalf of our clients so they get to sit back and collect their earnings.
One way to encourage on-time rent payment is to make it as easy as possible for tenants to get their rent to you. In many cases, this means offering an online portal. This prevents you from having to hunt down tenants, or wait for their checks to arrive in the mail. Since most bills can be paid online now, your tenants may even expect this option. If they can schedule recurring payments, that takes all the stress away from all parties involved. Online payments, in that regard, allow a ‘set-it-and-forget-it’ mindset when it comes to rent. When you give your tenants an alternative option for paying their rent, you will likely have much more success when it comes to receiving it online.
Another benefit of offering this payment method is that you will be able to more efficiently track the payments that have come from your tenants. For example, you will have real time access to the payments that have been made. This means you will always know if a payment is late, and be able to track which tenants pay on time regularly and which ones don’t without having to do much extra work. A good property management service will have an online portal for owners that allows this kind of tracking.
While collecting rent can be frustrating and sometimes tedious, with the help of a property management company like Simply Residential Property Management, and online rent acceptance, you can streamline the payment process and reduce the instances of late payments.