Business banking - local bank or larger bank?

[Jackie Anderson]

My husband and I are new(er) investors and have a question about banking.  I have banked at a larger bank my whole adult life.  I have my personal accounts there and just recently opened up a business account. Each of my tenants have their own account under the business side and they deposit directly to the bank each month which is great because there a tons of branches and their online services are super easy to use for my tenants who like to pay online.  

But, we recently started doing business with a local bank which has also been great. They have helped us leverage two properties to have funds to quickly pick up new properties. They then put permanent financing on the new properties and we pay back the HELOC - these are all commercial products too. They have been so helpful and are very willing to educate and help us grow our business. However they only have two branches and their online services are not user friendly at all.

We just closed on another permanent mortgage at the local bank last week and the lender "strongly encouraged" us to make a switch and put all of our funds at the small local bank.  She said that they are laying out all this money for us to move our business forward but it looks like we have little skin in the game by keeping the bulk of our funds and the other, larger bank.  I do understand this, but we are paying interest on every loan we have there. And we don't have any loans at the large bank. Moving all our funds would mean switching all my tenants to new accounts and asking them to pay rent in a more difficult way. I want to make it as easy as possible for my tenants to pay and I want to do the same for myself when it comes to accounting, as well, and I fear that their difficult website will just be more trouble than its worth.

Has anyone else ever encountered this? What would you recommend we do? Is it so much more valuable to be able to use a local bank that I should just make the jump and move it all over? Or is there a half and half solution (keeping deposits and some funds at the big bank while moving the savings and the tenants rent money over each month myself to the small bank)? If we did go half and half would that mess up our year end accounting?

I haven't yet talked to the big bank about their commercial lending requirements. I plan to go tomorrow. And I should also mention the local bank will also lend only up to 1 million in debt. So at that point we'd be capped out if we stayed - we are nowhere near that right now, but if we keep our goals we will be in a few years.

Thanks to all who have any suggestions or have had experience with this before!