Collecting rental deposit from credit card?

[Mark Hower]

Leasing my first long term rental. 

Tenant has asked if I can charge their American Express for the security deposit amount. The only potential issue I see with this is that they could potentially do a charge back at the end of the lease term (or earlier) for the amount. This is a higher end property and the deposit is at $3800/month. 

Everything else checks out good for tenant- background, credit, rental history, income level.

This isn't ideal, but I don't have tons of other leads for this particular property at this price point, so I'm considering it to get it rented.

Thoughts?

[Matt K.]

He's likely asking to use amex becasue that's what works with Plastiq and gets him 3x the points. Those points can be worth a decent ammount (~1.3 cents) and a lot of travelers use it to upgrade to first/biz class tickets.

Plastiq/Tio are services were you pay the company via CC and then they send whoever a check. If you were to pay mortgage/rent with a CC normally it'd count as cash advance and you wouldn't get points and you'd pay fees AND interest starts immediately.  If you go through Plastiq/Tio you pay a service fee but get the points...

Plastiq is more common, but don't take Visa cards anymore (a lot of travel cards are visa). Tio takes Visa, but isn't as popular. Look up travel hacking/manufactured spend and they will talk about this stuff...

https://www.tio.com/

https://www.plastiq.com/