How to figure out a SAFE Rent Collection Website?!

[Llewelyn A.]

I can't believe what's happening with wRentPayment.com! It really is scary to know something like this had happened.

For those who are reading this post, you can read about the fraud that is affecting the majority of on eRentPayment.com here:

BEWARE of fraud by erentpayment.com

Now obviously, any Landlord that uses Rent Collection Websites are going to be very nervous. If it can happen to ERP then it could happen to any of them.

I use Rentalutions. Rentalutions collects more than $60k per month from my tenants. So I have a lot to lose!

I decided to email them so I can get some sort of response.

Me: 

============================================

I'm not paranoid, but I just saw something major happened through a Landlord blog, biggerpockets.com

Basically, many of the Landlords there use "eRentPayment.com"

They suffered some kind of fraud in one of their relationships that helped with the ACH processing.

A lot of their Landlords are missing deposits while the tenants had already had their rents withdrawn.

Just curious, can something similar happen to Rentalutions? Is there anything that you are doing to prevent something like this?

Here is the statement that was put out by eRentPayments.com.

Much appreciate any response.

=====================

Here is their response:

======================

Hi Llew,

Thank you again for reaching out. As I mentioned previously, we were shocked and upset to hear about what happened to the landlords who used eRentPayment.com. You are 100% right in being concerned about this type of thing happening with your rent payments.

At Rentalutions, we take payment security very seriously. Before starting the company, both of our founders worked at large banks and have a deep understanding of how the financial system works.

When building our payments system, we evaluated working with a 3rd party vendor, like eRentPayment did (with eCheckit). This path would have been easier to build and would have lower ongoing expenses. What Ryan and Laurence didn’t like, though, was that we would be giving up control of our customers’ payments to a 3rd party.

Therefore, we built our own payment processing system from the ground up. We integrated with the largest business bank in Chicago - MB Financial, a bank with $20 billion in assets. When your tenants schedule rent payments, we automatically submit the payment instructions directly to MB Financial. There’s no intermediary like eCheckit. This is the biggest difference between eRentPayment and Rentalutions.

Beyond how our payments are structured, there are other security measures that we take to ensure security:

- all personally identifiable information and payment account information is automatically encrypted before it hits our servers using 256-bit encryption

- our servers are automatically monitored 24/7/365 to detect for vulnerabilities and automatically block suspicious traffic

Our security setup has been rigorously tested by several of our major partners including TransUnion and State Farm. Every time they’ve tested our system, we have passed on the first try.

There’s a lot of info here, but please let us know if you have any other questions.

Thank you

======================

I don't see a reason for me to move from Rentalutions and I really love their website although it's not free like Cozy.co

But now I don't know if I would use Cozy.co although I thought about it because I don't know if they have a 3rd Party Vendor just like eRentPayment.com did.

I think this is a worthy discussion and I decided to post this completely separate from the linked Discussion above so I don't change the subject there.

What do you think of your Rent Collection Website? Are you nervous? What would you ask as well?

I'll probably ask them about insurance and what would happen in a similar situation. Then I'll post it here.