Experience with RentRedi?

Question

We are currently using Buildium for our property management for our properties along with rentals that we manage for other investors in our market. We are considering a change that's easier to handle online payments, mobile repair requests and management, etc. and I've looked into RentRedi a little. I'd like to hear from someone that has experience with both or at least currently uses RentRedi. My main question/concern is whether it works well for management of other owners' properties or is it more of a system to manage your own properties? Does it provide a tenant side and a landlord side for accounting purposes so that you can easily keep up with expenses/income for the landlords that has no affect on what the tenant pays or owes. Hopefully my question makes sense. I need something that manages the landlord/owner stats well and does monthly reporting well for each property. Thanks in advance for any insight!

Jonathan Scheeler · Answer

Short answer: no.  The tenant side of things - the payment gateway is clunky and does not work for all banks (even national banks).

My long answer:

I have been using RentRedi for 4 months now with our 9 unit apartment building.  I would NOT recommend it for the following reasons:

1. No adaptability for pre-screening questions - remember that book that random bearded dude wrote on about managing rental properties.  Remember that section on pre-screening and application processes/questions. Yea, RentRedi lacks the ability to even get the prior two landlords without having to use an external form.

2. Application process - see above comments

3. Notifications/Communications - If a tenant submits a maintenance request, there is no linked communication route to that request.  You can send a push notification, but it does not link to the maintenance request

4. Fees - they charge your tenant quite a bit if they do not use ACH

5. Fees - oh, and did they mention they charge YOU the fees to?  Yes, they do, even though they don't say so.  Just got my 1099 for last year and those fees (to which we never received) were included (even the $1 ACH fee they collect).  Want to appropriately write them off as expense?  Good luck getting a W9 from them.

6. Lease - yep, you will need docusign or another software as well.  Their "lease" signing is not actual signing, it is just a confirmation email.  So, add that expense to your list as well

7. ACH and the WTF that goes with it. Your tenants can set up automatic drafts for their rent payments, but make sure they do not set them up for the due date, as they will not process.  Why?  Who the frank knows.  Ed (owner) finally stated that it is because payments are processed the night/morning AFTER the date in which the tenant picks.  HOWEVER, they do not tell anyone that, so your tenants and you will be thinking WTF happened to their automatic payments.

So, if you are not concerned about tenant screening, tenant application, lease signing, tenant payments, or being overbilled to the IRS for funds you did not receive, then RentRedi is the software for you!  They even have Latchel, to which I have not used, nor will not, as I am more concerned about basic landlord responsibilities over fluffy useless third party crap-ola.

Account Closed · Answer

Clint,

Did you ever get any response to your question?  What did you decide on?  I had planned on getting an account with Buildium to manage my rentals (currently using tenant cloud) because I plan to start managing other's properties in the near future.  But then I just came across rentredi and I really like the app aspect of it and being able to access my properties on any device.  Please let me know what you found out!

David Ross · Answer

We started using Rent Redi about 4 months ago and did a fair amount of research on other providers. We really like the tool to communicate with tenants, receive and track maintenance requests (including comments and a quick video of issues), and process rent payments (and other fees). The mobile app is pretty intuitive and easy to use (separate app for tenants vs. landlords). It's great to have a single source of truth for tenant contact info, if everyone paid rent on-time, and screen tenants using their screening tools. Overall we really like the application and no plans to change in the near future (we currently have 3 rentals and one of them we have 5 college students who each pay their piece of the rent which Rent Redi handles seamlessly).

For actually signing leases, the application only allows the user to sign the entire document, so we had to create an account with Dotloop where the landlord and tenants could sign, initial, and populate individual fields at various places on each page. We are pretty happy with Dotloop for this functionality.

We have not gone deep into the training, but hoping to dive into the maintenance requests in the near future. My hope is we can add our maintenance guy to the landlord app so he can see, track, comment, and schedule when the repairs will occur with the tenant in a nimble, flexible way that also includes tracking and traceability, but we will see on that piece.

For the $1 ACH collection fee, I'm happy to pay that to avoid driving across town to collect a rent check. We did have 2 checks not process correctly and were notified like a week later, so that was not ideal, but we have it figured out now and have not had issues like that since. Super convenient for tenants to set their payments to auto-draft on the desired day of the month so they should never be late.

It's also convenient to add property pictures, descriptions, and related information in the application so it is a one stop shop when we need to post the property for rent the next time. Appears RentRedi is seamlessly connected to a few for-rent platforms to make advertising easy, but we just put it up on Craig's List and Facebook Marketplace for a couple days and then directed applicants to download the RentRedi app and complete their application for review. The tenants paid the screening fee which was similar to other providers in the marketplace and the information we received to screen the tenants seemed to provide enough information to validate if the tenants were a good fit.

Brandon Marchand · Answer

@Clint Bolton - I have been using RentRedi for about 5-6 months.  I hear about it often on the Podcast.  I did review a lot of them and a few things that made me pick RR over the others....

• RR has an app that the tenant can easily pay their rent from.  They do not need to log onto a computer in order to make an electronic payment like many others.

I also like how I can add team members to the system for repairs and maintenance.

We've had several maintenance requests, and we get all our online payments like clockwork.

My only feedback is their support, while ALWAYS available can be frustrating.  They send you topical links to support questions for the first 3-4 minutes before they start thinking about the problem.  I'm not sure the people manning the chat can actually help you fix anything real.  Overall it's still a big win for me. We like the system.

Julian Chavez · Answer

I am a real estate investor in central Florida. Rent Redi is the first management software I have ever used. I currently use it to manage 14 tenants. Most tenants were able to make tenants easily through the app. Other weren’t because there bank wasn’t supported yet. According to rent redi on Feb 10 they updated the processor to allow payments from all banks. We will see about that on Mar 1st. I also like the teammate feature, auto late fees, and the maintenance feature. Definitely a huge step up from not having a management software before that. Overall good experience so far

Randy J. Beckman · Answer

Hello! My name is Randy Beckman and I and my partners started using Rentredi at the end of November 2020. We are extremely happy so far with Rentredi. Easy to use, simply to set up and the support staff is fantastic. Anytime we have had  questions they have gotten back to use immediately. We are in the process of adding another duplex to our portfolio and will certainly plug it into rentredi. The ease of advertising your properties for rent through Rentredi is another great value that we have come to really like about this program. Feature rich which you will greatly appreciate plus very affordable. Especially using the discount through Bigger Pockets! Make it a great day in your business and definitely check out Rentredi.

Troy Williams · Answer

hi. also looking into RentRedi.   Any experienced users out there?

Jonathan Scheeler · Answer

@Alicia Kim - currently running Innago and it has been working well. Customizable applications, customizable leases.  Going on a year now with very little bumps.

Alicia Kim · Answer

@Jonathan Scheeler Did you find a replacement that does all of those things? THank you!

Mia J. · Answer

I do not recommend RentRedi. It wasn't really easy or intuitive to set up. Some tenants had issues as well, but seemed ok once everything was in place. The first rent payment took eight days to get into my account, that's a very long time. They told me new tenants should push out the very first payment manually and turn on auto draft for the next month. This caused double rent payment, so I had to refund all my tenants. I've used zillow in the past, which was ok, I used Cozy.co which was great until apartments.com took it over. I think I'm just going to ask tenants use venmo, set up an auto pay directly from their bank account to mine or mail in a check, at least I'll have my payments at a reasonable time. These companies charge many fees and then hold your money for a week. I only have a small number of rentals right now, so I think this is doable. I know with a large number of rentals it has to be automated.

Experience with RentRedi?

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