Eviction, partial rent payments, and online collection (in GA)

[Glen E]

I'm a landlord in Georgia. I'm not an expert in Georgia landlord-tenant laws, but several years ago, I went to a couple of landlording seminars. The areas discussed included late rent, evictions, and partial payments. The expert from the seminars said that if a landlord gives a dispossessory notice to a tenant due to non-payment of rent, but then the landlord accepts a partial payment of that rent in a given month, that is tantamount to agreeing that the tenant can stay in the house, at least the rest of that month. Thus the landlord must wait until the next month and make sure not to accept any partial payments in order to evict the tenant. I haven't dug into the Georgia Code to know if there is really something specific in the law about partial payments. Perhaps it is more of a common-sense practice where magistrate judges don't want to grant a dispossessory if it appears that a landlord is trying to have his cake and eat it too by accepting payments and evicting at the same time.

Not accepting partial payments was easy to do in the days when tenants were mailing checks, because I could simply not cash a check. But now, I'm using the online rent service cozy.co to manage my rents. (I have seen a few general positive assessments of cozy on biggerpockets.) Cozy accepts partial payments by design, and I don't see any way in the cozy interface to prevent a tenant from doing a partial payment. I could in cozy stop accepting rents from that tenant altogether, but I generally don't want to do that since it would be counterproductive to getting the rent at all (I would have to come up with an alternative payment method, etc). But disabling rent collection for a tenant altogether in cozy seems to be the only way I can guarantee that a tenant won't be able to make a partial payment once a dispossessory notice has been filed.

Is it a problem if I want to evict a tenant, and the tenant makes a partial payment via cozy? Is there some setting in cozy that I'm not seeing, which would disable the ability for tenants to make partial payments? Or, perhaps cozy's interface is not as flexible as other online rent collection sites. Do other sites give the ability to prevent partial rent payments without disabling rent collection for a tenant altogether?

Or maybe this just isn't an issue in the age of online payments? If the landlord can't control tenants making partial payments online, perhaps judges know that and will still grant a dispossessory.

What do others with more experience than myself have to say about this?

[Domenick T.]

I can't speak to the legal question in GA but you are correct.  Most online rent collection services require you to shut off the "lease" to avoid accepting a partial payment.  Cozy included.  

There are only two services that I know that allow you to avoid partial payments without shutting off rent collection.  Tenant Cloud has this feature built in and Zillow Rental Manager can only accept full payments.

I use Cozy and I don't think the risk is big enough to use a different rent collection service.  If I were facing an eviction situation, I would simply shut off the lease until they paid by cashier's check.  Then I would decide if I want to turn it back on or if I would continue to require cashier's checks going forward.  Either way, you can go back into Cozy and Manually record the collections so you maintain complete records.