All Forum Posts by: Kyle Meyer

Hey, I work at Apartments and formerly Cozy on the software engineering team and just want to clarify: we do not report tenant's rent payments to credit bureaus any longer. Steven, you're right though that we have to report to the IRS how much money a landlord receives through the platform when it crosses the reporting threshold.

Credit bureaus promised that tenants reporting rent payment history would help tenants build credit. This seems a noble goal. However, in the real world, we saw issues with this. One is that we didn't get any actual evidence from credit bureaus that credit scores were improving. They may have; we don't know if or how much. The other is that any sort of offline payment, pre-payment, or in at least one case I can remember, a legitimate habitability issue that led to a tenant not paying rent one month led to a gap in that tenant's reported rent payment history. The next time a tenant in one of these scenarios goes to rent somewhere, their credit report show a gap in their rent payment history missing the context of why there's a gap, leading to a potentially rejected application even if their credit score is slightly higher.

Based on the data we've seen so far, reporting a tenant's rent payment history to the bureaus does more harm than good because of all the myriad things that can go wrong leading to a confusing permanent record for those tenants.

Hey y'all, I run the software engineering team for what was formerly Cozy and is now Apartments Payments. I'm speaking for myself, not any sort of official company opinion.

@Mike Malyy and others that have complained about this tax regulation change: I'm with you, this change sucks. Now if you sell something for $601 on eBay, you have to give them your social security number so that it can be reported. You'll then be obligated to keep receipts to prove whether that sale led to a profit or not and potentially pay taxes on the proceeds.

@Joe Splitrock is right though—this applies to all online payment facilitators and marketplaces. All online rent payment services will need to comply eventually, not process your payments, or start backup withholdings of 24% of your rent. In previous years, including this tax year, the threshold for federal 1099-K reporting was ≥200 payments and ≥$20,000. For this threshold, we've been filing 1099-Ks for years at Cozy, ever since our user base grew and people started qualifying. 

We're human people over here enforcing these new rules and, as the person with a good deal of responsibility for the software and therefore security of your data, I can tell you we take it extremely seriously. I'm sure the teams at other companies feel similarly.

Hey y'all, my name is Kyle. I run the engineering team at Cozy that, among other things, writes the software that processes rent payments.

Gabriel is right, card payments can be disputed for 90 days—it's a mandatory feature of card networks in the US to help fight fraud. But it can be abused as well. ACH payments can be disputed in exactly the same manner, but for a slightly shorter time period of 60 days. From the dispute emails we send through Cozy after a dispute:

I'll add the ability for landlords to turn off card payments in our feature requests backlog. But, it's also worth considering that, especially during the pandemic and record unemployment, the ability for renters to pay with credit cards could be the difference between them paying rent and not.