All Forum Posts by: Nathan Miller

We need the little up-arrow emoji to reference other posts here!  The advice here is perfect.  I too would recommend highly considering a property manager.  If you are not there to manage it in person, you have no idea what the tenants are doing to your investment.  You need somebody dedicated to managing the property in your absence that already knows, and keeps up with the ever changing landscape of landlord-tenant laws.  The cost of a PM is absolutely nothing compared to the cost of placing or keeping a bad tenant or making one legal misstep.

@Joe Freehold There are quite a few ACH payment options available to you as a smaller landlord.  Most of the property management software listed here https://www.biggerpockets.com/property-management-tools support both ACH and smaller unit counts.

 If you plan on getting more rentals in the future, then you are on the right track of starting with good software now that can grow with you.  $10 to the tenant to make a payment certainly seems excessive in your current solution.  You'll find, among the mature software out there, that there are two camps:

Camp 1:  The tenant pays the software bills for you you with payment processing fees, or tenant screening fees, or other fees.  You are experiencing this now.  As I'm sure you've identified, it's not the most professional look to your tenants.

Camp 2:  You pay for the software, typically a per-unit cost, and the software includes payment processing within it.  This tends to be more mature platforms like Appfolio, Buildium, and Rentec Direct.

I would recommend trying out free trials of each platform that checks all of your boxes, and give them a trial to see which feels best to you.  Also try out the customer service of each, because the quality of service varies greatly between platforms.

You are on the right track!  Good luck growing your portfolio.

ps.  I see recommendations to open accounts and give your tenants your banking information, or use consumer point-to-point apps like Venmo, in these forums.  I advise against that because once they have your deposit account information or venmo account, they can deposit whatever they want in there, even if it's $1.  If you ever find yourself in an eviction situation and they deposit $1, that can postpone your eviction and cause you to lose extra months of rent.  A good software solution will allow you to define what payments you will accept from the tenant.

@Gary Abrams A cloud based solution would work really well in your scenario of having other family logging in and helping with management.  Fortunately, most of the apps today are cloud based and have an app to make that easier.  Nathan above gave some good software recommendations, any of which would probably work well.

BiggerPockets also has a list of useful software applications for managing properties here:  https://www.biggerpockets.com/property-management-tools

Hi @Dilip Pothugunta, there are a number of outstanding options listed here: https://www.biggerpockets.com/property-management-tools

I know for certain that some of those solutions are excellent at helping you collect rent and keep track of maintenance.  

Software would help out a lot, and there is great software out there that will not only help track all the critical information as a PM, help you remain trust account compliant, and also enable tenants to pay online by ACH or CC.  Some good options available here:  https://www.biggerpockets.com/property-management-tools

A cool benefit of using property management software is you can provide the property owners a login to see their property performance as well (if you wish).  This lets them have instant insights to their property performance and saves you from having to email reports.

If you use an application designed for landlords you'll get some critical features that you won't find in a general accounting platform like Quickbooks or Excel.  Here's a few things you'll really want to have as a landlord:  

Online tenant payments - let your tenants log in and schedule/make online payments for rent.  HUGE time saver.

Individual property accounting - keep track of how profitable (or not) each individual property (or unit) is.

App for tenants - so they can look at their balance, make payments, report maintenance issues.

Rental applications and tenant screening - Accept online rental applications and then run credit, criminal, eviction checks on them easily.

Market your vacancies - getting a vacant unit filled with a good tenant as quick as possible is critical, and good software will help you market those vacancies. 

Support - general accounting apps do not know how to be a landlord, but property management software apps do because that's all they support.

@Edward Toomey V It's unfortunate you had that experience with a software purposed for landlords; however, I'd hate for you to give up on software designed to work for landlords and ditch to QB.  QB really is not made well for landlords and landlords leave QB every day for better software, payment processing is really expensive, and with QB there's no tenant portal for your tenants to schedule payments or push maintenance requests.  Short story, landlords tend to run away from QB, not towards it.

You might give other software designed for landlords a try before moving back to QB.  Also, SAAS platforms are supposed to include support and service (that's the last S), but the quality varies greatly from company to company.  There is some really great landlord software out there that also provide really great support.

And QB to the best of my knowledge only lets tenants pay invoices as the invoices are generated.  That may work ok for a small landlord with just a couple tenants, but for anybody with more than a handful of renters, the automation available in good PM software is critical.  PM software will let the tenant's see their statement and schedule their rent payments so it's automatic every month rather than having to do it manually each month through QB.  And also, as you mention the repair request is a big help too.