BLUF
I have very limited experience but have been using Tellus for two months now as owner/landlord and wanted to share my experience. Tellus is a solid no-fee platform. Third party screening through Naborly is no longer free (as of about a month ago?) and is $25. Stellar support team and nice user interface. Lacking in some very basic functionality but with minor improvements, this would be a really great platform.
Screening
Screening for Tellus is provided by Naborly and is no longer free as of about a month ago - there is a $25 fee now. I’m new to the game so when I went through a mock application, I was surprised to see that providing your SSN is optional. I’ve also found that you can skip multiple sections of the screening. If applicants don’t provide their SSN, I’m not sure how Naborly pulls credit/criminal history. One tenant provided employment details but the report came back with “unable to verify employment.” I ended up contacting the company and verifying employment myself. The report takes a few days to process and you can view the report directly in Tellus.
Payment
I’m not sure what third party Tellus partners with for payments but the initial payment from each tenant took over two weeks. Follow-on payments were quicker (5-7 business days). The payment process itself is very easy to use for both landlords and tenants. I set the rent amount in the app’s lease details and that is charged automatically every month. I also manually initiate utility fees every month. Tenants can send payment requests to the landlord/property manager for things like repairs etc. This is more of a user interface issue, but my biggest gripe so far is that when I initiate a payment request, if the payment date is more than 3-4 days out, the charge will not show up anywhere for either the landlord or tenant. I recently charged a tenant for utilities but set the due date for two weeks out. After submitting the payment request, I couldn’t find documentation of it anywhere. Thinking it was an error, I submitted another payment request. When the second charge didn’t show up either, I contacted Tellus support, who clarified the 3-4 day lead time. They removed the duplicate charge and when they changed the due date to the next day, it appeared in my rent history.
Support
I have been very impressed with Tellus support. You can chat with them directly through the app. The team is responsive and will usually get back to you within a few hours. Even though the issues I’ve had were very simple ones that Tellus should allow landlords to fix themselves, the support team resolved them every time. Friendly, professional, and responsive.
User Interface
Overall, I really like the interface of the app and if there were a few minor improvements, I would be perfectly happy. From a landlord perspective, there is pretty limited functionality. Like I mentioned above in the payments section, I lack the ability to edit a lot of things like payment amounts or dates once submitted. I have to rely on support to change even minor details. One tenant moved in mid-month and my policy is to charge a full month rent at move-in and then apply any prorations to the following month’s rent. Tellus automatically prorated when the tenant moved in and did not provide the ability to edit the amount. As a workaround, I had to manually initiate a second payment request for the remaining amount. Not a huge deal at the end of the day, but it’s an extra step or two and raises additional questions from tenants.
Conclusion
There are a few basic features that I would like to see added to provide landlords more flexibility. Free tenant screening is no longer offered so that may turn away potential users but the support team is great, the app itself is very easy to use and navigate, and there are a lots of additional features. Whenever I bring up recommendations or features I’d like to see, support seems receptive and offers to pass it to the development team. If just starting out like me or looking to switch to a no-fee property management platform, I recommend trying out Tellus.
-PK
