All Forum Posts by: Glen E

To those who have recommended particular rent-collection apps:

@Nicholas Ludwiczak, @Jill F., @Andrew Freed, @Michael Valdez, @Shawn Elrod, @Hunter Beier, @Chico Sajovic, @Timmi Ryerson, @Jeff Stein, @Nathan Gesner

Here is a main feature I'm looking for:

I'm one of many who used to be on cozy and got migrated to apartments.com. I have eight units, and I tend to be busy and sometimes don't get around to checking promptly whether all the tenants have paid for the month.

Cozy sent automatic emails for various tenant activity; in fact sometimes it sent almost too many emails, but I would rather have too many than too few. In particular, when a tenant went past a due date so their rent became late, or if a payment ever failed, I would get an email with the email subject clearly indicating what happened.

Apartments.com does not send *any* notifications like that. I have to log in and check property-by-property to see if the tenants are up-to-date. I find it tedious to have to do that every month, compared to cozy which told me immediately when there was a problem.

For those of you who have recommended various apps, do any of them give email notification of late and/or failed rent payments?

You should look at these threads on this forum - they are asking the same question and they both have a lot of replies.

https://www.biggerpockets.com/...

https://www.biggerpockets.com/...

https://www.biggerpockets.com/...

I'm replying in late 2021 to this thread that is 4 years old. Not sure if I should start a new thread, but I'm hoping that some of the people who previously replied to this thread will have signed up for notifications, see my reply, and be prompted to post again.

From reading through all the 4-year-old replies, it seems clear that most people were using cozy for rent collection. I used it too. But as the cozy people know, several months ago cozy became a part of apartments.com so the rent collection system has completely changed. And I don't like the new system as much.

I couple things I liked about cozy:

1. It was free, even if someone had multiple rental units. (I have six.) So far, apartments.com is continuing to be free. So far so good.

2. Cozy used to notify me about all tenant rent payments. In fact, every rent payment would get 2 notifications, one when the payment was started and another when it completed. I also got notified when a tenant's rent became late. If anything, cozy notified me about so much that it was a little annoying. However, apartments.com goes to the other extreme and doesn't notify me about anything. I *really* want to be notified when a tenant is late with their rent; I don't want to have to log in to my account every month and check property-by-property to see if all the tenants have initiated payment. But that is what I have to do in apartments.com. Sometimes I forget to check, and occasionally I don't notice until I'm going through my bank account later in the month if one of the tenants hasn't paid rent yet.

For anyone else who previously used cozy and got moved to apartments.com, have you looked to see if there's any other rent system that behaves more like cozy used to? Or for those who already use some other online rent collection, any recommendations?

To repeat more concisely, 2 features important to me are:

1. Free for multiple properties;

2. Email notification to the landlord when a tenant is late with rent.

I don't understand the "OR" in your question. It seems like you are suggesting you can either refinance your current mortgage OR buy a rental property, but not both. Why can't you do both?

Thank you to the two of you who replied!

I found this about vinyl wrapped cabinets:

      https://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/p...

There are a mixture of opinions there, but I tend to be wary of the vinyl, as the two replies here have said. From reading about putting vinyl on cabinets, it kind of reminds me of putting wallpaper on walls (although I think the vinyl is thicker, but then again kitchen cabinets get a lot heavier use than the average house wall). And I don't like wallpaper on walls. Inevitably it peels after some time, and once it has started peeling it is pretty much impossible to repair it. Whereas, even though a paint job doesn't last forever, in my experience one can generally do a touch-up paint job after a few years. So I agree that I would rather paint the cabinets than use the vinyl.

Thanks for the opinion not to put granite countertops on anything except a high-end rental. That was my opinion too but I was afraid that there would be a lot of landlords out there telling me that I needed to have a pricy kitchen to attract good tenants. It's nice not to get that kind of reaction, at least in the replies so far.

I was hoping for some opinions on cabinet colors, but maybe there aren't enough interior decorating people reading this forum. I did some web searches and I ran across this:

     https://www.countryliving.com/...

I like several of the choices here, but especially the first three and fifth one. It's nice that most of them are available at Home Depot so I'm not searching for some obscure/exotic brand.

The article above doesn't say much about the level of glossiness, but a couple other articles leave me the impresson that I should go for a flat paint rather than anything with much gloss.

So I have a better idea of what to do, but further comments are welcome.

I have a medium-priced rental in the greater Atlanta area. 9-yr tenant just moved out and I'm getting the house ready for another renter. This house was built in the 1980s and still has what are probably the original wood cabinets and laminate countertops. They're in decent shape but of course very dated. Perhaps I should upgrade to granite countertops and the modern white-look cabinets, but I'd prefer not to spend that much money if I can avoid it. (Renter demand is generally good in this area and I can probably get a good renter either way - I think!) So:

1) I'm wondering if I can get away with leaving the countertops as-is, and painting the cabinets a white color to (at least somewhat) give a more modern look. Have others out there done that? If so, are there folks with better interior decorating expertise than I have (which is none at all!) who would suggest any a specific brand, shade of white, and level of glossiness of paint for the cabinets?

2) Any other low-cost suggestions to spruce up a kitchen without doing whole new cabinets/countertops?

3) Or do you strongly suggest that I just bite the bullet and pay the money for the kitchen remodel?

And for what it's worth (to anyone else reading this), I just found this in the cozy help center:
     https://helpdocs.cozy.co/article/399-can-i-block-renters-from-sending-partial-payments

Cozy doesn't currently offer the ability to prevent or turn off partial payments. It's something that has been requested, but the current way we're set up allows renters the flexibility to pay bi-weekly or with roommates.

We know that this can cause concern, especially in cases of eviction proceedings. If you have a tenant who you think will send a partial payment or you're going through the eviction process with, we recommend ending their collection through Cozy and only allowing them to send you offline payments.

Thanks for the reply. It seems cumbersome to need to end rent collection in cozy and then potentially have to turn it back on and manually record the rent collected in the interim, but I suppose that what has to be done since cozy doesn't provide a good way of handling this. At least I don't file dispossessories often.

I haven't tried Tenant Cloud or Zillow Rental Manager. Have you (or anyone else here) used them? Are they free like cozy is, to manage rent collection? Other than the partial rents, how do they compare in general to cozy?

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?