Ensuring that Landlords Always Receive the Correct Payments
When a landlord makes the decision to rent out a property through an agent, they have a basic list of expectations:
Their property will be rented out at a fair price
If their property is managed by the agent, that they do so to a high standard
They will be paid in full, and on time
With increasing demands being put on agents, especially at this unprecedented time when many agents are working with a skeleton staff, the process of collecting rent, deducting fees or costs, and finally paying the landlord, can be a time consuming, manual process. With often one person being tasked with this monthly chore, mistakes can be easily made. Even when a tenant has paid, in full and on time, a payment to a landlord can be missed or incorrectly made. We are after all, all human so errors are inevitable.
It is when these human errors have an effect on others, or happen more frequently than a landlord can forgive, it becomes a problem. With landlords stating that missed payments have 'left an extremely bitter taste in their mouth' or that they are 'at the end of their tether,' it is no wonder that they often resort to legal action. For many landlords, this is their income and they rely on their payments to feed their families and pay their own bills.
With agents making incorrect payments, landlords loose confidence in their service. This means that agents who are making these errors are more likely to lose landlords. The result being that they lose properties - some landlords have multiple properties so therefore the agent is at risk of losing a large portfolio in one hit. This is a situation that neither the landlord, or the agent wants to be in. In fact, both parties want to ensure that there are no accidental payments to the incorrect landlord from another landlord's funds.
Also, with the addition of CMP compliance and annual auditing, one manual mistake to pay the wrong landlord, the wrong amount, means that agents have to carry out additional work to prove they have processes in place to ensure it won't happen again. This is additional strain on an already overworked office. Let alone the challenges if/when the mistake happens again.
LettsPay can solve this problem.
Their innovative payment platform is designed specifically to eliminate payment mistakes. With each landlord having their own account, money can be paid in directly from the tenant. This payment is then used to pay any invoices or fees, calculated by the system. The remaining funds are then only payable to the landlord themselves, meaning that the agent doesn't need to manually assign this money to the correct person.
There is no way that an agent can accidentally use the rent meant for one landlord, to pay a different landlord. Thus ensuring that landlords are paid correctly. This increases the trust between the landlord and their agent and in turn, naturally reduces the probability of a landlord moving their portfolio to another agent.