Automatic Rent Collection-Have Tenant Rent Zipped To Your Bank Account Each Month Automatically

Have you ever had a tenant not pay you on the first of the month when rent is due? Late on the first of the month, you call the tenant to express your concern and they tell you, "the check is in the mail"? Yeah right. Here we go again.

Tomorrow comes. No check. You call again. Still no check... "give it another day... I mailed it with plenty of time."

Maybe you're the lucky one who actually gets the rent on the fourth of fifth of the month (with a postmark for the first or second) and hope and pray that the check is good. Or, more likely, you are one the unlucky many who starts an eviction later than they should and never gets that rent.

Well, beyond some property management tips to help prevent that in the future, I can share with you something that I have been using that completely eliminates the "check is in the mail" excuse.

It's called automatic rent collection.

Here's how it works. When your tenant signs the lease, you give them two options:

1. Automatic rent collection free of charge or
2. Regular "mail me a check" rent collection with a manual processing fee for each payment

The overwhelming majority of tenants offered these choices will pick automatic rent collection.

With the company I use, ClearNow.com, the tenant fills out an enrollment form and attaches a voided check to the application and we submit it.

Then, each month, the rent is automatically drawn from their checking account and deposited right into my bank account.

What's great about it is that I can see very quickly whether rent was deposited and know that the amount is good (no bad checks).

I get an e-mail summary and can login to my bank account and/or my ClearNow account to check the status of any tenant's payment. If there was not enough money in the account, I can immediately start the eviction process and stop the process when payment is made. There is no room for, "my payment is in the mail"; it's either there or not.

So, stop the "check is in the mail" excuses for good and start collecting rent automatically.

James Orr is a professional real estate investor and marketing expert.

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