5 Tips to Encourage On-Time Rent Payments 

When it comes to collecting rent, a surprising amount of hurdles stand in the way between landlord and tenant. However, if you’re looking to encourage on-time rent payments, there are many ways you can eliminate obstacles, motivate tenants, and even make it easier for yourself to collect rent on time!

#1: Provide a Way for Tenants to Report Their Rent Payments to Credit Bureaus

Of course, rent is likely to be one of the largest monthly expenses for a tenant. However, unlike a mortgage payment, it doesn’t necessarily benefit the tenant (outside of maintaining the integrity of their lease, of course).

However, credit reporting is an amazing way to motivate & reward tenants for paying their rent on time. If you use a property management software that offers credit reporting, your tenants can sign up to report their on-time rent payments to credit bureaus.

Using RentRedi to pay their rent offers tenants the ability to sign up for a credit reporting subscription so that when they pay rent on time, it also improves their credit score!

And, according to a report by TransUnion, giving your tenants a way to report their rent payments can decrease late payments by 26%

#2: Set Up Auto-Late Fees

Auto-late fees are a great way to encourage on-time rent payments by letting renters know that if they don’t pay on time, there will be late fees automatically charged to them.

For RentRedi landlords, you can set up late fees to incur automatically right from your dashboard to charge based on your lease & state requirements.

If you’re not using RentRedi to manage your properties, then what are you waiting for!? Just kidding. You can still set up late fees and track them manually via your preferred method (spreadsheet, sticky notes) and then track down your tenant to collect the fees. 

(But RentRedi eliminates that hassle, just saying…)

#3: Ask Tenants to Set Up Auto-Pay

Another key way to encourage on-time rent payments is to have tenants set up automatic payments on your rent collection system. If your tenant uses a rental payment software to submit rent to you, encourage them to set up automatic rent payments so that neither of you has to worry about late payments.

As a bonus, some landlords even offer a monthly discount in rent if their tenant sets up automatic rent payments.

If the idea of tenant auto-pay intrigues you, RentRedi offers tenant auto-pay *and* the ability for landlords to see if the tenant has enabled auto-pay—right from your RentRedi dashboard! 

#4: Offer Accessible & Flexible Payment Options

Cash…card….bank account…it seems like every tenant has a different form of rent payment that they prefer. If this is the case for you and your tenants, it’s beneficial to let renters pay rent via their preferred method so you don’t create unnecessary roadblocks to receiving the payment.

That being said, collecting a wide array of rent payments also means that you have to track & organize these payments across platforms, properties, and tenants. Further, it might also necessitate you to drive from property to property collecting checks or cash.

Fortunately, property management software like RentRedi is nice to use in these cases because your tenants can pay via the RentRedi tenant app with ACH, card, or cash rent payments. As a bonus, you get an email notification every time a tenant makes a rent payment so you can open your inbox and smile at your “Rent Received” mails!

#5: Encourage On-Time Rent Payments By Being an Expert

If you’re a new landlord, it can actually be a little daunting to go out and collect rent from tenants. On one hand, you want to be friendly & personable. On the other hand, you want to establish a business & maintain a professional relationship with your tenants.

If you’re interested in learning more about how online rent collection can benefit you and your rental business, check out our Guide to Online Rent Collection. In this short guide, we offer tips & tricks for setting up rental software for landlords so that you can easily collect rent and not have to worry about how you’re going to encourage on-time rent payments!

As one RentRedi landlord said, “I don’t even have to collect rent…it just happens automatically!”