Getting paid on-time: A landlord’s guide to rental income
Revolutionizing the payments process for landlords and tenants
Canadian Real Estate Wealth
Ensuring that rent is received on time each month can seem like a never ending pain point for real estate investors. Not all tenants are perfect, and receiving late rental payments can seriously impact cash flow and have several frustrating knock-on effects.
In an attempt to improve the payments process for both landlords and tenants, RBC Ventures has launched Get Digs, an online platform designed to streamline payment and receiving of rent payments.
“Get Digs aims to transform the rental experience and remove the painful hurdles that exist in what is an antiquated system,” says Megan McQuillan, Co-Founder and Product lead at Get Digs™. “There are some major pain points for landlords and renters in Canada, and our mission at Get Digs is to help alleviate them”.
On Get Digs, landlords can easily manage aspects of the rental process, including payments, and tenants can pay their rent using a variety of methods, including credit card, Debit Mastercard, VISA Debit, Interac e-Transfer and cheque.
“In the current market, for the most part, renters are forced to pay rent with post-dated cheques but that just isn’t commensurate with the experience customers receive in all other areas of their daily activities,” McQuillan says. “People have choice in how they pay for just about everything, and we wanted to introduce that level of flexibility to the rental space.”
The RentSteady service offered by the Get Digs platform means the landlord gets paid even if their tenant misses a payment.
“It eliminates all of the stress and time associated with chasing rent payments,” McQuillan says. “It takes away the worry-factor. It also means less hassle depositing rent, and less time spent following up on bounced payments.”
Extensive research on the landlord and tenant experience was conducted before Get Digs went into development. The research team talked to landlords and renters across Ontario to understand their processes and pain points, and to find out how to make their lives easier.
“We called landlords, connected with people face to face and collected survey data to really get in front of potential users in all of the possible ways,” McQuillan says. “Quickly, we started to hear the pain-points, particularly around payments, for renters and landlords. We wanted to ensure that we are not creating a solution for one group; there are two audiences in the rental market and we wanted to make sure we came up with a solution that provided value for both.”
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