Rentec Direct - Property Management Software

I read the following the other day..

In response to complaints from tenants that more and more landlords are requiring rental payments be made only online, California lawmakers are considering a bill that may dictate how landlords collect rent.

“A growing number of landlords are no longer accepting checks or money orders from tenants,” says Sen Ted Lieu.  “Instead, they have begun to change rental agreements to require tenants – including the elderly, disabled and poor – to pay their rent online.”

The issue came to light late in 2011 when hundreds of tenants in apartment complexes in Los Angeles objected when the property-management group notified residents of a 300-unit complex that the only way they could soon pay rent was online.

Current law does not specify how rent is to be paid. The new bill revises the law to prohibit landlords from requiring online only rental payments.

So while I'm in absolute favor of adding payment options to tenants, taking payment options away is a big mistake.  Here's some ideas on how to provide online payments successfully:

• Add it an an option, not a requirement.
• Add both online check as well as online credit card (with a fee).  Some tenants would rather charge rent to a credit card for a fee than risk being delinquent.
• Add an incentive for online or automatic payments, such as a $10/mo discount.
• Provide a method a non computer savvy person can take advantage of it, such as an authorization form which the property manager processes online.

Being a landlord is not just collecting rent and taking care of repairs, it is a customer service position.  Would a company dare think that removing payment options from their customers is going to increase customer satisfaction?  Not likely, and nor should a property manager.

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Nathan is a member of Rentec Direct who provides property management software, tenant ach payment processing, and tenant screening for property managers and landlords nationwide.

California has passed a bill (SB 150) now disallows HOA's from changing the rules mid-game on a landlord by restricting rentals within the HOA.  This bill took effect January 1st.

An association which previously has no restrictions on rentals, that attempts to amend the HOA to then restrict the amount or percentage of rentals is now prohibited from doing so.  Such a change in bylaws will have no impact on existing owners unless the existing owners specifically provide their authorization.  The existing owner by default will get grandfathered into the pre-restriction rules.

It however does not protect the next owner of a home in the same association.  If a home is sold, the new HOA rules related to rentals will apply to the new owner and the previous owner must disclose the fact of the restrictions.

I have mixed feeling about this.  My first impression (as a Landlord) makes me think this is great!  If I bought a property in an association as an investment property, and later the association changed the rules which prevented me from renting my investment property that could be catestrophic to my cash flow.  On the other hand, I prefer smaller government and less government interference in my affairs.  An association is a mini-government in itself, and I generally trend towards wanting decisions to be at the smallest and most local form of government possible.  In this particular topic, I think property rights might trump my preference for local government though.

Thoughts?

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Nathan is a member of Rentec Direct who provides property management software, tenant ach payment processing, and tenant screening for property managers and landlords nationwide.

Was just reading this this morning.  Really makes me wonder if it's a Christmas "gift" to tenants during the Christmas season, or a political maneuver of some sort.  Has anyone experienced them doing this in the past?  Is Fannie going to join in too?

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Freddie Mac announced it has ordered all evictions involving foreclosed occupied single family and 2-4 unit properties that had Freddie Mac mortgages to be suspended from December 19, 2011 to January 2, 2012.

“If the property is occupied, our foreclosure attorneys will suspend the eviction to provide families a greater measure of certainty during the holidays,” said Tracy Mooney, Senior Vice President of Servicing and REO at Freddie Mac.

The suspension will apply only to eviction lockouts related to Freddie Mac-owned REO properties and will not affect other pre- or post-foreclosure processes.

Freddie Mac was established by Congress in 1970 to provide liquidity, stability and affordability to the nation’s residential mortgage markets. Freddie Mac supports communities across the nation by providing mortgage capital to lenders. Over the years, Freddie Mac has made home possible for one in six homebuyers and more than five million renters.

SOURCE Freddie Mac

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Nathan is a member of Rentec Direct who provides rental software, tenant ach payment processing, and tenant screening for property managers and landlords nationwide.

Wouldn't it be nice if your computer would be so kind as to give you this message "Your Computer Is About To Crash.  Backup Now!".  Unfortunatly it won't, and as a result many of us will be left with a busted computer and a loss of data.

It happens every minute of every day.  An unsuspecting PC or Mac user all of a sudden gets an inoperable computer, and all their data goes with it.  Why does this happen so often?  There are various reasons, but it usually boils down to the hard drive.  The hard drive is a bunch of platters stored in a small box inside the case of your computer.  These platters are always spinning at 7200RPM while your computer is active.  This spinning causes a lot of heat, and wear on the bearings of the device.  The useful lifespan of a hard drive is 3-5 years, with newer drives being closer to 3 because manufacturing methods continue to get cheaper.

So is your current computer older than 3 years?  If so, you have an imminent failure approaching. The good news is there is something you can do about it today.  Backup!  If you think your company or your IT administrator is doing it for you, think again!  Most backups are incomplete or done incorrectly.  Don't trust your data to someone else or you may end up re-doing every template, every email, every picture you've ever created yourself prior to today.  Backing up is really easy to do.  Here's a few methods:

1. Flash Drive - These keychain devices are sold everywhere in amounts up to 64GB.  Backing up to one of these drive which cost from $5-$50 could save you hundreds of hours of work in the future.
2. DVD / CD - Most computers nowdays come with DVD/CD writer drives.  These discs hold a finite amount of storage, but for many is enough to get a complete backup.  You can have many levels of backups becuase both CD-R and DVD-R dicss are just pennies apeice.
3. Networked Computer - Do you have a fileserver or other computer networked in your home/office?  You can use your own network to backup your files from your computer to another computer.  Be sure the other computer is trusted before doing this.
4. Tape - I'm somewhat suprised they are still selling these as the technology is so old.  You can buy a tape drive for your computer and backup to tape at any interval you choose.  This is great for permanent archival; however, probably my least favorite of the available options.
5. Online Backup - There are now tons of online backup solutions available.   They give you an application to download which will automatically, using your internet connection, copy the data you specify offsite for storage.  This is an excellent solution if you have a broadband internet connection and less than around 10GB of data to backup.  Dont' use this for music or movies.
6. Use Online Applications - One of the simplest ways to become more portable and become worry-free about backups is to use online applications instead of local ones.  Online apps such as Google Docs and Rentec Direct run via your web browser and are running on a powerful server in a data center somewhere.  They automatically do the backups and are responsible for the data.  The added benefit besides data security is you can access it from anywhere in the world at any time.

Whichever of these methods you choose, or if you create your own, my primary concern is that everyone backup!  Another very important and often overlooked component of backups is verifying if they work.  Sometimes, backups are not restorable and a backup does you no good if it can't be restored.  Follow these steps to make sure your backups are working for you.

1. Restore - Restore your backup periodically to make sure the files restored from it are everything your intending to backup and to ensure that the files are not corrupt.  Open a few documents to make sure they are what they seem.
2. Verify - Verify the backups are running automatically and completely.  A lot of us use Outlook for email and if Outlook is left open your backup program cannot back it up.  Your backup program needs to be smart enough to shut down Outlook prior to starting it's backup otherwise your email is not being backed up.
3. Security - Your backups are sensitive.  Make sure they are not available to any 3rd party that you don't want seeing that data.  Also, in a worst case scenario (fire, meteor, etc), make sure your backups are stored off-site.

I woke up this morning thinking about how important this topic is and decided to write this short article.  If it saves just a single person from losing their data and thereby saving hundreds, maybe thousands of hours of work in the future; then my time was well spent!

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Rentec Direct provides property management software free to landlords and property managers and it includes automated online backups. Because of the importance of thorough screening for prospective tenants, we have integrated tenant screening directly into the software so in just a few clicks a complete and comprehensive background check including previous evictions can be done on any new tenants.

We've added some great reports, based on user feedback, to Rentec Direct. These new reports are available to Rentec users today, even within Rentec Basic which is abolutely free to landlords, property managers, and brokers!

• Account Summary - See all of your banking accounts in one spot with their total income, expenses, and balance.
• Property Summary - See all of your property accounts in one spot with their total income, expenses, and balance.
• General Ledger - Customizable general ledger report by property or account. Fully sortable by your own custom dates.
• Current Deposits - Quick report to show you deposits held per property.
• Lease Expiration - Quick report to show you which properties have leases and when those leases expire.
• Rent Roll - At a glance report of properties and tenants, their rent due, and current balance.
• Vacant Properties - Quick report to show you all vacant properties.

If you are not familiar with Rentec Direct, we have one of the most easy to use and robust property management software applications in the industry.  The application is web based which means, just like ActiveRain, it works from every type of computer, and works on any connected computer in the world.

A couple years ago I had this question myself. At that time I visited the local credit reporting office in my town, and while they used to run screens on behalf of landlords have stopped that activity. That is also true of pretty much every local screening company. Property managers can run background screens, but only for their own clients. This leaves the question, how does a private landlord screen their prospective tenants without a huge hassle? I've been asked this dozens of times and I'm happy to say I have the answers.

If you are a landlord, it's actually quite easy. The FCRA allows "tenant screening" as a permissible purpose for running certain background checks, including full criminal background screens, bankruptsy, eviction, and judgement checks. You just need a reliable provider. This can be obtained easy enough by googling 'tenant screening'. Which ones are reliable though?

What I've found is most tenant screening companies are using extremely limited databases. None of them actually disclose what data they are using, or how they got it, or how complete it is. With that, it's more or less just a guess as to if they have valid data. Most tenant screening companies suggest you use one of their packages which include a "nationwide" search of some sorts. I've found these less than accurate as well because their nationwide results tend to only have results if they specifically have already scanned for that particular record. What are the chances? Pretty slim indeed. It often equates to a substantial investment in invalid results. I've even heard that some landlords use multiple screening companies paying two to three times what they should as a result.

Because of the guesswork, and game of chance out there, and since we have lots of landlords using Rentec Direct for it's property management software capabilities, we've worked out a partnership with a premier data screening wholesaler to be able to provide tenant screening services directly to our customers. The quality of the data is second to none.

One might ask, "how is it different than the rest"? Great question! While we offer similar nationwide and statewide searches, most of our nationwide and statewide databases are updated extremely frequently with complete records from that state. This differs from many screening companies. Additionally, and this is a major difference, we offer an intelligent search (Intellisearch) feature which at no cost to you scans the entire previous address history of your prospective tenant. It then recommends the specific local products designed to give you the most accurate results for this tenant. After all, why spend 4 times as much out there on a broad nationwide search when you can learn the specific locations this tenant has lived and run state and county level searches which produce up to date, and flawless results for as little as $6. By the way, our comprehensive nationwide criminal, which includes the nationwide sex offender database, is only $9.95 for Rentec members.

We're currently offering a 2 month FREE trial to Rentec Pro to ActiveRain members which includes a 30% discount on all screening products.