How PADRentals delivers a great service at scale with payment automation

Growing pains

By 2017, PADRentals was booming: managing more tenancies and processing more rent payments on behalf of more landlords all the time. But the company's payment administration methods weren't keeping up with their growth.

The process at the time was all manual, explains Chris. It was running credit cards manually, it was running to the bank with cheques, it was waiting for people to come in and use a debit machine. We had an Excel sheet 40 pages long and when rent would come in, we'd put a little X beside the tenant's name. We would literally spend almost the entire month collecting and gathering rents.

Chris and his team were working around the clock just to manage the portfolio they already had, with no room for further growth. Worse still, payments were starting to slip through the cracks.

Doing everything by hand left room for errors, he says. Someone would come in and pay cash and they would forget to mark it off, and then we have to go back and see if they paid or not.

Investing for growth

It was clear to Chris that PADRentals needed to do things differently. He looked for tools to reduce the administrative load on his team without harming the quality of service he offered to his clients – maybe even to improve on the customer experience he and his team were offering. That was when he discovered PayProp.

PayProp is an automated rental payment processing platform used by thousands of property professionals around the world. It reconciles incoming payments, deducts contractor bills and management fees, and pays out to landlords – all according to rules set by the property manager. Instead of manually crossing off incoming payments on a paper spreadsheet, Chris could see which tenants had paid with one glance at his PayProp dashboard.

After a short onboarding process, PADRentals started using PayProp on 1 May 2018 – and it was exactly the solution they were looking for. To have tools like this is everything, says Chris. I would 100% recommend PayProp to property managers. With PayProp, by the 3rd or 4th of every month, we have 70 or 80% of our landlords paid out. Our owners are noticing a huge difference with getting their money faster, we have eliminated so much paperwork, and we have collected more rents on time than ever before. We're building a new office, we're looking at hiring more people this year, and of course it helps the bottom line out.

And for Chris, who believes in customer service, there was another big benefit to PayProp too.