Property management platform's new rental payment service's allows agents to see rental payments hit the trust account in real time
Property Management Platform - Propertyme has launched a new rental payment service called ‘MEPay’. This will allow agents to see rental payments hit the trust account in real-time while keeping the tenant’s bank details private.
The MePay service will be rolled out to more than 30,000 real estate agents using PropertyMe and will be available to almost two million tenants already on the PropertyMe platform, according to the company.
PropertyMe processes all payments through rental trust accounts, a key point of difference when compared to third-party rivals, PropertyMe Chief Product Officer, Scott Shepherd said.
“There’s other payment products in the marketplace, and have been for quite some time, but the difference between those products and ours is that those are third-party payment products that the agent has to purchase separately,” Shepherd said.
“While they’re often integrated with the trust accounting platform that the agent uses, they’re not part of the trust accounting platform. “This is not a product that we’ll be offering to non-customers that they can use, it’s an embedded functionality within our platform and it updates the trust accounting platform in real-time, which none of the other services can do.”
This integration removed the need for property managers to reconcile payments against the trust account, Shepherd said.
Another pain point the MePay feature removes is not being able to see payments in real-time, Shepherd said. “With our platform, the minute the tenant pays, because they’re paying on our platform, the trust system is updated.
“So you know, in advance, that the payment has been made so you’re not chasing for tenants that have already paid, which is not uncommon for agents to do.” Shepherd said that the MePay platform was “a free payment system for both the agent and the tenant and the owner”.
That meant that it was able to satisfy the legislative requirement in operation in many states that require landlords to provide tenants at least one free payment option, he added.
Because MePay was embedded in PropertyMe’s tenant app, it didn’t require tenants to register for any additional services or remember complicated ID numbers, Shepherd said.
“They’ve got transparency and control from that perspective as well,” he said.
An added benefit for tenants has increased privacy.
“At the moment, the agent is collecting that payment information, whether it’s on a form or recollecting it and so you’ve got an additional party, in that the agent has to collect that data and then tap that data into the system,” he says.
“With MePay, the tenant enters that data directly, and the agent never sees it.
“So it’s more secure from that perspective because you don’t have the agent in that data channel.”
