Hi There,
I’ve been using the rent collection now for over a year and there has been no charge, however while going through the new tenant contract it say £10 per month? Is this correct and when was the change made?
Thanks
Alex
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Yes that’s right. It baffles me how an automated system needs to charge £10 per transaction so I’ve stopped using it. It takes 30 seconds to check my tenant has paid me direct. Open rent will make interest having rent money in their account before transferring it over to the landlord and I feel they’ve let themselves down here. If things become “complacent” in other areas then I’d consider whether to continue using Open Rent sadly. I pray they don’t turn in to a greedy Upad. We all know what happened to them!
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Might have to stop using rent collection myself or OpenRent all together. All of a sudden they started charging fees for collecting rent🤔
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Hi all, thanks for your questions about our rent collection (RC) service. I’ll cover the basics for users reading who haven’t used Rent Now before then answers your Qs and explain a little more.
How Rent Collection Works
If you use Rent Now to create your tenancy, you can choose to use our RC service. It’s completely optional. Additionally, landlords who created their tenancy with Rent Now before we launched RC can turn it on for their tenancy.
We provide tenants with OpenRent’s bank details, and they pay us. As soon as the rent hits our account, we instantly notify you and the payment is sent to you the same working day. There’s no holding period , and when the rent hits our account, we instantly notify you and the payment is transferred to you the same working day.
We’ll send you a brief confirmation email with each payment we make to you, so your records are up-to-date without you needing to check your bank. If your tenant is late on rent, we’ll notify you automatically, and chase the tenant on your behalf.
If, for whatever reason, your tenant stops paying, we have legal partners who will be happy to help. The rent collection service for ongoing rent payments is completely optional. You don’t need to use it if you’d rather get paid directly, and you can opt out at any point.
Your Questions
So that’s how it works. Now your questions.
Yes, that’s right. We introduced this for now tenancies last year. We’ve added useful functionality, such as landlords being able to add multiple bank accounts or our rent pause feature which allows landlords to suspend rent chasing emails in the case of having agreed a rent holiday (e.g. due to coronavirus). We plan to continue to add functionality to make RC better and better. Meanwhile, landlords who don’t want this can turn it off very easily.
As described above, RC is not just a transaction – it’s a great service for landlords to let us deal with all the admin around chasing, taking and keeping record of rent payments. We chase the rent, keep an account of payments made and owed, and add helpful and responsive functionality based on the problems landlords face, such as the rent pause feature. High street agents charge anywhere from 5-15% of rent every month for doing much less than this.
Our service means it will take 0 seconds as we send you an alert on payment and we will automatically
chase them on your behalf if they don’t pay on time. We’ll also automatically keep track of the amount of arrears accrued.
This not the case. We do not hold your rent money, but rather pay it straight on to you as described above. That means we don’t make any money on interest from your money. Even if we did hold onto the money, interest rates on client money accounts are typically not above 0% at the moment and won’t be for the forseeable future. When RC was free to landlords, we were actually losing thousands of pounds every month providing the services listed above.
We have no plans to introduce hidden fees and costs. Landlords who used RC for their existing tenancies were not suddenly charged for RC on those tenancies. The current pricing applied only landlords newly using RC for their tenancies. As @Alex3 mentioned, we put any optional costs upfront where everyone can see them in advance and ask about them on a public forum.
I hope that answers all the questions here and for anyone else reading this thread! We’re always happy to explain our product on this Community and thanks for having an interest in speaking about the services we provide – your feedback is very valuable.
Sam
Ithink £10 is very cheap
Thank you Sam for the detailed response. For me £120 a year to pass rent on to me for one property is potentially an unnecessary cost, however I’m sure it is a required feature for some.
Look forward to hearing the developments that are implemented in the future.
Similar to others I hadn’t really noticed this monthly charge being added
Where is it invoiced? I don’t see it on Rent Now and there are no attachments on the rent notification emails
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Hi Ciaran,
Any charge for our Rent Collection service will be confirmed in our “Rent Payment Received for…”.
For now any user who opted into the free service will not be charged.
If you’ve got any questions about your specific account, or tenancy, please feel free to email https://www.openrent.co.uk/faq#i-have-more-questions and our customer support team will be happy to assist.
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