Venmo is a great service for making payments to friends and family; however, an increasing number of property owners/managers are leveraging the free tool for collecting rental transactions. There are numerous reasons why P2P apps are not great tools for property managers. Privacy, fraud, and transaction limits are a few reasons why it would be advantageous to shy away from using Venmo for digital rent payments.
Privacy and Fraud
Venmo is a payment network with several social features. Users can see view their friend’s transaction history – causing personal information and payment history to become public. Additionally, tenants become members of an open network with millions of users – it is very easy to commit user error and pay the wrong party. Paying rent to the wrong person on Venmo could potentially be catastrophic for tenants, as users are not required to refund money to the sending partey. Tenant’s transmitting thousands of dollars take on the risk of losing big.
Volume
Venmo may work for landlords with one or two doors, because the “single largest amount you can transfer to your bank account at one time is $2,999.99.” This limit doesn’t allow most landlords to accept payments and export transaction to their bank account in a timely manner. More property managers bigger in size will not be able to use Venmo due to this limit. Furthermore, there are limits imposed on the sending party. If a tenant has a big rent payment to execute, he or she will likely no be able to.
No Added Tools
Because Venmo is NOT meant to be used for rent payments, there are no additional tools for landlords and property owners to leverage. Without these additional tools, landlords are required to use outside software or other communication methods to manage maintenance requests, accounting, etc. Although Venmo is familiar to many tenants, landlords will not have an easier time during rent collection. To some, that may be a product of providing tenant’s a more streamlined method of payment, but to most it’s not worth the headache and the additional requirements on the property-side.
Suggestion
Landlords can benefit from a a free payment tool like Venmo. That being said, it is not built for rental payments or property management. Luckily there are a few free tools, like Venmo, to process rental transaction. Additionally, these tools can be used throughout many aspects of your property portfolio.
Visit https://getrentroom.com for details on how your property management business can benefit from a rental specific payment system.
