We don’t believe in making anyone wait unduly for payment of any money that may be due to them. Whether it be landlord’s rent, a contractor’s payment for works or a tenant’s refund, we deal with it expediently.
We don’t try and sit on payments as long as we can so that we may benefit from the meagre interest our bank pays and won’t operate in this manner, even when rates improve.
Some agents have payment runs once a week, or even once a month. We’re not implying that they are sitting on money; indeed it may be that all rents are arranged to come in on the same day each month, or each week and they choose to operate in this manner in order to save on their own administration costs.
We generally make a tenant’s rent day coincide with the day they move in, which serves to help keep their initial costs to a minimum. The result is that rents are due every day of the month and we pass it on every single working day of the month.
The primary reason for this is one of credibility; originally, being new in town, we wanted a good reputation for payments. And we also recognised that those to whom we owed money were, by and large, relatively small businesses and might well be reliant upon the payment for their own cash-flow. We don’t like being owed money and in this regard, we were pretty certain that we were not alone.
And, with so many horror stories in the press concerning rents and deposits being misappropriated, we figured that we should be as prompt and as transparent as we possibly can be.
The fact that we are no longer so new has not changed our attitude.
We make electronic payments whenever we can; cheques take time to clear and have a habit of going astray in the post and cash is an expensive commodity in which to deal. Most of the time, we use “faster pay”. Unlike BACS, it can very often hit a recipient’s bank account on the day we send it. Sadly, this is not always the case and for some reason, we have to resort to three day payment cycles to certain recipients. It depends upon the recipient’s bank and the type of account and, sadly, we have no control over this. The banks seem to have a veil of secrecy over certain transactions, even today.
Sometimes a landlord will telephone to ask where a payment is, but the fact that most never do would seem to imply that we have it right and we have gained their trust in this regard.
Rest assured, if there is a reason for us not making a payment when it is due, we will communicate with the intended recipient. We chase unpaid rents immediately and with vigour and are proud of the fact that there is not one single landlord who has been paid anything other than a day or two late without a full explanation.
Not only are we expedient in our payments. We are also diligent in our collection of rents. In 2016, we successfully collected nearly 7,000 rent payments. We did not fail to collect a single payment.
