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A recent REB webcast exploring the future of real estate payments has shown that agents, now more than ever, are using digital systems instead of trust accounts to stay ahead of the competition.
In the constantly shifting property landscape, digital payment systems have gained significant popularity, with recent research from Agile Market Intelligence indicating that 10 per cent of agencies are already operating without trust accounts.
During a recent REB webcast, commercial director at payment platform Managed, Alex Whitlock, said that digital trust account alternatives present an opportunity to build a “transparent, simple system” that benefits property managers, tenants, and owners.
Founded in 2018, Managed is a direct and automated rental payments platform that provides a fast and secure method for transacting payments to landlords, property managers, and tradespeople for work orders and maintenance.
By offering a secure and efficient framework for real estate transactions, chief operating officer at Managed, Rohith George, said that digital payment platforms can enable agencies to grow their rent roll while ensuring that increases to trust account costs remain minimal.
“If you go from 100 properties to 500 properties, that should not scale in terms of your costs,” George said.
“Ideally, new technology should try and keep your costs as minimum as possible while reducing the admin for your team.”
The growing popularity of digital payment platforms was also evident in REB’s inaugural Stellar Agencies ranking, which earlier this year revealed that four of the fastest growing 10 agencies opted for a property management platform built around automated direct payments.
Ashlea Merlo, co-director at Stellar ranked agency The Property Collab, explained that owners increasingly expect to receive their rental income at “lightning speed”.
By offering a fast-tracked pipeline for quickly delivering funds to owners, Merlo said the Managed platform has made operating a trust account “seem like a thing of the past”.
“Ultimately we want our clients’ money working harder for them and it’s better off in their account versus in our trust account until the end of the month doing absolutely nothing,” Merlo said.
Beyond the investor side, Merlo said digital payment platforms also benefit tenants by enabling payments to be sent and received instantaneously with complete transparency.
“From a timing perspective, we don’t have to worry about mid-month, end of month, daily bank reconciliations or anything like that – it’s literally instant,” Merlo said.
“The minute that our tenants are paying, it’s going straight to our clients as well and it’s all available to them,” she added.
Director at NU Management, Grant McKay, who uses the Managed platform, said it had helped his agency to quickly address the logistics of property management and free up time to develop client relations further.
“It allowed my business to do what we needed to do on a daily basis, which is look after the tenants, make sure repairs and maintenance are done in a timely manner, communicate to everyone involved, and look for those opportunities with new clients,” McKay said.
Merlo also said that the Managed platform helped her team to work around the informal rule in her office that “by time someone contacts us, it’s too late”.
“Using all the technology that we have available to us, we’ve been able to automate to help us scale, but also be able to communicate with our clients efficiently and ultimately before they contact us,” she said.
By freeing up more time to build relationships with renters and providing them with a fast, free digital payment method, George said that monetary incentives will likely arrive more quickly and be received sooner by investors.
“A good relationship with the renter is obviously going to impact your investor, so at the end of the day, platforms and technology, regardless of what it is, should only enable that better experience,” he concluded.
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