Why don't we pay our rent online?
tempuname: I am currently one of the people responsible for the finances of a student housing cooperative.There is precious little property management software and services directed at small to medium sized landlords (most of the market). With a couple hundred members/residents we're a fairly large organization, bigger than almost all of the other landlords in our market, but we're still too small to afford what's out there.1Address the following problems and you will have a hundred billion dollar market to yourself:1) Margins are pitiful and you want to take 3%?2)Retailers have to take credit cards because consumers can just go elsewhere. Tenants don't really choose a place to live based on payment options.3) Staff is untrained and cheap. Typing checks into Excel or Quickbooks is dead simple. 
We calculated that for the cost of automating this process with a Tenant Pro2 module and ach, we could hire another full time staff member.4) We have no IT staff. Existing services all talk about integration with accounting software and marketing web sites. The vast majority of landlords use Quickbooks/Excel and have no web site. Don't integrate, we can import/export monthly.5) We don't have accountants on staff.3 Even those that can afford Tenant Pro, don't really know how to use it. Less is more. Tenant, apartment number, payments, payments owed. Anything more and you'll just confuse us.6) Problems 3+4+5: Less than 25 units, the landlord is the accountant, general counsel, marketer, agent, IT, general contractor, and often subcontractor. Going to the bank once a month they can do, but you want them to wrap their head around ach?-----------------------------------------1.Take a look at propertysolutions.com. The clients they list have thousands or tens of thousands of units. That, and the fact they don't post prices or fees anywhere tells me there is no way they can help me.2. Tenant Pro, the dominant property management software, is crap. Please kill it.3.  Actually, we have one, but we're a feel good nonprofit so we pay peanuts and our funky ownership structure makes it a requirement.sorry this is a mess, been a long week