Comments on: Bipolar Landlords: Revoking Credit Card Rent Payments

By: Barb

Barb — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 20:13:48 +0000

My landlord actually accepts PayPal, which kind of blows me away. Very convenient for me, though.

By: KMC

KMC — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 14:27:31 +0000

Typical of most large companies, someone in the finance department of your landlord’s company came up with the brilliant idea to just get rid of those pesky fees to Visa. When companies do this, they typically neglect to look at the other side of the equation where doing something adds costs elsewhere.
My guess is costs will rise because of these other factors people have mentioned and they’ll go back to accepting credit cards. But not until the genius who made this decision is given a nice fat bonus for “saving the company hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.”

By: Flexo

Flexo — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 02:49:01 +0000

That’s assuming they aren’t paying massive bank fees for bounced checks from tenants. When they made the decision to *reinstate* credit card payments last year, they must have done that for a financial reason as well.

Dealing with the receipt of checks is also much more of an administrative hassle than credit cards. So, while I’m sure they made the decision from a purely financial standpoint (ie., not customer service), there are other financial aspects to consider other than just the credit card processing fee.

By: dakboy

dakboy — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 02:35:28 +0000

Yep, processing credit cards adds up. That company owns approx. 240,000 units (per their website). To make the math easy, let’s say you’re paying a processing fee of 2% on each transaction, if each unit rents for $1000/month, you’re losing $400,000 per year to processing fees.

I work for a similar company (but much smaller) and just cutting our check-processing time by a single day means over $100,000 per year in extra interest earned, from what I heard in one meeting. So your apartment’s management company is looking at a huge savings by dropping credit card payments.

By: limeade

limeade — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 01:22:16 +0000

I can’t understand why they wouldn’t allow a payment from a credit card. As long as they get there money I don’t see why they’d care if it were a check or from Visa. I guess they must have some reason.

By: Jeremy Bettis

Jeremy Bettis — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 01:03:21 +0000

I am not really surprised, it is rather expensive to process credit card payments. Perhaps at first the losses due to credit card fees were not as much as the bounced checks and late payments that were prevented, but probably too many of their good tenants signed up for the credit card payment option, and now it is loosing money for them.