As an agent arrears management is something that I am very passionate about, but it is a hard job and can be very difficult to both manage and deal with.  It’s the sort of job that can really suck the soul out of you, as it becomes a constant battle at times.
This why it is so important that you are dealing with an agency who is proactive, rather than reactive, in their approach to this delicate issue.

Let’s first of all talk about what is arrears?

Arrears is when a tenant is behind in their rent payments.  Sounds simple right?  The requirement under a tenants lease, is that they pay their rent ‘’on time and in advance’’.   This means that they need to pay their rent for the coming week, rather than the week that has just passed.
There are a number of factors that can come in to play in this situation.
When a tenant pays their rent using Bpay, or direct deposit from their bank, there can be a delay of up to 48 hours for the funds to hit our bank account.  It is for this reason that our office likes to give our tenants a grace period of 1 – 2 days for their payment to come into our account.
Does this mean that we do nothing in this time?  Of course not!
When a tenant is a couple of days behind in their rent they receive a reminder text message from our office letting them know that their rent is due.  We try to keep this text very light and often it is just a prompt in case they have forgotten their payments.

The thing to remember in the arrears process, is that life happens.  What I mean by this is that bad things can sometimes happen to good people and you need to have an agent in place who is prepared to put strategies in place to deal with the times when things go wrong.  People lose jobs, get sick, or have serious issues that can affect their payment capacity.
If you deal with every person in exactly the same manner, without listening to what their situation is, in my opinion, you  are not being a very good property manager.
A lot of times you might hear an agent talk about having “zero tolerance rent arrears”, but what does this actually mean for you as a landlord?  And are they able to prove that as an agency they take their arrears management this seriously?
Here at professionals lithgow we stick to a strict policy and procedure for our arrears and over the past 12 months, our arrears for the entire office has sat at just 1.5%.  This means that 98.5% of our tenants are paid on time and in advance with their rent and I think that you would be pretty hard pressed to find another agency in our local area with the stats to beat that!