Rent Payments for Property Managers

Rent payment platforms are how residents pay rent electronically, by bank transfer, card, cash at a retail counter or autopay, with the payment posted to the resident ledger in the property management system. Most systems already include native payments, so the buyer for a specialist platform is not starting from zero. They are asking a narrower set of questions. Who pays the processing fee? How do paper checks and cash get converted? Can one vendor collect across two or three PMSs after an acquisition? Can a resident split rent without the property carrying the risk? The vendors in this category answer those questions in different ways, and this guide covers who buys them, how to evaluate them, what pricing looks like where it is published, which PMS each connects to, and what our database records for each vendor.

Who buys it

The category’s buyer runs from the independent landlord with four doors to the centralized accounts-receivable team at an institutional operator, and the products split along that line.

At the small end, an independent landlord or a small property manager with a handful of buildings wants online collection without a PMS contract. PayRent describes its customer as independent landlords and small property managers, prices in tiers of units, and promises no unit minimums. Its site describes reports that download into “virtually every accounting system,” which is what a landlord on a spreadsheet or a general ledger wants to hear. This buyer is not integrating with Yardi. They want the ACH to land and the tenant to see a receipt.

In institutional multifamily, the buyer is an accounting lead or a resident-services lead who already has a payment module in the PMS and wants something the module does not do. Domuso sells “centralize rent payments across multiple PMS platforms, ownership groups, and properties” to exactly this buyer, and says on the same page that teams can spend up to six hours a month reconciling payments by hand. ClickPay sells payment consolidation and business-rule automation across a portfolio. Zego sells collection across a long list of PMS and association systems, with lockbox and retail cash on top. Aptexx sells payments inside a resident app that also carries messaging, surveys, maintenance and package tracking. These buyers run Yardi, RealPage, MRI, ResMan or Entrata, and the first filter on any list is whether the vendor connects to the one they run.

The third buyer is the operator with a delinquency problem rather than a collection problem. The Multifamily Dive report on flexible rent quotes Leslie Hyman of Circa saying that 25 to 30 percent of people pay late and that site teams are stuck chasing those payments, and it records rent-to-income rising from 27.8 percent in 2015 to 2018 to 31.8 percent in 2022, with 8.5 million households behind on rent in the third quarter of 2022. That is the buyer for Flex and Livble, and it is why Stephen Baker of Zego describes flexible payments in the same article as an amenity offered “without putting their cash flow at risk and without any incremental burden.” Bilt approaches the same buyer from the rewards side, with a resident-portal payment layer that its owner-facing site describes as a “payment platform with rewards” at no cost to owners or operators.

Association managers are a fourth group. Zego and ClickPay both list HOA communities as a segment, and ClickPay’s integration page names association accounting systems such as TOPS, Caliber, Jenark and VMS that no other vendor in the category lists.

How to evaluate it

The pain points in the research turn into demo questions. Ask them in this order.

Start with the fee. Every vendor in this category moves money, and the first thing to settle is who pays for it on each rail. Ask for the fee on ACH, debit and credit, stated as a percentage plus a flat amount, and ask who is charged. PayRent publishes the whole table and lets the landlord choose who pays the bank-transfer fee, while card fees are always the tenant’s. Flex charges the operator nothing and stacks a membership fee, a processing fee, a credit-card surcharge and a split fee on the resident. Zego, ClickPay, Domuso and Aptexx publish nothing, so this is the first thing to ask.

Then ask what the resident sees. The research records that Flex’s resident fees stack, and that Multifamily Dive counted 43 pages of Better Business Bureau complaints about Flex in January 2023. A product that is free to the operator is not free to the resident, and the resident’s complaint lands on the leasing office. Ask the vendor to walk you through the resident’s fee disclosure screen by screen.

Then ask about paper and cash. Checks, money orders and cash still arrive, and the vendors sell different ways to convert them. Zego offers Lockbox check scanning and CashPay at more than 30,000 CheckFreePay locations. ClickPay offers lockbox, check scanning, online bill-pay sweeping and walk-in cash at more than 35,000 locations. Domuso offers mobile check and money-order scanning and MoneyGram cash. Aptexx lists cash among its payment types. Ask what share of your current receipts are non-digital and what the vendor’s conversion path is for each kind.

Then ask about reversals. Domuso’s whole product framing is “Domuso Certified,” a non-reversible digital payment its site describes as similar to a certified check, aimed at move-in and delinquent balances where a chargeback is expensive. Ask every vendor what happens when a card payment is disputed after the resident has moved in, and whether the platform offers any non-reversible rail.

Then ask about the ledger. Where does the payment post, how fast, and what does reconciliation look like when a portfolio runs more than one PMS or more than one ownership group? Domuso sells centralization to that case and ClickPay sells consolidation. If you run one PMS and one ownership entity, this question matters less than the fee question.

Then, if you are evaluating flexible rent, ask about the credit. Livble states that its loans are originated by Lead Bank and charges the resident a $30 to $60 finance charge per split depending on when rent is submitted. Flex describes the resident paying Flex in two parts while Flex pays the property in full on the due date. Ask who carries the risk if the resident does not pay the second installment, whether the property is ever asked to return funds, and what the resident’s cost is as an annualized rate. The glossary defines the payment and ledger terms that come up in these conversations.

Last, ask what the built-in module already does. If the PMS collects ACH and card today, ask the vendor to name what its product adds. Sometimes the honest answer is that the PMS module is already theirs.

Pricing models

Three vendors in our database publish a price, and the three pricing models they publish look nothing alike.

PayRent publishes two plans. Do-It-Yourself is $24 a month with 30 units included and $3 per extra unit; bank transfers cost $5 each, paid by the landlord or the tenant at the landlord’s choice; debit costs 1.0 percent plus $6.95 and credit 3.5 percent plus $6.95, paid by the tenant. Go-Like-A-Pro is $59 a month with 10 units included and $4 per extra unit; bank transfers are free; debit costs 0 percent plus $12 and credit 3.5 percent plus $6.95, again paid by the tenant. Note that the higher plan includes fewer units than the lower plan in the published table; ask PayRent to confirm the unit allowance before you compare the two at your door count.

Flex is free to property managers and operators. The resident pays a $5.99 monthly membership, a 0.5 percent processing fee, an additional 2.5 percent surcharge on credit cards and a split fee of up to 3 percent, with no late fees.

Livble does not state a property-side cost. The resident pays a finance charge of $30 to $60 per split depending on when rent is submitted, on a loan originated by Lead Bank.

Bilt’s owner-facing site states that its program comes at no cost to owners or operators and does not state resident-side fees. Zego, ClickPay, Domuso and Aptexx do not publish pricing; ask each for the per-transaction fee by rail, who pays it, any monthly platform or per-unit fee, the minimum, and the contract term.

The shapes you will meet, then, are per-month plus per-unit plus per-transaction for the small-landlord tools, per-transaction with the cost pushed to the resident for the flexible-rent and rewards products, and a negotiated platform fee for the institutional collection platforms. Before the demo ends, price a year of your own receipts on each rail, because a vendor that is free to the operator on paper can still cost the operator in resident goodwill, and a vendor that charges the operator per unit rewards the vendor for every door you add.

Integrations

The PMS is the deciding filter, so here is what the database records for each system. Every integration below carries a source URL and a last-verified date in the vendor record.

Yardi is listed by Zego, Flex, Domuso, ClickPay and Aptexx. RealPage is listed by Zego, Flex, Domuso, ClickPay and Bilt. MRI is listed by Zego, Flex and ClickPay. ResMan is listed by Zego, Flex, ClickPay and Aptexx. Rent Manager is listed by Zego, Flex and ClickPay. Entrata is listed by Zego and Flex. AppFolio is listed by Flex alone in the database, and the research notes add that Zego’s integrations page names AppFolio as a primary integration as well. PayRent and Livble name no PMS integration; PayRent sells downloadable reports instead, and Livble describes an API-based launch for software platforms and a tenant-portal payment method. The Yardi, RealPage, ResMan and Rent Manager integration pages list every category that connects to each system.

Two integration facts deserve their own sentence. ClickPay has been owned by RealPage since April 2018, when RealPage bought it for $218.5 million while it served 2.3 million units across multifamily, HOA, condo and co-op, according to the SEC exhibit in the research file. It is still sold on its own domain, and its integration page names Yardi, MRI, Rent Manager, ResMan, Sage 100, SS&C Skyline, Jenark, AMSI, Caliber, TOPS, VMS and Property Boulevard alongside RealPage. It does not list Propertyware, AppFolio, Buildium or Entrata. And Flex’s own site names Aptexx as an integrated portal partner, so a resident on an Aptexx-powered portal can pay through Flex; the two vendors sit at different layers rather than competing.

The alternative to any of these is the payments module inside the PMS. Yardi, RealPage, Entrata, AppFolio and Buildium each ship one, and the research notes that those native modules were not fetched for this edition, so treat their fees as a demo question rather than a fact. The one PMS payments page the research did fetch shows how thin the line can be. Rent Manager’s payments page is partner-delivered, with Zego handling ePay, CashPay at 30,000 CheckFreePay locations and Lockbox, AvidXchange handling bill pay and Safeguard handling electronic checks, with no fees published. A Rent Manager customer evaluating Zego is, in part, evaluating the vendor already behind the module.

The vendors

The table below is generated from the vendor database and shows each vendor’s description, pricing model where published, PMS integrations and segments, each with its source and last-verified date.

Read the list as three groups. Zego, ClickPay, Domuso and Aptexx are collection platforms for institutional multifamily and, for the first two, association managers; they take ACH, card, checks and cash and post to the PMS, and they differ on non-reversible rails, cash networks and how many systems they consolidate. Flex and Livble are flexible-rent products, resident-paid and free to the operator, layered on top of the portal. Bilt Rewards is a rewards-led payment layer in the resident portal at no cost to owners. PayRent stands apart as the only vendor built for independent landlords and small managers, with published plans and no PMS integration. The full vendor list compares all eight side by side.

Zego and Bilt each carry a second category. Zego’s resident app and credit-reporting incentive are sold as a resident benefits package, and Bilt’s consumer points program is the reason a resident chooses to pay through it; both are covered again in the resident benefits platforms guide, where the question is the bundle rather than the payment rail.

What the Index shows

The Index does not measure rent payments yet, so the snapshot above carries no ranking and this guide claims none; the category will be added when a prompt set is approved.

Inclusion criteria

The criteria block above states which vendors qualify for the category and why; a vendor that sells electronic rent collection, flexible rent or a resident-portal payment layer to property managers and has a verifiable source for its description and integrations is listed, and nothing else is.

If you sell into this category and want to know what a property manager hears when they ask an assistant which payments vendor to use, AI visibility for proptech companies explains what we measure each month, why the source map matters more than the inline citations, and what the fix costs.

Where to go next

If you are an independent landlord, the PayRent profile is the only page here written for your door count, and the published fee table is the whole decision. If you run institutional multifamily on Yardi or RealPage and already have a payments module, read the Domuso and ClickPay profiles for the two products that sell consolidation across systems, then the Zego profile for the longest integration list in the category. If your problem is late rent rather than collection, read the Flex and Livble profiles together and take the resident-fee questions into both demos. The rest of the stack a property management company buys is on the property management software hub, one category at a time.