But it’s hardly the only way technology is frustrating tenants. His case ended up in the hands of debt collectors.įor Wallace, the entire affair is a frustrating example of what happens when landlords rely on technology to make their jobs easier. So the company’s position was that Wallace should have gone through the portal Wallace’s position is that the company had accepted his checks as payment in full or 18 months, and that it could have easily told him in an email that he owed money long before 18 months had passed. The property managers told him that had he gone through the online portal, he would have seen that he owed the extra fees. Critically, he says, he wrote “paid in full” on those checks and the property managers kept cashing them – which Sue Berkowitz, director of SC Appleseed Legal Justice Center, says means the property managers accepted full payment for the month, ever month, for more than a year.īut a year-and-a-half later, Wallace found a note on his door and a message in his email inbox saying that he owed $1,800 in “ambiguous” (according to Vaughn) fees. So he kept paying with a check at the main office. “So I wasn't about to link my bank account to that.” “It was saying that it was an unsecure website,” Wallace says. Wallace didn’t really want an online portal, but he accepted that this was the new-normal-to-be and went to the site to set up his account. Right around 2017 (he’s not exactly sure of the date), Wallace’s apartment building on Main Street got a new property management company, and the new managers introduced an online portal for tenants to pay rent, request maintenance, and keep up with news from around the building. Take the story of James Wallace, a Columbia resident who paid his rent with a paper check for years. On the downside, renters are getting lost in the ether and tied up in frustrating fights over what a computer program is saying about them. On the positive side, all of this has cut down the risks of checks getting stolen from drop boxes or lost in the mail expanded the pool of available rental units to someone looking for a place to live and made it easier for property managers to collect information from and about tenants and potential tenants. AI programs run background checks and credit checks online portals collect digital payments and take renter complaints. Technology in the real estate space has changed how we find, get, pay for, and even get qualified for a place to live. Today, it’s all a bunch of ones and zeroes and algorithms. ![]() ![]() You’d find an available apartment in a newspaper ad, you’d fill out a paper application to rent the place, and you’d put a paper check in a paper envelope and either mail it to a landlord with a desk that was covered in paper or drop it through a slot so that it may come to rest among other paper envelopes full of paper checks. In the Analog Age, getting an apartment was all about paper.
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