Audience: Property Managers
Who Collects Rent?
When adding a Landlord to Housters, the Property Manager specifies whether they collect rent from Tenants or whether the Landlord does. This is super important because it determines whether the Property Manager owes the Landlord money or the other way around. If the Property Manager collects the rent, then it means they need to send on that rent money minus their property management fees to the Landlord. If the Landlord collects the rent, then it means they need to send property management fees to the Property Manager.
Contract Terms
When specifying a Landlord’s contract terms, it’s important to input them right because this is what Housters uses to track the payments due to or from the Landlord over time. Housters is very customizable and supports any variation of payment frequencies, e.g. every month on day 5, every 2 weeks, every 4 days, and so on. It also allows marking payments as due “in arrears”, e.g. a property management fee is due on the last day of each month. For the property management fee structure, Housters supports both a fixed amount due or a % of paid rent that is due.
What you should set the Contract Start Date to depends on how you want to use Housters. If you set it to the next time that a payment is due, then you can start adding Payment Transactions at that time and start fresh with Housters. In this scenario, you will have no backwards history of Landlord payments before you started using Housters. If you set it to the original date that the Landlord started using your services, then Housters will expect Payment Transactions for each of those old payment periods so you will need to add Payment Transactions, otherwise you or the Landlord will show as owing all of those past payments.
Read the Landlord Invoicing help topic to understand how Housters uses the Landlord’s contract terms to generate Invoices for the Landlord, and how it uses Payment Transactions to update the amounts paid on those Invoices.