Property Management Agreement (image: c-rem.com)
Are you managing your own rentals in Silicon Valley? Do you have single family rental homes? Well, here’s a neat service by a company called Cozy. Funded by Google Ventures, Cozy with offices in San Francisco and Portland has some unique features that should help small landlord with their tenant screening and online rent collection.
Some of these services were the domain of much larger property management companies. But these services are now available by paying $9 per month for each unit/house you want to managing using Cozy. Here are some of the advantages of using Cozy right out of the box:
1) Privacy: If you are accepting applications from tenants which contain their social security number, you have the responsibility to develop strict controls to protect the identify of these applications. For instance, everyone who applies for your home as a tenant, has the right to have their application returned to them or at least inquire about what has happened to the information contained in their application.
But since you as the landlord are not collecting this data, this responsibility falls on Cozy which has a privacy policy in place.
2) Security: Just like privacy concerns, you are not the recipient of the data and don’t have to worry about storing the data in a safe and secure environment.
3) Background Checks: You can use Cozy to screen your tenants where all the information about each applicant is in one place as opposed to dozen emails. This make the follow up contacts and distribution of information to your applicants much simpler too.
3) Online Payments: No longer you have to wait for your tenants check to clear to be able to allocate and use the funds. Since the payments are debited directly from your tenants account, they are available to you right away.
4) Online applications: Managing paper applications is a huge headache. With Cozy each applicant can create a profile for your property which you can then review side by side to select the best candidate for your property.
With the growing popularity of Cloud Computing application like Cozy, concerns about security and privacy will become more pronounced which will put pressure on small landlords to devise strategies to protect their tenants identity and privacy. We believe Cozy offers a neat solution to help small landlords avoid these challenges at a very reasonable cost.
Have you used Cozy? What do you think? We would like to hear from you.
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