We frequently get questions from owners about rent collection and how the eviction process works if rent isn’t paid. Our rent collection process starts with rent being due on the first of the month. By midnight on the fifth of the month, rent is considered late if it hasn’t been paid. The tenant will automatically get an email stating that their rent is officially late and notifying them that a late fee has been imposed on their rental ledger.
Once rent is considered late, we have a specific steps we follow to either obtain the rent from the tenant or begin the eviction process.
Collecting Late Rent
Once a tenant’s rent is late, we immediately turn it over to our rent collection department to start the collection call process. By the seventh or eighth of the month, if the tenant has still not made their rent payment, our bookkeeping staff will call the tenant and attempt to make a collection or to get some sort of communication from them regarding their payment.
Managing Event Reports
We have a report online that our owners can find called Event Reports. This report will give a full outline of exactly what happened during our collection attempts with the tenant. It will show all phone calls that were made to the tenant and detail all voicemails that were left. It will also describe phone conversations if we were able to reach the tenant. Anything along those lines is what can be found in an event report, and they are useful when we’re deciding how to proceed.
Continued Collection Attempts
If the tenant has not communicated after the initial attempts, the property manager will then reach out to the tenant, usually around the 10th of the month. This now becomes the second official attempt to collect the rent, and the property manager acknowledges in any correspondence or communication that the tenants have already received a late notice and one collection attempt from the collections department. If nothing is accomplished by the 12th of the month and rent is still not paid, we send a Pay or Quit notice, which is a letter that basically states it’s the tenant’s last chance to either make their rental payment or move out of the property.
Moving Towards the Eviction Process
If there is still zero communication after the Pay or Quit letter, the eviction filing will usually begin by the 15th of the month. The owner will receive a phone call or email from the property manager asking if they would like to proceed with eviction due to lack of payment.
Ultimately, this is the owner’s decision. Often, there are already notes on file stating that if it ever gets to the 15th of the month with no rent payment made, to go ahead and proceed with the eviction. We would then immediately begin that process and transfer it to our legal team to handle if the owner does not have an eviction attorney of their own.
Sometimes, however, the owner does not wish to proceed with the eviction. They may prefer to continue to attempt to get the rent from the tenant. In certain cases, the owner is familiar with the tenant and knows they usually pay their rent mid-month and is okay with that. If that is the case, we will still attempt to communicate with the tenant to obtain the rent until it is paid or until the owner advises to proceed with the eviction process.
This is an overview of our rental collection and eviction process. If you have any additional questions or concerns, please contact us at Realty Solutions, and we’d be happy to tell you more.
