Why partnering with PayProp was a match made in heaven for business owner and bride Ellie

The pressures of being a letting agent can be overwhelming, but finding the right tech partner can transform your business, says Ellie Bell-Jenks, Lettings Director at Dourish and Day.

Ellie Bell-Jenks, the Lettings Director at Dourish and Day Lettings, was ready to throw her laptop out of the window due to frustrations with her old property management software, but then found PayProp. It transformed not only her job but gave her peace of mind – and even played a part in her wedding.

Interview with

Ellie Bell-Jenks

Lettings Director, Dourish and Day

Software stresses

Before PayProp, Dourish and Day Lettings relied on in-house software that didn’t solve the time-consuming nature of manual rent reconciliations.

“It was quite a long-winded process and then it would be [a] case of [an] end of week reconcile. If we got too busy it would be an end of month reconcile. And at that point I'd tear my hair out and want to throw my laptop out the window.”_‍ Ellie Bell-Jenks, Lettings Director

But all that changed after a PayProp consultant approached Ellie and took her through the platform, demonstrating how easy it is to reconcile rent payments to the penny and pay it out to landlords on the platform.

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Night and day difference

Ellie says the impact of PayProp on their daily operations has been incredible. With PayProp, she can quickly check incoming payments and reconcile them with individual reference codes, significantly reducing the time spent on manual processes.

“With PayProp we'll come in in the morning and check what's come in, what payments have [been] reconciled. [It] takes two minutes because each one's got their individual reference code, so click a button, all the payments go through to the landlords.” Ellie Bell-Jenks, Lettings Director

Checking holding deposits is easy too and can be done from any device as PayProp is cloud-based. As a result, the team can take a property off the market, subject to contract, as soon as the deposit is paid into PayProp’s bank-integrated platform.

That reduction in admin time has allowed Dourish & Day to focus on providing an award-winning service to its clients.

Customer-centric philosophy translates to growth

In 2018, the lettings department won Gold for the West Midlands at the Estate Agent of the Year Awards (ESTAS), along with nine other ESTAS awards for their service. Ellie puts this down to client communication, efficiency and ongoing rental management – all things that PayProp helps with across Dourish and Day’s rental portfolio.

Ellie says PayProp also makes it easy to measure the growth that has come with this gold-standard service, at the hand of PayProp’s clear reports and dashboard graphs.

"PayProp has got a really cool graph that goes up every month that I love looking at, so yeah, we can see when the payments are increasing, we can see the commission rate increasing, so we can see where we were 11 months ago when we started and we can see where we are today." Ellie Bell-Jenks, Lettings Director

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Peace of mind on her big day

Ellie highlights a significant reduction in administrative stress since PayProp, crediting the platform’s advanced automation for making client account management easy. "I still get the stresses and strains of lettings, as we all do, but [the rent invoicing, collection, reconciliation, distribution and accounting] I know is kind of closed off, it’s done, there’s no stress, no hassle," she says.

The PayProp process is so stress-free that she was able to pay her landlords on her wedding day in just a couple of minutes.

"When I got married in Greece last year, I sat the morning of the wedding and did all of the payments on my mobile phone – it took literally two minutes. I own the business, [so] I have to be able to provide a great service to my landlords, that's what they expect. Then I could just go off and enjoy the rest of my day.”Ellie Bell-Jenks, Lettings Director

To experience the same peace of mind that Ellie enjoys with PayProp, book a demo.

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