How PADRentals delivers a great service at scale with payment automation

Chris Lesky built PADRentals into a 200-unit property management business purely through word-of-mouth advertising and a reputation for quality service.

But early on, inefficient, unscalable payment administration systems threatened to put the brakes on the company's runaway growth. That's why Chris chose to save hours of admin each month by automating payment reconciliation – and won back the breathing space needed in an agency stretched almost to breaking point.

Interview with

Chris Lesky

CEO, PADRentals

Growing pains

By 2017, PADRentals was booming: managing more tenancies and processing more rent payments on behalf of more landlords all the time. But the company’s payment administration methods weren’t keeping up with their unexpected growth.

“The process at the time was all manual,” explains Chris. “We’d either be running credit cards manually, going to the bank with cheques or waiting for people to come in and use a debit machine. We had an Excel sheet 40 pages long and when rent would come in, we’d put a little X beside the tenant’s name. We would literally spend almost the entire month collecting and gathering rents.”

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Chris and his team were working around the clock just to manage the portfolio they already had, with no room for further growth. Worse still, payments were starting to slip through the cracks.

“Doing everything by hand left room for errors,” he says. “Someone would come in and pay cash and we would forget to mark it off, and then have to go back and see if they paid or not.” Chris Lesky, CEO at PADRentals

“I’d know that we had given out money to landlords that we hadn’t collected but we couldn’t verify if we actually did collect that money or not. It was hard financially sometimes.”

Investing for growth

It was clear to Chris that PADRentals needed to do things differently. He looked for tools to reduce the administrative load on his team without harming the quality of service he offered to his clients – maybe even to improve on the customer experience he and his team were offering.

That was when he discovered PayProp.

PayProp is an automated rental payment processing platform used by thousands of property professionals around the world. It reconciles incoming payments, deducts contractor bills and management fees, and pays out to landlords – all according to rules set by the property manager. Instead of manually crossing off incoming payments on a paper spreadsheet, Chris could see which tenants had paid with one glance at his PayProp dashboard.

After a short onboarding process, PADRentals started using PayProp on 1 May 2018 – and it was exactly the solution they were looking for. “To have tools like this is everything,” says Chris.

“I would 100% recommend PayProp to property managers. With PayProp, by the 3rd or 4th of every month, we have 70 or 80% of our landlords paid out.” Chris Lesky, CEO at PADRentals

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“Our owners are noticing a huge difference with getting their money faster, we have eliminated so much paperwork, and we have collected more rents on time than ever before. We’re building a new office, we’re looking at hiring more people this year, and of course it helps the bottom line out”.

And for Chris, who believes in customer service, there was another big benefit to PayProp too.

“The thing that I like best about PayProp, other than getting our business on track, is the people that I’ve dealt with. It doesn’t feel like a business relationship – it’s a friendship where I can e-mail or call anybody. I do consider a lot of the people there to be friends.” Chris Lesky, CEO at PADRentals

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