How To Motivate Your Student Tenants To Pay Rent On Time

By Emily Plummer on November 14, 2015

Managing housing sites where college students live must be a very different endeavour than looking after other types of residents. Students keep strange hours and are almost always busy and stressed. This necessitates a specific type of communication in order to reach out to them, and opens up a whole new realm of possibilities to motivate them to complete important tasks.

That being said, if you are having trouble motivating students to get their rent payments in on time, it could be due to the unique nature of these tenants that requires different forms of incentive to encourage them.

Lucky for you, I have the insight you are looking for to get inside the heads of these college students and allow you to get your rent payments on time, every time.

Communication

This is the number one method of getting students (as well as most people) to do what they are responsible for. Students especially keep very busy schedules, and are constantly prioritizing certain tasks above others in order to complete everything they need to do.

This workload “triage” of sorts forces students to choose the most imperative thing to do right away, and save less important, or perhaps less pressing tasks, for later. So some things, even very important ones like rent payments, will inevitably fall through the cracks.

Image via campustechnology.com

To remedy this, be sure and keep up good communication with your tenants about when rent payment deadlines are coming up. Reminders are enormously helpful in keeping the idea of paying rent at the front of your residents’ minds so that it can get done. These reminders can be as simple as sending them a quick email or text message (phone calls are more difficult — it is hard to catch someone at a time when they will answer the call), or even taping notices to apartment front doors.

Further, students are often first-timers or if not, relatively new, in the living-on-your-own world. This means that many of us are not accustomed to being responsible for paying our own rent at the beginning of each month. Reminders of due dates will keep us on top of the rent payments that we are not yet used to, and will help us get used to them over time.

Free Food Incentives

To really grab students’ attention, all you have to do is give away free food. From attending club meetings to walking across town, most college students are willing to put in quite a bit of effort to eat free of charge. If all we have to do is turn in a rent check by its due date to get some free sustenance, we will do it.

Image via hoos-eat-free.blogspot.com

These incentives could be something as simple as a granola bar or a cup of noodles for everyone who turns their rent in on time, or something as extravagant as a pizza dinner for the apartment that turns in their payments first.

We students, with most of our funds tied up in tuition payments, are constantly on the lookout for deals on food. The words “free food” will get us to do just about anything. So getting more of your student tenants to turn in their rent on time could be as easy as that.

Offer Letters Of Recommendation

Student housing can be tough to find, and even tougher to beat out other students for the opportunity to actually sign a lease. We are always looking for a better place to live, somewhere closer to campus, with more bathrooms, a bigger kitchen. And when trying to get into a new apartment, it can be helpful to have letters of recommendation from past property managers.

Image via blogs.strose.edu

So publicize to your tenants that you are willing to write good letters of recommendation for those tenants who consistently pay their rent on time. To win this prize, your residents are more likely to be vigilant about getting their checks to you on time. Then, when their lease is up, you can write them a letter of recommendation or offer to be a contact reference. Your resident will be able to more easily find new housing for next year, and you will not have to go looking for your rent payments from every single tenant when they are late — it is a win-win for everyone.

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