Landlords: Collect Rent via Direct Debit

Rob's mission is to educate businesses on the current payments landscape and the range of options that can be implemented to optimise their payment processes. As a former small business owner, Rob understands the issues that continually complicate payment collection and creates content to help businesses navigate the available solutions to these problems. Connect

As a Senior Product Marketing Manager at GoCardless, Coral is focused on Top of Funnel and ensuring that customer-facing teams have the correct positioning, messaging, and understanding of pain points to deliver payment solutions to SMEs. Before GoCardless Coral worked as a Product Marketing Manager at PayPal and has experience in the travel industry as an entrepreneur. She is also a certified attorney. Coral completed an MBA at the London Business School. Connect

Last edited Jul 2023 — 1 min read

Landlords and letting agencies collect payment in various ways, including cash, cheque, standing orders and Direct Debit. However, we’ve seen an increasing number of private landlords and letting agencies of all sizes make the switch and automate rent collection with Direct Debit.

If you’re collecting rental payments , now is the perfect time to review your payments process to ensure you’re making the most of your time and money and catering to your tenants' needs.

Direct Debit can help you in four ways:

1. Automate rent collection
2. Reduce late rent payments
3. Increase rent easily
4. Reduce manual admin

Private landlords can easily automate rent collection to eliminate late payments & always collect rent on time with GoCardless.

1. Direct Debit allows private landlords to automate rent collection

Direct Debit is a pull payment that puts private landlords in charge of rent collection. Once set up, payments will automatically be debited from your tenant's account and credited to yours without requiring any manual effort from you or your tenant. With rent payments automated, you can focus on the more important things in your life and business.

2. Direct Debit helps you to reduce late rent payments

More and more landlords and letting agents are turning to Direct Debit to take control of when they’re paid.

With Direct Debit, once you have authorisation from your tenant, you can collect rent payments whenever they’re due without your tenant needing to do anything else. This means you don’t need to worry about chasing payments or threatening eviction and tenants don’t need to worry about remembering to send you cash or a cheque or setting up a standing order.

3. Direct Debit lets you increase rent when you need to

As a landlord or letting agency,, you may occasionally need to increase the rent or charge additional fees. If you take payment by standing order, this can be difficult as you’ll need to cancel existing standing orders and ask your tenant to set up a new one.

With Direct Debit, however, your tenant won’t need to do anything: you have full control over how much you take from them and when.

4. Direct Debit reduces your admin

Taking payments by bank transfer and standing order can be a huge administrative burden. You must check your bank daily to see what has cleared and chase any non-payers.

In contrast, Direct Debit payments can be completely automated. Rental payments can be set up and then forgotten about as they’ll be taken automatically each month, and you’ll always know exactly what has and hasn’t been paid without checking your bank statement. What’s more, you’ll know when a tenant has cancelled their Direct Debit so you can contact them immediately.

"We’re a completely different business as a result of GoCardless and the second we discovered it we started recommending it to our clients."

Find out how The Wow Company used GoCardless to solve a decade of billing and payment headaches.