I cannot say enough good things about Cozy.co , and I can safely say that every landlord should be using them. Best of all its FREE!
Great things about Cozy
- Free Online Rent Collection (Tenants Bank Account to Yours)
- Online Application Collection
- Optional Tenant Paid $24.99 background check
- Optional Tenant Paid $24.99 credit check ($39.99 for both)
- Tenants can pay by Credit/Debit card but would be charged a 2.75% transaction fee
Step-By-Step Guide
1. Sign up for an Account, and Add your property
2. Add your units for the property
3. Create a listing for your rental (If you already have renters, just invite them to be tenants for the Unit they are assigned, and skip to step 9) I suggest putting to application link and other ads on Zillow Listing Manager(Zillow, Trulia, Hotpads), Craigslist, and Facebook Marketplace. Cozy will syndicate ads to Doorsteps and Realtor.
4. People can apply online through your listing
5. Look at the individual applicants. They can invite each other to be on the same application is there is more than one person renting the unit.I like to make background-heck and Credit score optional since it costs $40, I have them do it, once the whole listing looks good.
6. Check out the application to see if they meet your requirements.
Below are my requirements:
- Total Household Gross Income must be 2.5X Rent Amount
- No Large Dogs, Only Well Trained Pets on a Case by Case Basis
- Every Adult(18+) must have credit check and background check before final acceptance as tenants
- Average Credit Score of Adults must be 620 or greater
- No Criminals
- No Smokers
- Utilities are paid by Tenant
7. Check their credit score, and how many monthly payments they already have to make.
8. Check their Background
9. Once you find and accept the right tenant, start collecting rent online through Cozy. Set the length of the lease, monthly rent amount, any move-in costs, add your bank account for deposits to transfer into.
One thing I really like is the ability to add a bill, I charge a $10/day late rent fee, and I can just add that on the fly.
Cozy has been a great service, and in all honesty, it is the only service I have used, but I can’t think of what I would want to be better.
Perhaps the one thing I dislike is it does take almost a full week for payments to deposit into your bank account. You can accelerate payment for a fee. $2.99 per unit per month.
Cozy also came out with a recent service where they will analyze your rental market, to see what you should charge for rent. It costs $19.99, and it was interesting, but I likely wouldn’t use it again. Here is a sample report: https://cozy.co/img/rent-estimate/sample_report.pdf
I hope from this post you can see why Cozy.co is the one stop free shop for any small-time self-managing landlord. It does everything you need to seamlessly interface online with your potential and current renters. Goodluck and Godspeed!
