For us, the ideal prepaid solution for landlords starts with a memory of the guy who liked the product so much, he bought the company! (Disclaimer: We didn’t quite buy the company but did invest time, money and energy in it.)
Personally I have been through the mill with tenants – not all of them ideal, some of them exemplary and others so nit picky and payment averse that we would fight every month.
It all started when electricity started becoming more and more expensive – not the ideal situation when you include electricity, water and bandwidth in your monthly rental.
So, my tenant at the time agreed that I may install a manual electricity meter – then read and bill according to the monthly reading. And, what happened? The tenant refused to accept that she could have “used so much electricity”. Maybe I have an untrustworthy face, maybe I didn’t explain the situation properly, maybe the tenant was unable to read the meter, maybe the tenant just didn’t want to pay anything!
After a few months of continuous arguments and a mounting outstanding bill for electricity I found a company that would supply prepaid electricity, meter and gas meters to ours AND pay us a small share in the admin fee payable every time a tenant topped up their prepaid meter – in return we offer sales, marketing, installation, after sales support and admin services in the Eastern Cape.
Despite the added admin fee my tenant was quite happy to switch to a prepaid electricity meter.
And there we now had an ideal prepaid solution – my tenants could top up and manage their own electricity consumption, the money that they paid was paid to us on the 7th of each month and we received reports on how much was consumed with a little ‘tip’ each month to keep our systems going.
So ecstatic where we that we thought to name our new division ‘Ideal Prepaid‘ BUT, unfortunately that name was taken so we went with tradition and stuck with Straton Prepaid which joined Straton Electrical and Straton Solar.
Straton Prepaid have seen sectional title complexes that have installed manual water meters where sectional title holders and/or their tenants have point blank refuse to pay for water consumed – in some cases racking up in excess of R57 000 in unpaid water. In that situation we advised the body corporate to pass a rule allowing them to automatically install a prepaid water meter should a unit have a large outstanding water bill.
Straton Prepaid have been thanked time and time again by complex and commercial landlords who have seen their water bills plummet after installation of prepaid water meters – two this year have seen bills of R23 500 drop to R950 and R14 300 drop to R280 per month.
Many commercial landlords are now opting to install a prepaid water meter inline after the municipal meter which is an ideal method to ‘encourage’ tenants to save water in Nelson Mandela Bay’s drought stricken area.
Video: Why Prepaid is Ideal for Landlords
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