The Landlord Lens - How to Guarantee Rent On Time For Free with Livble

Episode Date: November 27, 2024

Tony DiBiase is the Head of Customer Operations at Livble, and sat down with the TurboTeam to discuss flexbile rent payment options for tenants and how this can make a smoother rent payment process for landlords. Learn more about how Livble can help you!Livble - https://www.livble.com/partners

Hi, I'm Krista and this is Tony, and we're here to help you be a better landlord. Now, Tony, you are the head of customer operations over at Livable. Can you tell me a little bit about what livable is? Sure, yeah, absolutely. So Livable is an embedded fintech. We're on a mission basically to enhance the tenant experience. And the way that we are able to do that is by allowing tenants to take control of their largest expense, which is rent. So really what we're trying to do here is free up a tenant's cash flow and allow them to build really meaningful credit and avoid any late fees.

And by doing this, not only are we enhancing the tenant experience, but we're enhancing the landlord-tenant relationship. Landlords are always happier when tenants pay rent on time. And what livable does is allow tenants to pay their rent on time by splitting rent with us. When a tenant split rents with us, we pay their rent directly to their landlord on time, and the tenant can sit back and relax and enjoy some freedom cash flow. Okay, that's incredible. So it sounds like livable provides kind of a customizable payment plan, but the landlord doesn't have to worry about it.

The tenant can just set it up with you and be good to go, not have to worry about overdrafting their account. Exactly. Yep. Wow. Okay. Are there any more details you can give me about how someone could get started? Like, what do you do?

Yeah, absolutely. So, well, there's two ways. If a user is using TurboTenant, for example, they can go into their renter dashboard or into the payment section and find the livable widget, which is a payment method. From there, they simply just enter their phone number. They verify it for security purposes. And then they enter their TurboTenant credentials so that we can, you know, read their portal and understand the charges. and then they go through our underwriting process and boom. Alternatively, if a user finds us through the App Store or the Google Play Store,

very similar process, you know, they verify their phone number, they enter their tenant portal credentials, and then same thing, underwriting process. From there, assuming that a user is approved, they will see their rent displayed, and then they get to choose if they want two, three, or four installments for the remainder of the month. So the down payment is that first installment that will be debited at the time of us paying rent on behalf of the tenant.

And that is debited, yeah, right when they split rent. And then from there, they actually get to also choose the dates that they want those installments due. So they can, you know, if they want to put two installments due in one week, they can do that. If they want to split it up one each week, I mean, align with their payroll, for example. They can absolutely do that. And again, the entire purpose of that is to really encourage tenants, By using livable, not only are they paying the rent on time, they get to avoid any late fee, but they also get to avoid credit card fees if they're using credit cards as a payment method

or overdraft fees because, you know, they're making a super large payment at once. And unfortunately, I think there's a lot of tenants living paycheck to paycheck. So this is a way for folks like that and others to just, you know, have a little bit more ease as a tenant. Wow. So that's super cool. I love that you guys are making it easier for tenants to have the best possible experience. Yeah. Who's best suited to use livable? Yeah, another really great question. So, again, as part of our mission, you know, we understand that with rising costs in the country right now, and unfortunately, wages seem to kind of be lagging with that. Who is best for livable would be

anyone who really has a struggle making a large payment at one time, right? And maybe some tenants can afford to make a large payment at once, but they want to free up their cash flow because, you know, there are other bills to pay or, you know, they want to take their kids out to a nice dinner or their partner, something like that. So I would say anyone who's really looking to free up their cash flow and have really easy ways of building their credit and avoiding late fees, that's a perfect candidate. As I mentioned before, there is an underwriting process, so they will have to go through that. And part of that underwriting process is linking their bank account. We take a look at things like transaction history, overall cash flow, overall kind of financial status. But what's cool is

that livable does not rely on any credit reports. So a credit score really will not make or break any eligibility for a tenant. Well, I mean, Libble sounds like a really awesome service, a great way to give tenants greater flexibility while still making sure that the landlord gets their rent on time. I'm curious, is it a service where someone opts in just once or can they like decide month by month if they want to use livable. Yeah, I'm glad you asked that. So users can choose which months they use it. So if they sign up, they're not locked in for a year or six months or anything like that. Of course, we encourage that. We want to be helping the experience and we want to continue seeing users utilizing our services. But for example, if you were to sign up for

livable, you can pay rent next month and then you can take a break. We have a feature that allows users to freeze their membership, for example, so they're not charged the membership fee. for the next month and then they can come back. So really, yeah, it's kind of a touch and go whatever fits the tenants, you know, needs. Beautiful. Yeah. Do you have any stories of tenants who have really loved your service that you can share with our audience? Yeah.

So overall, just to give you some stats, too, we have been seeing that 90% of our users do come back to livable after their first month, which is great. We love to see that. And then on top of that, we see about 70% of users coming back after, and staying with us for six months or more. And the reason why I bring that up is just it shows the trust that users have in us as a reliable service. But as far as specific examples go, I talked with one tenant. His name is Jake.

He mentioned that he was really appreciative of livable and that the $30 membership fee that we charge per month was an easy cost for him to assume, especially since that allowed him to pay rent on time and avoid the $100 late fee that his landlord was charging. that was really cool to hear. And then we had another tenant. Her name was Latrina. And she mentioned that were her go-to service for tough times. And she's a perfect example to your previous question, someone who has used us, you know, one month and then has paused a couple months and came back. So, yeah, so we're really happy to see that. That's incredible. Wow. Thank you so much for sharing everything to do with livable and how much y'all love to help tenants. If you have any questions about splitting up rent payments, please leave them in the comments down below. And don't forget

to like and subscribe.