We reviewed Urbanr before as the best-priced system for paying rent with a credit card; it’s just a 1.5% fee, and they even allow splitting rent across up to three credit cards. The major drawback is that they require your landlord to signup in order to process payments. They also don’t accept Amex.
We heard some information from a reader about temporary changes in the works:
- Urbanr will temporarily shut down their rent payment feature down for the entire month of June. Customers will be told they should continue to pay their rent in the fashion they had prior to Urbanr.
- The reason for this suspension is to upgrade their credit card verification system to properly verify billing information. The enhanced software will ask for additional verification on the card. (Was anyone was using VGC’s on Urbanr? Not sure if this change will affect that.)
- They will be bringing their service back after completing the upgrade, probably in July. The fee will not change from 1.5%. The change seems to be entirely from a fraud prevention angle.
Some of this information is slated to be sent out to Urbanr users in the next few days, I figured people would be interested in the heads-up, along with some of the background information.
I just need to stress that this information is not coming directly from Urbanr, it’s from a reader based on some research/communication on this matter. I assume it all to be true, but in the end we’ll have to wait and see.
The most interesting thing to me is that they indeed plan on keeping the 1.5% rate long term, as their CEO has claimed in the past. It’s difficult to understand how they manage that, but certainly nice to hear.
