Nothing tires many like standing on long queues in banks to pay rent at the end of the month.
But the headache is not only for tenants. Managing rentals is a tedious activity and often involves marketing vacant houses, issuing tenancy agreements, recording and billing varying bills like water and fixed bills like garbage, collecting rent and issuing receipts.
However, these hustles are a thing of the past, thanks to a rent payment application called Manyatta Rent.
Developed by IT expert Stephen Nge’the, the app helps tenants pay rent and landlords manage rent collections.
“The idea got birthed when I was in Standard Seven. My mother had just finished building rental units in Nyandarua,” says Ng’ethe, a software developer.
His mother was initially determined to be a D-I-Y (Do It Yourself) landlord, but six months later, the day-to-day management of the property became a nightmare as she found dealing with tenants very frustrating.
Ng’ethe says it got so bad that at some point she would spend more than five days each month following up with tenants that were mostly making fake bank deposit slips or playing hide-and-seek.
She eventually hired a property agent on commission but two months later, the directors of the property management firm disappeared with one month’s rent collections and tenants’ deposits.
“While designing an app for a friend who is a property agent who faced similar pressures like my mother, I came up with the idea of Manyatta Rent to ease people’s work,” says Ng’ethe, a graduate of computer technology from Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology.
The app, which is now available on Android Google Playstore, will soon to be available on USSD.
A landlord needs a smart device (laptop, tablet or a smart phone) to log on to www.manyattarent.co.ke and sign up. From here, a landlord uploads rental details and tenant details.
The landlord can see in real-time that the tenant has paid rent and the money is credited to their account on request.
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