Rental Property Payments Made Simpler

Dvora, a resident-services company, has a mobile app that is designed to make life hassle-free for tenants of their buildings. Residents can book building services, discover and RSVP to events, reserve spaces, and more.

Challenge

As the app grew in complexity, Dvora realized they needed a payment system that gave more control and flexibility to residents, landlords, property managers and service providers. Their different users needed to be able to do things such as:

• accepting payments from their residents without having to leave the app
• accommodating multiple custom user flows for payments and receivables
• scheduling future rent subscriptions and custom proration
• applying automatic late fees to subscriptions with varying configurations
• allowing residents to have control over automatic vs. manual charges on a per subscription basis
• allowing residents to make payments to different businesses without having to re-enter a payment method for each business

It was clear that Dvora had outgrown a one-size-fits-all payments approach and needed a tailored solution.

Solution

As a Stripe-certified team, the Echobind team was able to understand all of Dvora’s challenges and business functionality requirements to develop payment flow diagrams and user flows.  Mapping this out for the Dvora team allowed us to validate and determine which Stripe products were necessary.

We determined that developing a secure and scalable microservice that contains REST API endpoints to interact with Stripe’s API would be the best solution. We utilized the following Stripe products during our implementation:

• Stripe Connect: helps landlords and property managers with smoother payouts to service providers.
• Stripe Elements: provides the ability to collect payments directly in Dvora’s app without leaving the app for a seamless experience.
• Stripe Billing: allows for managing subscriptions and generating invoices for residents.

Result

With their newly rebuilt payment system, the Dvora app is now a first-of-its-kind platform that allows landlords, property managers, and service providers to easily make and receive payments customized to their specific needs.

In the end, all parties that used the app now had what they needed:

• Service providers were able to receive direct charges into their Stripe Connect account and were responsible for managing refunds and disputes
• Landlords and property managers could split payments between multiple deposit accounts
• Renters were able to easily pay one lump sum and know that their payments were being distributed accordingly—without having to make multiple payments to various accounts.

Last but not least, the payment solution we built relied on Stripe to do all of the heavy lifting (communicating with card providers, facilitating transactions and all of the other great things Stripe can do). This allowed Dvora to keep focusing on their central mission: making the lives of residents easier.

💡Visit our Stripe partnership page to learn more about Echobind’s expertise in building Stripe implementations.