RentPay: Flexible Rent Payments for Aussie Renters

Renters have been stuck paying rent like it is 1995

About a third of Australians rent, and until recently the way they paid rent looked nothing like the way they pay for everything else in their lives. No app. No choice. No reward for doing it well. Just bank details in an email, a direct debit you cannot control, and the hope that nothing bounces.

So when I sat down with Shane Lavagna-Slater of RentPay for The Proptech Podcast, what struck me was not the payment rails they’ve created. It was the idea that rent – the biggest, most reliable payment in most renters' lives – has been doing nothing for the people making it.

The problem is bigger than a bounced direct debit

Shane framed it plainly: "32%, 33% of all Australians rent. Huge market." Add rental increases and cost-of-living pressure, and the payment method stops being an administrative detail and starts being part of the affordability conversation.

On the other side of the ledger sit property managers, spending real hours reconciling and receipting rent, water and bond payments, chasing unknown funds, part payments, dishonours and clawbacks. It is the sort of work nobody went into property management to do.

RentPay is a dual-sided app owned by rent.com.au, the listed rental portal, and has been running in its current form for around three years. Shane joined as general manager after a career in credit, banking and finance and a stint teaching finance on MBA programs at UWA and ECU. He describes the app's job as flexibility and reward for renters at the front end, and "accuracy, certainty, and simplicity" for agents at the back end.

How rentpay actually works

Renters get eight ways to pay. There is a flat $2 per month subscription that includes unlimited direct debits and PayID. Where surcharges apply – credit card, BPAY, Alipay, WeChat Pay, UnionPay – they are passed through. As Shane put it: "RentPay, we don't make money off of moving money."

That line is worth pausing on, because it is exactly the distinction regulators are starting to draw between proptechs that add value and proptechs that clip the ticket.

The features that interested me most sit on top of the payment. Renters can drip extra money into a wallet to build a buffer against uncertain income. A credit score builder lets consistent rent payments contribute positively to a credit score. There is cashback on utility bills paid through the app, plus a rewards program across around 140 retailers offering cash discounts between 3 and 15 per cent — and crucially, those discounts go towards the next rent payment, not a points scheme nobody redeems.

Agencies can also migrate their whole rent roll and pay the $2 themselves, making the app free for renters — which Shane argues still saves them money once you count transaction and back-end costs and the person sitting there reconciling.

Shane's best example was not a statistic. It was a hospitality worker he met on the weekend who uses the app because she cannot predict her shifts: "she puts $20 into her Rentpay wallet every week additional so that she has one week's rent saved up."

For agencies, rent is collected and paid over in a single daily batch payment into the trust account, with an ABA pay file compatible with PropertyTree, PropertyMe and Console. Drag the file in, and reconciliation and receipting happen automatically. RentPay aims to cut admin from around two hours a day to about 15 minutes. And because they collect the money first, agents only ever receive cleared funds — no part payments, no clawbacks.

Why better rental payment options matter for the Australian property industry

I have spent time recently with the New South Wales Rental Commissioner and an advisory committee discussing fairness, equality and data privacy in rentals, and anything that costs renters money is viewed very dimly right now. Shane expects that scrutiny to bite: he told me there are providers "charging exorbitant fees and charging variable fees and really compounding the problem" for renters, and that it will come to light very soon. I think legislation and regulation will follow.

Which is why fee transparency is now a competitive asset, not a compliance chore. So is trust accounting. RentPay holds renter funds in its own trust account and only ever pays over to a registered real estate agency's trust account, so those funds sit under state-based consumer protection laws.

Then there is PayTo, which Shane sees as a genuine disruptor to direct debit – instant payment, with the authority sitting with the consumer rather than whoever holds the debit form. Rather than every agency keeping pace with each new payment method, RentPay absorbs that arms race and releases new options across the rent roll. Their next evolution, Shane says, is a mortgage builder: buffer, credit score, deposit.

Reflecting on Rentpay

Rental affordability will not be fixed by a payment app, and Shane was honest that he cannot see an end to the pressure any time soon. But there is something quietly significant about infrastructure that lets a gig worker, an international student or a new arrival pay rent flexibly and finish their tenancy in better financial shape than they started.

For years, renting has been the part of the property market where paying on time earned you nothing but the right to keep renting. Tools that turn that behaviour into savings, a credit score and eventually a deposit are doing something the industry has talked about and rarely delivered.

Renters do not want to go back to the '90s just to pay their rent. Good on RentPay for noticing.

You can listen to the full episode of The Proptech Podcast with Shane Lavagna-Slater on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

More from this episode: read the show notes or read the full transcript.