Now you can pay your rent with Apple Pay
Once a month, most renters have to dig out their checkbooks, place a check in an envelope, put a stamp on that envelope, and put it in a mailbox. For millennials, this process feels like a bingo card of outdated, annoying technologies.
Enter RadPad, a Los Angeles-based rental listing app startup that thinks there's a better way - the option to pay your rent from your phone, using a credit card, debit card, or, most recently, Apple Pay.
With Apple Pay, you simply tap a single button in the app, press your finger to your phone's Touch ID pad and the credit or debit card you registered with Apple Pay is charged. RadPad takes the money, plus a 2.99% fee if you use a credit card, and then writes and mails a check to your landlord.
For the user, it takes "90 seconds or less," says Eppers. It's a lot easier for the younger crowd, for whom mobile payments are becoming the norm. In fact, 80% of RadPad users are under 34 years old.
So far this year, RadPad has processed $60 million in rents via the Pay with RadPad feature in its Android and iOS app.
Today, RadPad announced an additional $9 million in Series A funding, led by Altpoint Ventures, which also invested in car service Lyft. RadPad co-founder and CEO Jonathan Eppers credits this round, which brings the company's total funding to $13 million, to the success of these mobile payments.
"For the first time, people are seeing that users are using us for more than just finding a place," says Eppers.
RadPad first added the ability to pay rent back in the fall of 2014. Nowadays, it's free to use a debit card - it used to cost $4.95 per month - and it charges 2.99% for a credit card. That credit card fee isn't cheap: If you pay $2,000 in rent, that amounts to just under $60 per month that RadPad takes on top.
Apple is bullish on RadPad - it actually took the startup to its Cupertino headquarters ahead of the official Apple Pay launch to show them what they were up to, giving them the chance to become one of the earliest apps to integrate the payment service. RadPad is now featured in the App Store as one of the top apps to use Apple Pay.
RadPad's other business is in apartment listings, which Eppers describes as way more modern than the competition. He says that finding a rental can be "a full-time job," and that RadPad is designed to help renters find their place, and then to help them pay their rents every month. 60% of all RadPad users come back to use it monthly, Eppers says.
"They keep using us until they've bought a home and got out of the rental market," Eppers says.
Goldcrest Investments also participated in this round.