ESTAS Newsletter Edition 26

Rental scams are on the rise. Action Fraud, the UK’s national reporting centre for fraud and cybercrime, reports a 23% increase in cases from 2021 to 2022, averaging 15 a day in 2022.

Letting agencies, which handle billions of client money annually, are particularly at risk. What can they do to minimise it? No business owner wants to put undue stress or responsibility on their employees to combat fraud in such pressured circumstances. But help is at hand.

For 20 years, PayProp has helped business owners keep their employees safe from accusations of fraud and their clients’ money secure in a few simple steps. The best part? Our bank-integrated payment automation lets you easily manage your risk in just 15 minutes, tops!

1. Defined and detailed user permissions

User permissions are crucial for protecting your employees, and PayProp offers full control over access and the actions they can take on the platform. You can adjust how many users it takes to perform important actions and what permissions they need.

Thanks to our granular permission settings you can, for example, enforce a separation of duties for certain actions or transactions. That means no one employee can complete a task alone or perform risky combinations of actions, such as creating new bank details for a landlord AND paying them.

2. Enhanced client money segregation

In the UK holding client funds separately from agency money is a legal requirement. PayProp takes this to the next level, protecting your agency from unwittingly paying money out of pooled client accounts to landlords when it has not actually received it in rent for that property.

Every penny is accounted for and reconciled to a specific property, so that it can only be paid out to the owners of that property or other specified recipients. This stops colleagues from accidentally paying landlord A with landlord B’s rent money and helps to prevent bad actors from using social engineering to convince an employee to pay money into a fraudulent account.

3. Undeletable logs to protect your business

PayProp's audit log provides a comprehensive record of user actions, including who did what and when, from login onwards – and stores it forever. Records are immutable, ensuring visibility even if users are removed. PayProp’s latest feature, the communications log, also tracks outgoing emails, detailing each message's timing, recipients, and interactions, providing valuable evidence in case anything is disputed by a tenant or landlord.

Regularly reviewing your audit log summary, whether weekly or monthly, will give you total visibility over all user actions, making red flags easier to catch and protecting your employees from false accusations.

4. Credit note control

Thanks to PayProp’s bank integration, there will very rarely be a need for an agent to create a credit note. If the money has been paid, it will show in your client account. You can restrict credit note creation to authorised personnel. All credit notes are logged in PayProp's audit log, enabling easy review of reasons entered during monthly activity checks.

5. Safe tenancy deposits

Deposits are protected by law and covered by insurance. With our bank integration and detailed reports, you have full oversight of every deposit and withdrawal made with PayProp.

Security or damage deposits should only be used to pay for any necessary repairs after a tenant has moved out of a property, and the balance must be paid out to the tenant, so keeping control of these insured amounts is key.

To give you that control, PayProp's security deposit reports simplify the tracking of payments and balances. Checking this report helps ensure the accuracy and validity of deposit requests and approvals throughout the tenancy.

15 minutes a month buys you ongoing peace of mind

Letting agencies face rising fraud risks, so business owners need to be hands-on to mitigate it. And it’s not just money that’s on the line – the damage to your reputation or your employee’s trust can be irreversible. But thanks to PayProp, you can personally safeguard your agency and protect your team with very little effort.

Just 15 minutes a month can spare you a lifetime of headaches.
To get started: book a demo.

Homemade Focaccia Bread

One of my new year resolutions was to start making my own bread. Which, if you’re a beginner like me, can be quite the minefield. There are endless recipes, types of bread and methods out there, it’s hard not to fall into a rabbit hole.

So, I started off with this very simple yet effective focaccia recipe which requires very little knowledge of breadmaking or skill. Woo! The outcome was delicious, and I now make it most weekends. Give it a try!

Recipe: