Late fees aren’t always about making more money - they’re meant to promote prompt payment.
That might seem a little counterintuitive (and hard to explain to those tenants you’re charging a late fee), but it’s true. Late fees should be used as a way to encourage your tenants to pay on time.
To that end, sometimes it can be beneficial to a self storage operator to forgive a late fee, rather than pocketing the extra ten dollars. In those situations, our Late Fee Waiver Form makes record-keeping simple and quick!
Late fees encourage your tenants to pay on time – they give a monetary value to prompt payment, rather than trusting their courtesy. However, there will still be times when even well-meaning tenants fall behind. Giving loyal customers a break can be a great way to improve your overall customer experience, which contributes to long-term rentals and a good reputation.
As a part of our Self Storage Operator's Toolkit, the Late Fee Waiver Form helps you take care of your tenants and your business. We’ve put together this set of helpful sheets, checklists, and forms so that you don’t have to waste time typing up new versions for every unique situation.
This customizable form gives you a simple way to track which tenants have had late fees forgiven. Don’t wait until you’ve got a customer who says one thing and a manager who says another – implementing waivers gives you a hard copy to prove exactly what happened and when.
Our self storage late fee waiver form has plenty of room for you to record all the necessary information about the transaction. The default form also has a warning that this is a one-time exception that will not be repeated for additional late fees.
Having a form also makes the whole process feel more official. This way, it’ll come across as a policy decision, rather than something that can be wheedled out of a manager if the tenant just tries hard enough. Giving delinquent tenants a piece of paper with NO EXCEPTIONS on it might help get the point across.
Dealing with late tenants isn’t any fun. In fact, it can be downright frustrating - you provide them a nice, clean self storage unit, and they pay you a monthly fee! It should be simple. Unfortunately, there can be lots of small things that get in the way, from credit cards being declined to bills simply slipping through the cracks.
Late fees are your way of encouraging tenants to pay promptly. When otherwise perfect tenants fall behind for the first time, you can determine whether or not this is due to negligence or just bad luck. If it’s the latter, waiving the late fee can end up being better for your business in the long run.
Waiving the fee can generate good feelings from the customer towards your business. A single positive review on your Google Business Profile is worth far more than the ten or twenty dollars you’ve forgiven!
The Late Fee Waiver Form is just one of more than a dozen ways our Self Storage Operator's Toolkit can make running a self storage facility easier. All of our forms come from trusted self storage pros, and you can customize them all with your own information and branding!
For more great resources and information, check out the links below!
At StoragePug, we build self storage websites that make it easy for new customers to find you and easy for them to rent from you.
With Insights, our self storage marketing platform, operators get the data and digital tools they need to make the get out of their website and their self storage investment.
