Students Given Opportunity to Pay Rent Through Facebook
Campus Apartments now allows residents to pay rent on its online account portal SmartClick via Facebook Connect.
By Jessica Fiur, News Editor
Philadelphia—Now students have another reason to be on social media: Campus Apartments, a privately held student housing company, now allows residents to pay rent on its online account portal SmartClick via Facebook Connect.
According to John Ailor, senior director of Web technology, Campus Apartments, all Campus Apartments residents have access to SmartClick when they sign their lease, and they can then connect it to their Facebook accounts, making it easier to pay rent and make service requests.
In addition, residents can set up their accounts so that multiple people have access, so whoever is responsible for paying rent can do it from their own computer.
“The minute you’re set up, you can set up other people who will have access to that account,” Ailor tells MHN. “They’ll have their own user name and password. So if your parent is paying your rent, you can set them up right away, so that they can pay your rent for you.”
The accounts can be paid every month by credit card or by direct deposit.
“We get a pretty good percentage of people using the direct debit, but we still get a lot of people who take a check into the office,” Ailor says. “As a company, the less of that, the better.”
Though some people still use the old fashioned method to pay their rent, Ailor predicts that more and more residents will start to pay via social media.
“It’s a whole lot better for everybody,” he says. “We see in our population, Facebook is everywhere—everybody has it. We also do a lot with Twitter, but frankly it’s nothing compared to Facebook. But we will soon make it so you can connect with your Smartclick account to Twitter, Facebook and Google+, and any other social media that comes around. But we started with Facebook because it’s just universal.”