From 19% to 74% in three months: how residents moved payments into the app

When we enter a new market, one of the things we watch closely is how quickly residents change their everyday habits.

Payments are particularly interesting because people usually already have a way to pay. It may not be convenient, but it works — which means switching to something new requires the new option to be noticeably easier.

At one property where we recently launched Unitify, with around 1,000 apartments, the transition happened much faster than we expected.

The share of all monthly payments made through the resident app was:

June — 19% July — 37% August — 74%

By the first days of September, it was already around 82%.

So in just three months, the majority of resident payments had moved into the app.

And this wasn’t the result of forcing residents to change their habits. The previous payment methods remained available, there were no penalties for using them, and there was no dedicated campaign pushing everyone to switch.

Residents simply chose the easier option.

What were they doing before?

The main alternatives were cash and bank transfers.

Paying in cash often means physically going to the management company’s office. And if you normally use a card, there is an extra step before that: finding an ATM and withdrawing the money.

A bank transfer is easier, but it still creates friction. A resident has to enter the payment details or, where available, scan a QR code from the invoice and complete the payment through their bank.

In the Unitify resident app, the charge is already there.

The resident opens it and pays using the payment methods available on their phone. There is no need to search for an invoice, copy account details or visit an office.

The difference sounds small. But monthly payments are exactly the kind of repetitive task where removing a few unnecessary steps matters.

Payments are only half of the problem

There is another pattern we see in a number of the markets where we operate: property-management billing itself is often still highly manual.

In some companies, charges are calculated and tracked in Excel.

For a small portfolio, that may be manageable. But as the number of units grows, so does the complexity.

Who has been charged? Who has paid? Which payment belongs to which invoice? Does the resident still have an outstanding balance? Was a payment entered twice — or not entered at all?

Processes that are tolerable at 100 units can become painful at 1,000 and increasingly risky at 10,000.

That is why Unitify has its own billing system, connected directly to the resident app.

The workflow is straightforward:

The management company creates a charge → the resident sees it → the resident pays → the payment is recorded back in billing.

There is no separate payment layer that then has to be reconciled manually with another system.

Billing and payments should not be separate workflows

A convenient payment method reduces friction for the resident.

A proper billing system reduces operational work for the management company.

Connecting the two removes friction on both sides.

It makes it easier for residents to pay when a charge appears and easier for the management company to understand, in real time, what has been billed, what has been paid and what is still outstanding.

The jump from 19% to 74% of payments made in-app in three months is interesting to us not just as an adoption metric.

It shows something more basic: people usually don’t need much persuasion to change a routine when the new routine is genuinely easier.

And in property management, making it easier to pay is one of the simplest places to start.