SimpleRent brings real-time payment confirmation to property payments

When a tenant says a bond, an invoice, or another one-off charge has been paid, a property manager often can't confirm it straight away. Card payments and standard bank transfers can take a day or two to clear, and for most of that window there's no way to see whether the payment has actually landed. The ledger says one thing. The tenant says another.

For charges tied to a specific moment — a key handover, the close of a lease, an invoice that needs settling before a file shuts — that gap isn't just an inconvenience. It stalls the process.

That gap is closing faster elsewhere in the Australian economy than it is in property. The Reserve Bank's most recent survey of consumer payment behaviour found PayID use rose 18 percentage points in 2025, with around half of respondents reporting they'd used it in the past year, with much of that growth coming from older age groups that had previously been slower to adopt it. Australian Payments Plus, which operates the New Payments Platform that PayID runs on, reported the network processed nearly two billion real-time payments in 2025, with momentum continuing to build. Real-time, account-to-account payment has gone from a novelty to something a lot of Australians already reach for by default. One-off property payments are one of the categories still catching up.

SimpleRent Instant, a new payment option from SimpleRent, is built to close that gap. It uses PayID, Australia's real-time payment infrastructure, to confirm one-off payments as they happen rather than sometime after the fact.

"Property managers have always had to take a tenant's word that a payment has gone through," says Ben Skeggs, CEO of SimpleRent. "PayID gave us a way to make that verifiable, rather than assumed."

How it works

The process sits on top of the payment links agencies already send. A tenant receives a link for a bond, an invoice, or whatever the charge happens to be, and is directed to a payment page branded to the agency. SimpleRent Instant then generates a one-time PayID for that specific transaction. The tenant copies it into their own banking app and pays directly from their account — no card details, no new account to set up.

Because the payment runs through the New Payments Platform, confirmation is close to immediate: agencies typically see a payment status update in their portal within around sixty seconds, at any hour and on any day, including weekends. Each transaction is also pre-validated and monitored in real time through the same infrastructure banks use for their own transfers, which removes the need for a separate manual check on the agency's side.

Confirmation and settlement, though, are worth treating as separate questions. Seeing that a payment has been made is immediate. Having the funds actually clear into a trust account still follows standard banking rails — typically the next business day, rather than the two-day hold common with conventional transfers.

In practice, the payments this suits tend to share a common feature: a charge that sits outside the rent cycle and is tied to a specific point in a tenancy. Bond and entry payments are the clearest example, where confirmation is needed before keys are handed over rather than assumed on trust. Water invoices, utility charges, and other outgoings follow a similar logic — usage-based costs that need to be settled and confirmed without a follow-up email to chase a receipt. Maintenance and repair costs, break-lease and make-good charges, pet damage, and late fees all sit in the same category: payments that are often urgent enough that waiting on confirmation creates friction of its own, whether that's a file that can't close or a cost someone else is carrying in the meantime.

None of this changes the underlying mechanics of property management. Agencies still collect what's owed and tenants still pay it. What changes is the interval that's always sat between those two things — the period during which a payment may or may not have happened, and nobody could say for certain either way.

SimpleRent Instant is available from 1 October 2026. Further detail is available at simplerent.com.au/instant.