Lovely app wants to help renters stop writing checks

To snag an apartment rental in San Francisco, tenants fill out page after page of applications. Some landlords require references to communicate by fax. And often that rent check is the only check tenants cut in a given month.

Despite San Francisco's love of the digital, a startling portion of the city's red hot rental market still relies on paper.

That's where a handful of startups come in.

Lovely is one of the companies trying to streamline the bumpy landlord-tenant paperwork process. Its goal is to become the place where renters find and apply for apartments by phone. And now it's trying to become the place where tenants go to pay rent as well.

In November, the company acquired Rentmatic, which allowed landlords to bill renters by phone. On Thursday, Lovely released a feature that lets tenants request that their landlords accept digital payment instead of putting checks in the mail.

Paying by phone is not a groundbreaking idea, but it's a lucrative one. Peer-to-peer payment systems such as Venmo or consumer-to-business systems like PayPal can make money by charging small transaction fees.

And it's also a move that could help Lovely become a payment platform not only between landlords and renters, but also between renters and renters.

When asked about Lovely's future features, as many CEOs are, Blake Pierson is cagey. But the implications are there - if each roommate already keeps payment details on the app, then Lovely can let the roommates pay each other, say for groceries.

"We are very aware of the roommate situation," Pierson says.

The payments market is one of the hottest in Silicon Valley. Rather than depend on the fickle budgets of advertisers, businesses in the payments space like PayPal can charge users for the convenience of a transaction.

Yet one of the hardest sells for any app is to get users to enter their payment details. Paying rent - to avoid writing that one check each month - is a fairly appealing reason to hand them over to Lovely.

Lovely deals with stiff competition, including Apartment List, which integrates with rental agencies from around the country and released a dating/housemate-finder Roommates app. And Craigslist remains the Internet's chief repository for rental listings and roommate searches.