Now you can pay your rent in Bitcoin

With Bitcoin mania in full frenzy, Williamsburg property management platform ManageGo announced Thursday morning it will implement a rent payment option to pay in Bitcoin, Ether or Litecoin through its app.

The company is treating the payment as a convenience for renters, rather than an investment. Chief Strategy Officer Chaim Lowenstein said the company converts the payments to USD overnight, rather than holding onto them.

“We tested out the API from Coinbase and saw that it’s doable and we could build it into our platform,” Lowenstein explained in a phone call. “We saw we could do this and take the risk out of it by converting it. … It would be like if someone wanted to pay with marbles and we could convert marbles overnight.”

ManageGo is not itself a property manager, but a service for property managers that digitizes processes such as rent collection and maintenance requests. Property managers of more than 6,000 buildings in the city use the company, which was founded in 2010. Lowenstein said his company sees this offering as one way of standing out from the competition.

“It fits the profile for the type of tenants we have and just doing a little surveying we saw there would be an interest,” he explained. “We thought this would be a next-level amenity for that type of audience and clientele.”