I know someone who's a landlord, and they have a very strong preference for direct debit (or some other sort of auto-pay), because it dramatically reduces the risk of non-payment. There are all manner and sorts of situations where the tenant might forget (or "forget") to pay their rent, or spend their paycheck too quickly (they set it up so that rent goes out of the account on pay day), or something else. There's no desire on my landlord-acquaintance's part to treat their tenants unfairly, it's simply a risk-mitigation strategy in a world where eviction is a long and expensive process, and a certain subset of the population knows how to exploit the system for as much free rent as possible.