When Per Drake Nevrin moved to New York from Stockholm last year, he wasn’t bedazzled by the bright lights or the big city. He was mostly surprised by how technologically backward the city is – especially compared to Sweden, which boasts the highest Internet penetration in the world.

“I paid for everything online in Sweden,” Mr. Drake Nevrin said. “It was really rare to see anyone use a check. When I got my checking account in New York, I think it was the first time I had a checkbook in 10 years. Even taxis in Stockholm started accepting credit cards five or six years ago.”

While New York has seen major technological advancements in recent years – residents can now pay their traffic tickets online or even download an application for a dog license – the rent check is one of the few payments most still have to make with a 37-cent stamp instead of the click of a mouse. Some find it bewildering. New Yorkers have a voracious appetite for anything that will save time, but many landlords have been slow to accept rent online. It would certainly simplify their job: Online payments get processed more quickly, and there’s less leeway for excuses from tenants about why their rent was late (“The stamp must have come off in the mail!”).

“Most of our landlords still like to physically pick up the check,” a Brooklyn-based real estate agent with Northside Plaza, Randy Ossowski, said. “I know some landlords who will put envelopes under tenants’ doors a couple days before rent is due, just to make sure they get it. They’re old school. They didn’t grow up paying bills online, and they may not be comfortable with technology.”

In spite of resistance from many landlords, technology is creeping into the business, whether they like it or not. At least two major real estate companies, including the Related Companies and Bellmarc, have set up systems allowing tenants to pay rent online. Bellmarc, which manages 5,000 apartments in New York City, allows tenants to automatically debit rent or maintenance charges from their checking accounts. Alternatively, the president of property management at Bellmarc, John Janangelo, said tenants also can go online and make the payments themselves.

“We thought of it as an enhanced service,” Mr. Janangelo said. “It gets the money in quicker, so it benefits the building as well as the tenant.”

Similarly, the management division of the Related Companies, which oversees more than 21,000 apartments, introduced a program two years ago that allows tenants to pay rent using American Express credit cards. Under the program, renters can use their credit cards to pay online, offline, or through an automatic payment option, and by doing so, they can earn membership reward points.

“The main reason we did this was that we thought it addressed the way people live and manage their money,” a vice chairman at the Related Companies, David Wine, said. “It’s a tremendously popular program with our residents. Now they can earn points for merchandise by paying the same bill they would have been paying anyway.”

Still, countless landlords are resistant to change. Almost anyone with a checking account can make payments online, but if the recipient can not take payments online, the bank will have to print the check and send it by snail mail, which defeats the purpose of online banking. Today, very few New York City landlords are equipped to accept online payments, either from a credit card or a checking account.

“I haven’t heard of any landlords who accept online payments,” the manager of Douglas Elliman’s rental department, Yuval Greenblatt, said. “In New York, real estate is an old business, and landlords in Manhattan are very traditional.”

That’s not to say online rental payments won’t become commonplace within a few years. Even the New York City Housing Authority, which serves about 175,000 families and 417,000 residents, is considering an online system.

“It’s being discussed at the highest levels,” a spokesman for the Housing Authority, Howard Marder, said. “We’re actively researching the technical requirements needed for it. You will probably see it down the road – maybe even in a year or two – but right now we’re researching it.”