Create a lease

A lease connects a tenant to a unit and drives everything downstream: rent charges, late fees, the tenant portal balance, and the accounting. Open Leases in the sidebar and click through to the new-lease page. Creating leases requires the leases.manage permission.

Pick the unit and tenant

• Property and Unit — two dropdowns; only units available for lease appear. Choosing a unit prefills Monthly Rent and Security Deposit from the unit's defaults (you can override both).
• Primary Tenant — select an existing tenant, or click + Add tenant to create one without losing your work; the form restores your draft when you return.
• People on this lease — add co-tenants, Co-signers, Occupants, or a Landlord / Owner signer. Each row has a checkbox controlling whether that person needs to sign, and the primary tenant has its own "needs to sign" checkbox.

Lease type

Lease type offers Standard and Section 8 / Housing Choice Voucher. Choosing Section 8 opens an HCVP panel where you enter the PHA and the rent split — the housing assistance payment plus the tenant portion must equal the contract rent before the lease will save as Section 8.

Terms

• Start Date and End Date — End automatically follows Start at one year out until you edit it yourself.
• Monthly Rent and Security Deposit.
• Rent Due Day (1–28), Late Fee (%), and Grace Period (days).
• First month — appears only when the lease starts mid-cycle: choose Prorate to days occupied (default), Charge full month, or Custom amount.
• At lease end — what happens when the term ends (for example converting to month-to-month or expiring).
• Recurring fees (parking, pet rent — monthly, quarterly, or yearly) and One-time fees & credits (admin fees, move-in credits). Amounts are always entered positive; pick Credit to subtract.
• Pets, Addenda, and Notes round out the form.

Autosave

The form autosaves as a draft about a second after each edit, once the minimum is in place (unit, tenant, dates, and rent). A save-state indicator answers "did my work save?" — and your in-progress values also survive a page detour in this browser tab. The one exception: commercial CAM leases turn autosave off and use an explicit Save draft lease button instead.

Save, sign, activate

Turn on Send for signing on save to flow straight from Done into attaching the lease document and sending it for signatures. Leave it unchecked and Done saves a draft and lands you on the lease page, where you can send it for signatures or activate it later.

A lease doesn't start charging rent until it's activated. From the lease's page, use Send for Signing to collect signatures, then Activate — or activate directly if you handled signatures on paper. Activation also emails the tenant a link to set up their portal account.