How do I record a tenancy on a managed unit?

Choose Tenancies under Property management. It answers who lives in each home you look after, for how long, and at what rent — and it is the record an owner statement is later built from, which is why it is kept rather than edited over.

Recording one

• Choose Record a tenancy.
• Choose the Unit, and give the Tenant and the Landlord.
• Give the dates it Starts and Ends. The end must be after the start.
• Give the Rent and choose the Rent cycle — per month, per week, per night or per year.
• Give the Deposit and the currency, if you hold one.
• Tick "Save as a draft, while the terms are still being agreed" if nothing is settled yet.

The landlord is a name you type rather than the unit's owner taken automatically, and that is deliberate: the person on the agreement and the person on the title are not always the same, and a managed home is often let by one of several owners.

Draft, then active

A draft is a proposal. Two candidates for one flat are two drafts, so drafts are allowed to overlap each other and to overlap a tenancy that is already running. Activate is where that stops being true: the CRM refuses to activate a second tenancy over the same dates and names the one already in force, which is the check that stops a home being let twice.

The rent cycle is recorded as agreed and never converted. A weekly rent stays weekly, and a statement reads the rent from the tenancy that was in force that month rather than the one in force today.

Renewing and ending

Renew creates a new tenancy and marks the old one as renewed, ending it the day before the new one starts. It is not an edit, and that is the point: the rent agreed for earlier months has to stay exactly as it was, or every statement for those months would quietly change. Leave the rent blank on a renewal to carry the current figure forward.

End the tenancy closes it on the date it was agreed to end. Ending it earlier than that is recorded as Ended early rather than as Ended, so the two are told apart afterwards. An ended tenancy stays in the list — ended and archived are different things, and a statement for an earlier month still needs it.

The deposit

A deposit is a figure you record and it shows as still held, or as returned on a date. Housing Market does not take it, hold it, protect it or pass it anywhere: the money stays wherever your agency or your landlord already keeps it, and this is a note of what that amount is.

What this screen does not do

• It does not collect the rent. Rent falling due is scheduled separately on the Rent tracking screen; recording a tenancy raises no charges by itself.
• It does not produce or sign the agreement. There is no tenancy document, template or signature here — contracts and signatures are the document vault, on the deal and the contact.
• It does not remind you that a tenancy is ending.
• There is no edit form once a tenancy exists, and nothing is deleted: Archive takes a tenancy out of the default list and Restore brings it back.

Rent is tracked and never collected. See "Does Housing Market collect rent from my tenants?".