Online Lease Agreements

Today we wanted to briefly discuss online leasing in the AppFolio database. This is a very powerful tool that needs to be set up and adopted by each AppFolio user. Here are a few tips we wish we would have known about years ago.

Tips for Setting Up Online Leases

1. 1Online leasing begins with your lease document. We recommend having a local real estate attorney draft a general lease that fits your company and owners' needs.

1. 1By "general lease," we mean have the attorney leave blanks where data needs to be entered — rent amount, deposit amount, pet addendum, etc.

1. 1Have your attorney deliver the lease to you in a Word document.

1. 1Transpose that Word document into AppFolio leaving clear blanks where data needs to be entered. Fill in blanks after to save time in building the doc.

1. 1Once all verbiage is entered, go back to the blanks and start using the pre-fill data options available. You may also create manual fields if you do not see an option. For example, if your lease asks how many pets a tenant will have, you would create a manual field and name it: "How Many Pets Does The Tenant Have? (Answer numerical only)." This way when creating a lease, you can manually enter the number.

1. 1Each page of a lease has an area to initial at the bottom. Keep this in mind when following along with the lease created for you. If that lease has 10 pages, your online lease should also have 10 pages.

Additional Tip

Let the attorney know about the AppFolio layout. You only have options for 1 signature spot and multiple initial spots.