Documentation / Leases

 

Leases

A Lease associates a Unit with a Tenant and allows you to record the agreed-upon terms such as Rent Amount, Begin and End Dates, the Security Deposit Amount, the Late Fee Policy, and the Grace Period*. From the Lease Profile, you will see all of this information, progress meters showing your time elapsed and rent collected, and you will see a finanancial summary which includes the average number of days that rent is past-due.

*This does not constitute a legally-binding lease document. Greenhouse PM will only allow you to record information about leases that you've already established.

Leases come in 3 different types: Monthly (most-common), Weekly, and Daily. The lease type controls how the Lease Schedule is constructed by breaking out payments at the monthly, weekly, or daily level. You are also able to create open-ended leases by simply leaving the End Date blank when creating a new lease or renewing an existing lease.

The Lease Schedule

When a new lease is created, Greenhouse PM will automatically break out your lease terms into monthly payments and create the Lease Schedule. It is important to note that this Schedule does not create any Accounting transactions, but rather serves as the guide for when rent is due, how much is due, and whether a late fee applies. Accounting transactions are created whenever you record Rent Received (either via the main Overview or from the Lease Profile) and late fees are automaticaly calculated based on the received date that you select.

The Lease Schedule can also be modified. Say, for example, a Tenant has communicated with you that next month's rent will need to be a week late. If you agree to not impose a late fee for this payment, you can simply edit the Scheduled Date for that particular payment moving it one week later, and Greenhouse PM will automatically take this new date into account when calculating late fees.

Late Fee Policies

Greenhouse PM allows you to specify a One-Time late fee, a Recurring late fee, or a One-Time/Recurring late fee combination. This gives you the flexibility to decide how you would like to structure your late fees for each individual lease. Also, each different fee can be expressed either in a dollar amount or a percentage of the underlying scheduled payment amount.

One-Time late fees are simply fees that are assessed once for each individual scheduled payment. For example, if a lease has a One-Time late fee of $75, on the first day after the grace period Greenhouse PM will calculate a $75 total fee. If the payment is indeed late, this fee will be $75 regardless of when rent is recorded.

Recurring late fees are multiplied by a factor to produce a fee that increases based on the amount of time that has elapsed past the grace period. For example, if a $500/mth lease has a Recurring fee of 5% every 2 days, Greenhouse PM will calculate a fee of $25 on the first day late, $50 on the third day late, $75 on the fifth day late, etc.

One-Time/Recurring fees are simply a combination of One-Time fees and Recurring Fees. This allows you to specify a Base Fee (say, $50) with an additional Recurring Fee (say, $10/day). For example, if a $500/mth lease has a One-Time/Recurring fee with a Base Fee of $50 and a recurring fee of 5% every 2 days, Greenhouse PM will calculate a fee of $50 on the first day late, $75 on the third day late, $100 on the fifth day late, etc.

*When setting up your new Late Fee Policies, you can specify both the dollar-amount fees and the percentage-based fees in whole numbers. You do not have to input a 10% fee as ".10".