Leases

How to record a signed lease, attach the documents, and read a unit's tenancy history.

Last updated: 2026-05-10

What a lease record is for

A lease record is your permanent log of one tenancy: who signed, for how much, for how long, with what attachments. Every lease that has ever existed on a unit stays on the unit's history forever, including past tenants.

Why this matters: when a landlord asks "what did 4B rent for in 2024 and who signed it," the answer is on the unit page, not buried in someone's inbox.

Recording a new lease

Two ways into the form. Both open the same right-side panel from the unit detail page.

• From the "Record lease" banner — when a unit is in leases_out status, a banner appears at the top of the unit page. Clicking it opens the panel pre-filled with what we already know.
• From the Leases card — on any unit, the Leases card has a "Record lease" button. Use this to back-fill a lease that didn't come through the deals flow. Typical reasons: a historical lease imported from an old spreadsheet, a lease that was signed before your brokerage was on Urbero, or a rental that closed outside the kanban flow so no deal was ever created.

In the panel, fill in:

1. Start date and end date.
2. Monthly rent — the gross monthly amount. Checked against the legal cap for this unit; if it's over the cap and you're not a brokerage admin with an override on file, the save is blocked with the verbatim reason.
3. Term in months — e.g. 12, 18, 24.
4. Primary tenant — the named contact. Pick from existing tenants or add a new one.
5. Co-tenants and guarantors — any number, each with their own role.

Save, and the lease is created. The unit transitions to rented.

The primary tenant

Every lease has exactly one primary tenant. They're the named contact for everything that touches the tenancy:

• The welcome packet emails to them.
• Weekly landlord digests and reports reference them.
• They're the contact in renewal pricing PDFs.

You can swap who is primary inside the Tenants section of a lease, but there's always one and only one.

Leases are append-only — corrections work differently

You don't edit a saved lease. Once recorded, the row is permanent. The principle is that the lease record is your account of what was true at that moment; rewriting history makes the record useless.

If a lease has a real correction (wrong end date, wrong rent, wrong tenant), record a new lease with the right values. The old row stays in place as part of the history. On the Leases card you'll see both — the most recent is the one in force.

Attaching documents

Each lease accepts PDF attachments for the signed lease and supporting documents (rider, application, addendum, etc.). Open the lease row in the Leases card and use the upload button. Files live in private storage; only people who can view the unit can download them.

What happens when a unit re-vacates

When a lease ends and the unit empties out:

1. The unit's status flips to vacant.
2. The old lease row stays exactly as it was.
3. Photos auto-archive so you can start fresh for the next listing without losing the previous shoot.

The next tenancy gets a new lease record. The unit page will show both leases in its history, newest first.

The welcome packet sends automatically

When you finalize a lease, the new primary tenant gets an email with the building's welcome packet — move-in instructions, key release, house rules, any lease addenda the brokerage admin has uploaded for that building.

Links in that email are signed and expire after 60 days. They're tied to the recipient, so a forwarded email won't let a third party download anything.

If the building has no welcome-packet documents uploaded yet, no email goes out. Brokerage admins manage that bundle from the building detail page.

Who can record leases

See also

• Deals — the funnel that leads up to recording a lease
• Renewals — what to do as a lease end-date approaches
• Comp report — context on the rent-cap gate that runs on every lease save
• Notifications — the welcome-packet email fires off the lease-recorded event