Property Tech Glossary

Property management borrows its words from real estate, accounting, consumer credit, housing law and software, and the same word shifts with context: a tenant is a household to a landlord and a management company to a platform, a waterfall is an investor distribution in one chapter and a military housing eligibility order in another, and a master policy means different coverage for a rental owner and for an association. Entries are grouped by the part of the volume that explains them, alphabetized within each group, and each is one line and a link to the chapter that owns the idea. The volume's own names for the core records (tenant, legal entity, property, unit, household, lease, charge, payment application, work order) are the ones in The Core Data Model.

The Business#

• AI tier: a priced platform tier of agentic features sold above the core subscription, whose cost a third-party manager then has to allocate to the owners whose properties used it (The Software Landscape).
• API as a plan feature: API access sold to the customer as part of an upper plan, so the customer's own integrations need no partnership with the vendor (The Software Landscape).
• Base fee (management fee): the manager's recurring fee under a management agreement, typically a percentage of gross receipts as that agreement defines them, computed from the property's ledger (The Property Business).
• Build, buy or extend: the vendor decision; buy when your segments and operating model match a vendor's first customers, extend when the core fits and one band doesn't, build when the operating model is the advantage and no vendor's model fits (The Software Landscape).
• Building: one structure inside a property; a scattered-site property has one per house (The Property Business).
• Centralization: moving leasing, accounting, invoice processing, compliance review and utility billing from each property's office to a central team, the vendor or an outsourcer, so grants are scoped by function and portfolio rather than by site (The Software Landscape).
• Charge: an amount actually posted to a lease's ledger, from a schedule or one-off, immutable and corrected only by a reversing charge (The Property Business).
• Charge code: an entry in the tenant's catalog of what can be charged (rent, a fee, a deposit, a utility, an ancillary service, a concession) (The Property Business).
• Charge schedule: a recurring charge the lease promises, such as rent, pet rent or parking; a schedule is a promise, a posted charge is a fact (The Property Business).
• Down unit: a unit that isn't rentable because it is under renovation or damaged; models, offices (non-revenue) and employee units are their own statuses; it leaves available inventory but stays in the owned count, with the reason recorded (The Property Business).
• Effective gross income: gross potential rent less vacancy loss, concessions and bad debt, plus other income (The Property Business).
• Embedded revenue (transaction revenue): what a software vendor earns per use from payments, screening, insurance and similar services, as a percentage of the transaction or a flat fee, often paid by the resident or applicant (The Property Business).
• Front office: the band that owns listings, websites, leads, tours and the leasing conversation (The Software Landscape).
• Household: the people who live together, kept across renewals and transfers, whose membership can change during a lease (The Property Business).
• Investor: puts capital into an owning entity without running it, and needs capital accounts, distributions and reporting across managers (The Property Business).
• Landlord of record: the legal entity that is landlord on a lease as of signing, usually the property's owner of record (The Property Business).
• Lease: the contract for a unit for a term, with a landlord of record and a price; never edited into a different deal, so a renewal or a transfer is a new lease (The Property Business).
• Lease member: a person's role on a lease (leaseholder, occupant or guarantor) over time, so roommates can join and leave mid-term (The Property Business).
• Leaseholder, occupant, guarantor: the resident roles on a lease: a leaseholder signs and is financially responsible, an occupant lives there without financial responsibility (minors are always occupants), and a guarantor pays without living there (The Property Business).
• Legal entity: a party that holds title, signs, banks and files taxes: the manager, an owning LLC, a fund, an association or an individual owner (The Property Business).
• Occupied, on notice: a unit whose household has given notice or isn't renewing; it is back on the market while still lived in, so it can be pre-leased (The Property Business).
• Operator: the organization that runs a property day to day, either an owner-operator for its own properties or a third-party manager for a fee (The Property Business).
• Other income: fees, parking, storage, utility reimbursements and services, added to rent income on the way to effective gross income (The Property Business).
• Owner: holds title to a property: an individual, an LLC or partnership, a REIT, a fund, a housing authority or an association (The Property Business).
• Owner of record: the entity on the deed, which usually is landlord on the lease; who owns that entity is a separate, effective-dated chain of ownership shares (The Property Business).
• Ownership share: which entity owns how much of another entity, over time, chaining upward from the owner of record to funds and investors (The Property Business).
• Payment application: the record of what part of a payment paid which charge; payments are applied to charges, never assigned to them (The Property Business).
• Point solution: a product that does one band better than a suite module (an AI leasing agent, fraud detection, smart locks) and lives on the suite's integration terms (The Software Landscape).
• Portfolio: the tenant's grouping tree of regions, owner groups and funds, down which configuration inherits with explicit overrides (The Property Business).
• Pre-leased: a unit on notice that is already leased to the next household while the current one still lives there (The Property Business).
• Property: a managed asset with one owner of record and one jurisdiction, such as an apartment community, a scattered-site group of houses, an association, a shopping center or a storage facility; the rule boundary (The Property Business).
• Rentable space: space rented alongside a unit (a parking space, a garage, a storage locker), put on a lease's charge schedule and not counted for occupancy (The Property Business).
• Resident: the household that lives in a unit: leaseholders, occupants and guarantors who pay but don't live there (The Property Business).
• Resident ledger: a view over the double-entry ledger of one lease's receivable, built from charges, payments and their applications, never a balance column (The Property Business).
• Suite: a product that sells most bands on one database, with one login, one resident, one ledger and one set of permissions (The Software Landscape).
• System of record: the band that owns the lease and the money (properties, units, leases, resident ledgers, owner and entity accounting); an operator has exactly one per property (The Software Landscape).
• Tenant: in the multi-tenancy sense, the management company (or self-managing owner) using the platform and the isolation boundary; the owners it works for are legal entities inside it (The Property Business).
• Unit: what is leased and counted for occupancy: an apartment, a house, a suite, a storage unit or a lot; it outlives every lease on it (The Property Business).
• Vacancy loss: rent lost on units nobody was paying for, subtracted from gross potential rent (The Property Business).
• Vacant, leased: a rentable unit with a signed future lease, held for a move-in date while the make-ready finishes (The Property Business).
• Vacant, not leased: a rentable, empty unit with no future lease; every day there is vacancy loss (The Property Business).
• Vendor: a business the operator buys from and pays: contractors, suppliers, utilities, insurers and screening agencies (The Property Business).
• Work order: maintenance to be done at a unit or a common area, from a resident, staff, an inspection, preventive maintenance or a make-ready (The Property Business).

Properties, Owners and Investors#

• Accessible unit: a unit tracked with its specific accessibility feature set, not a yes/no, so the platform can show which units have which features and that they were offered first to households that need them (Portfolios, Properties & Units).
• Accredited investor, Rule 506(c): the Regulation D exemption that lets an issuer broadly solicit an offering if every purchaser is accredited and the issuer takes reasonable steps to verify it, so the platform keeps the basis claimed and how it was verified (Investors, Funds & Asset Management).
• Allocated cost: a cost the manager incurs for many properties (central leasing, a shared crew, an AI tier) charged to each owner by a rule with a base and a period, and only where the owner's agreement allows it (Owners & Management Agreements).
• Allocation (shared cost): a pooled cost divided among properties by a rule with a base (units, square feet, hours, work orders, interactions), a period and a property list, stored with its inputs so each share can be recomputed (Budgets, Forecasts & Capital Projects).
• Approved budget: the frozen budget version that is the authority for spending and the baseline for variance all year; a mid-year change is a reforecast or an approved amendment, never an edit (Budgets, Forecasts & Capital Projects).
• Area measurement method: the standard an area was measured under (inside walls, centerlines, with or without a share of common space; BOMA publishes standards per property type), stored with every area so differently measured areas are never mixed in one ratio (Portfolios, Properties & Units).
• Asset manager: the person working for the owner who judges a property against its plan (budget versus actual, reforecast, leasing and pricing, capital returns) and decides whether to hold, refinance or sell (Investors, Funds & Asset Management).
• Beneficiary: the person or entity with a legal claim on each balance in a trust account (the owner for collected rent, the resident for deposits and prepaid rent, the broker for its own permitted funds) (Trust Accounting & the General Ledger).
• Beneficiary record: the chronological per-beneficiary ledger of deposits, disbursements, interest and daily balances that state trust rules require, produced from the ledger (Trust Accounting & the General Ledger).
• Betterment, restoration, adaptation: the three kinds of improvement the IRS tangible property regulations require to be capitalized rather than expensed (Budgets, Forecasts & Capital Projects).
• Budget: an amount per GL account per month for the coming year, built from drivers (the rent roll, the charge catalog, staffing, contracts, parcels, the fee rule) with the drivers kept beside each line (Budgets, Forecasts & Capital Projects).
• Budget cycle: draft, review, submit to the owner by the agreement's deadline, revise in versioned rounds, approve, then operate against it (Budgets, Forecasts & Capital Projects).
• Capital account (book, tax): an investor's running equity in an entity (contributions plus allocated income, minus losses and distributions), kept as ledger balances in a book version and a tax version that feeds the K-1 (Investors, Funds & Asset Management).
• Capital call: a notice asking investors to fund part of their commitments by a date for a stated purpose, each investor's amount a pro rata share adjusted for classes, prior funding and equalization (Investors, Funds & Asset Management).
• Capital or repair: whether a cost is an operating expense deducted this year or a capital improvement recorded as an asset and depreciated, decided by tax law and book policy from facts the platform captures at the invoice line (Budgets, Forecasts & Capital Projects).
• Capital project: a project with a budget by cost code, often by phase and unit, tracked through budget, committed and actual (Budgets, Forecasts & Capital Projects).
• Catch-up: a waterfall tier, after the preferred return, that pays mostly or entirely to the sponsor until it has received its agreed share of everything distributed so far (Investors, Funds & Asset Management).
• Change order: an amendment that raises or lowers a signed contract's committed amount (Budgets, Forecasts & Capital Projects).
• Closed-end fund, open-end fund: a fund that calls committed capital as it buys, holds, sells and distributes, versus one investors enter and leave over time at a periodic net asset value (Investors, Funds & Asset Management).
• Commingling, conversion: mixing trust money with the holder's own (overfunding is treated as an indication of it) and using one beneficiary's money for another, which negative beneficiary balances indicate (Trust Accounting & the General Ledger).
• Commitment: the amount an investor agreed to fund, by share class, with the date their capital was accepted (Investors, Funds & Asset Management).
• Committed: contracts and purchase orders signed against a project budget, including change orders; budget minus committed is what's left to commit (Budgets, Forecasts & Capital Projects).
• Consolidation, eliminations: producing a fund's statements from the entity books below it, removing intercompany balances, which works only when every layer uses mapped charts of accounts and closes on time (Investors, Funds & Asset Management).
• Construction management fee: a fee the management agreement charges on capital projects, computed from the project's actual cost at completion (Owners & Management Agreements).
• Contributed nonpublic data: competitors' actual rents, occupancy and lease terms pooled by a vendor and returned as benchmarks, the kind of market data source where antitrust risk lives (Investors, Funds & Asset Management).
• Contribution (owner): money an owner pays into trust to cover bills that exceed the property's collections or to fund a starting reserve, recorded as its own transaction type (Owners & Management Agreements).
• Cost code: a line of a project budget (demolition, cabinets, flooring, appliances, labor, permits, contingency) that commitments and invoices are tracked against (Budgets, Forecasts & Capital Projects).
• Cost to complete, forecast final cost: the project manager's estimate of what remains, and that estimate plus actual; a forecast above budget needs owner approval before it happens (Budgets, Forecasts & Capital Projects).
• Crosswalk (external IDs): the record of every external identifier a property, building or unit carries in other systems (a previous manager, a lender, a listing site, the assessor), matched before creating and with merges recorded so they can be undone (Portfolios, Properties & Units).
• De minimis safe harbor: the IRS election to expense amounts up to a per-invoice or per-item limit instead of capitalizing them (Budgets, Forecasts & Capital Projects).
• Deal-by-deal waterfall, fund-level waterfall: whether each property's cash runs through its own waterfall (the "American" style) or investors get all capital and pref back across every deal before the sponsor's promote starts (Investors, Funds & Asset Management).
• Direct capitalization: a valuation method dividing a year's net operating income by a market capitalization rate (Investors, Funds & Asset Management).
• Discounted cash flow (DCF): a valuation that projects income and a sale price and discounts them to today (Investors, Funds & Asset Management).
• Draw, draw request: a periodic advance against a construction or renovation loan, supported by a package of a schedule of values, invoices and contracts, lien waivers and the owner's certification (Budgets, Forecasts & Capital Projects).
• Due to, due from: paired entries posted in each entity's books when one transaction crosses entities, which must net to zero across them (Trust Accounting & the General Ledger).
• Fee basis (cash or accrual): whether a management fee is charged on money collected (most residential agreements, so an unpaid charge earns no fee) or on amounts billed, which has to reverse for bad debt (Owners & Management Agreements).
• Fee method (by application, by ledger activity): the two ways to compute a management fee basis: per payment as it's applied to a charge, by the charge's code, or as the activity in a set of income accounts for the period (Owners & Management Agreements).
• Fee run: the periodic computation of every fee across the portfolio, posting each as a ledger transaction from the owner's funds to the manager's income and storing its rule version and basis; a correction posts an adjustment in the open period (Owners & Management Agreements).
• Fixed asset: a capitalized cost with a cost, placed-in-service date, location and component, depreciated and retired when its replacement is placed in service; ideally one register shared with maintenance's equipment records (Budgets, Forecasts & Capital Projects).
• Floor plan: a property's catalog entry for a layout (bedrooms, bathrooms, area, marketing name); pricing, listings and availability work at this level, so it's a table rather than text on the unit (Portfolios, Properties & Units).
• Foreign owner withholding, W-8ECI: rent paid to a foreign owner is subject to chapter 3 withholding unless the owner elects to treat it as effectively connected income and gives the payer Form W-8ECI; without it the manager withholds rather than paying in full (Owners & Management Agreements).
• Form 1065, Schedule K-1: the information return a partnership files (it passes profits and losses through rather than paying tax) and the form giving each partner its share, which can't be finished until every entity below it closes (Investors, Funds & Asset Management).
• Form 1099-MISC (rents): the form a property manager uses to report rent paid over to the property owner, in box 1 (Owners & Management Agreements).
• Form D: the notice an issuer files within 15 days of the first sale in a Regulation D offering (Investors, Funds & Asset Management).
• Fractional ownership: a property owned in shares (tenants in common, a family LLC whose members are paid directly), where distributions split by the ownership shares in force on the date and each holder is paid and reported separately (Owners & Management Agreements).
• General ledger by entity (one ledger, many entities): every ledger account dimensioned by the legal entity whose books it belongs to and the property it relates to, so each entity's trial balance is a filter, not a separate database (Trust Accounting & the General Ledger).
• Gross receipts: the collected amounts a management fee is a percentage of, defined per agreement by what's included (rent, parking, utility reimbursements) and excluded (refundable deposits, loan and sale proceeds, capital contributions) (Owners & Management Agreements).
• Grouping (property group): an effective-dated named set of properties for ownership, funds, same-store comparison, a lender's collateral pool or a program, kept apart from the operating tree because these sets don't nest (Portfolios, Properties & Units).
• Indirect ownership: an investor's share of a property through a chain of entities, computed on a date as the product of ownership shares along the chain, never stored as a number (Investors, Funds & Asset Management).
• Job costing: tracking a project's spending by cost code (and phase and unit) through budget, committed and actual, down to the lender's draw and the asset register (Budgets, Forecasts & Capital Projects).
• Joint venture: a sponsor and one or more capital partners owning a property LLC together under an operating agreement that sets contributions, control rights and the waterfall (Investors, Funds & Asset Management).
• Jurisdiction: the state, county, city or special district whose rules apply to a property, resolved from its geocoded location against boundaries (never from the postal city), reviewed near boundaries and effective-dated because cities annex land (Portfolios, Properties & Units).
• Leasing fee, renewal fee: fees beyond the base management fee, a flat amount or a share of first month's rent per new lease, and a fee per renewal (Owners & Management Agreements).
• Lien waiver: a contractor's or supplier's release of mechanic's lien rights, conditional (effective when payment clears) or unconditional, and progress (through a date) or final, in a form set by state law (Budgets, Forecasts & Capital Projects).
• Mailing address: where notices go and what a lease says, kept per building and per unit with the unit's secondary designator; not the same as the parcel or the jurisdiction (Portfolios, Properties & Units).
• Management agreement: the contract between owner and third-party manager setting the budget calendar, spending authority, emergencies, monthly reports, bank accounts, fees, reserves, termination and audit rights, stored as versioned data with clause references (Owners & Management Agreements).
• Management fee: the manager's base fee, a percentage of a basis the agreement defines (usually gross receipts), with minimums, maximums and rounding per agreement (Owners & Management Agreements).
• Management period: the dates the operator actually ran a property, taken from the management agreement, so reports for any past period include exactly the properties managed in it (Portfolios, Properties & Units).
• Manager submission: a third-party manager's monthly package as received by an owner, kept and hashed, mapped to the owner's chart, validated, then accepted, rejected or accepted with exceptions before it publishes (Investors, Funds & Asset Management).
• Manufactured home, lot: in a manufactured housing community the lot is the unit that is leased and counted, and the home on it is a separate asset with its own title and owner, attached to the lot over time (Portfolios, Properties & Units).
• Master chart of accounts: the tenant-wide chart every property's books use, with versioned mappings to owners' own charts so their reporting renders in their accounts (Trust Accounting & the General Ledger).
• NCREIF Property Index: the property-level return index from NCREIF, dating to 1978, one of the index providers that aggregate valuations (Investors, Funds & Asset Management).
• Negative beneficiary balance: a beneficiary paid for with money it didn't have, so the cash came from someone else; regulators read it as conversion and the platform blocks the disbursement (Trust Accounting & the General Ledger).
• Onboarding, offboarding (owner): taking on an owner (verify the entity, collect tax forms and bank details, sign the agreement, map opening balances, receive the reserve) and its reverse (final statement and fee run, transfer of deposits and balances, records and a final 1099) (Owners & Management Agreements).
• Operating tree: the single-parent hierarchy of regions and districts that permissions and configuration inherit through; each property sits in exactly one node (Portfolios, Properties & Units).
• Owner distribution: paying an owner what is theirs and not needed, computed from ledger balances net of deposits, prepaid rent, reserves, payables and pending items, and split by ownership share (Owners & Management Agreements).
• Owner package, owner statement: the monthly reporting a third-party manager sends (income statement, balance sheet, budget comparison, rent roll, delinquency, general ledger, payables, bank reconciliation), stored as sent; a correction is a visible restatement (Owners & Management Agreements).
• Owner-operator, third-party manager: an operator that owns what it runs, versus a manager working under contract for owners, often as a licensed broker with trust account duties; the landlord of record stays the owner (Owners & Management Agreements).
• Parcel, APN (assessor's parcel number): the county assessor's unit of land, keyed by county plus its parcel number, which property tax, assessment appeals, deeds and title key on; properties and parcels link many-to-many and over time (Portfolios, Properties & Units).
• Pooled trust account: one trust account holding money for many owners, with beneficiaries separated only in the ledger, as opposed to accounts per property or per owner (Trust Accounting & the General Ledger).
• Preferred return (pref): a waterfall tier paying investors a stated annual return on unreturned capital, simple or compounded as the documents say, before the sponsor shares further (Investors, Funds & Asset Management).
• Pro forma: a multi-year projection of a property's operations and capital, with debt service and, for a sale, an exit value, used to buy, refinance, sell or value it; its assumptions are explicit and versioned (Budgets, Forecasts & Capital Projects).
• Promote, carried interest: the sponsor's share of profits above its pro rata equity, earned above a hurdle; carried interest is the fund-language name (Investors, Funds & Asset Management).
• Real estate commission audit: a state real estate regulator's examination of a broker's trust records, reconciliations, beneficiary records and consents (Trust Accounting & the General Ledger).
• Reforecast: actuals for closed months plus a new forecast for the rest of the year, approved like a budget and stored as a version beside it, never replacing it (Budgets, Forecasts & Capital Projects).
• Replacement reserve: lender-required monthly deposits held by the lender or servicer and released for replacing capital items, recorded as the owner's asset per loan and reconciled to the servicer's statement (Budgets, Forecasts & Capital Projects).
• Reserve (owner): the owner's money the manager keeps in trust instead of distributing so bills can be paid without a negative balance; a balance, not an expense (Owners & Management Agreements).
• Retention, retainage: a percentage of each contractor payment held back until the work is accepted, a liability per contract released at completion (Budgets, Forecasts & Capital Projects).
• Return of capital: the first waterfall tier, paying investors pro rata until each has received back what they contributed (Investors, Funds & Asset Management).
• Routine maintenance safe harbor: the IRS rule letting recurring work that keeps property in ordinarily efficient operating condition be expensed, if for buildings it's reasonably expected to recur within the stated period (Budgets, Forecasts & Capital Projects).
• Schedule of values: the draw package's table of each cost code's budget, work completed in prior draws and this period, materials stored, retainage and balance to finish (Budgets, Forecasts & Capital Projects).
• Secondary unit designator: the USPS designator (APT, STE, UNIT, LOT, SPC, SLIP, TRLR, RM and others) that precedes a unit number in an address, which is why lots and slips get addresses like apartments (Portfolios, Properties & Units).
• Security deposit account: the account deposits are held in under the landlord-tenant statute of the property's state, which can govern its location, whether it bears interest, the tenant's share of interest and the notices owed (Trust Accounting & the General Ledger).
• Single-asset entity: an LLC that owns one property, so a lender's collateral, a lawsuit or a sale stays contained (Investors, Funds & Asset Management).
• Small taxpayer safe harbor: the IRS rule letting small taxpayers expense repairs, maintenance and improvements on a lower-basis building when the year's total stays under the stated limit (Budgets, Forecasts & Capital Projects).
• Spending authority: the agreement's budget tolerance, approval threshold for unbudgeted items and contracts, and emergency rule, which purchase orders and invoices check against (Owners & Management Agreements).
• Sponsor: the managing member or general partner who finds and runs a deal, often contributing a small share of equity and earning the promote (Investors, Funds & Asset Management).
• Suspense beneficiary: where unidentified money sits, with an aging clock, until it's identified; suspense isn't distributable (Trust Accounting & the General Ledger).
• Syndication (investment): many individual investors in one deal through an LLC, each paid and reported separately (Investors, Funds & Asset Management).
• Three-way reconciliation (triple tie-out): proving on one date that the reconciled bank balance, the book balance and the sum of beneficiary balances for a trust account all agree, kept as a signed record; a difference blocks money out (Trust Accounting & the General Ledger).
• Timing variance, permanent variance: a budget variance that reverses later (a repair paid a month early) versus one that won't (a tax increase), tagged so the reforecast picks up the permanent ones (Budgets, Forecasts & Capital Projects).
• Total units: every unit the property has, as distinct from rentable units on a date, which exclude units in a non-rentable status period (Portfolios, Properties & Units).
• Trust account: a bank account holding money for others (owners, residents), governed by state real estate license law and landlord-tenant deposit statutes, with every dollar assigned to a beneficiary (Trust Accounting & the General Ledger).
• Unclaimed property (escheat): money nobody claimed (an uncashed refund check, a credit on a closed lease) that after a dormancy period and a due diligence notice is reported and remitted to the state; voiding the check moves the liability, it doesn't end it (Trust Accounting & the General Ledger).
• Unit merge, unit split: a renovation that combines or divides units, recorded as an event linking the retired and new units so lease history on a retired unit still resolves (Portfolios, Properties & Units).
• Unit status period: an effective-dated period of a unit's own rentable status (rentable, down, model, employee, non-revenue) with a reason and source; future periods are allowed and corrections are recorded rather than overwritten (Portfolios, Properties & Units).
• Valuation: an estimate of a property's value with a date, method (appraisal, DCF, direct capitalization, broker opinion or internal mark), inputs, source and approver, kept as an immutable record where a revision is a new record (Investors, Funds & Asset Management).
• Value-add renovation: a program upgrading units as they turn over to lease them at a premium, with the unit down for the work, returning with dated amenities, and the premium measured against unrenovated leases of the same floor plan (Budgets, Forecasts & Capital Projects).
• Waterfall: the ordered tiers (return of capital, preferred return, catch-up, splits) that divide each distribution among investors and the sponsor, each filled before the next, kept as versioned data from the governing documents with every run stored (Investors, Funds & Asset Management).

Leasing#

• Abandonment: a household leaving without returning possession; when it was determined, and on what evidence, sets the deposit deadline (Move-In & Move-Out).
• Accessibility overlay: a script that claims to make a site accessible on load without changing the underlying markup a screen reader reads; it doesn't fix the site (Listings, Websites & Marketing).
• Addendum: a document attached to the lease by rule (pets, parking, a lead or flood disclosure), recording the rule and version that required it (The Lease).
• Adverse action notice: the notice owed when a decision rests in whole or part on a consumer report, including denial, requiring a co-signer or a larger deposit; it names the agency, says the agency didn't decide, states the consumer's rights and any credit score used (Applications & Screening).
• Advertised price snapshot: an append-only record of the price as shown on one channel over a time range: base rent, total monthly price, each component and its treatment, the assumed term and move-in date, the concession, the rule version and a payload hash (Listings, Websites & Marketing).
• Agent-led tour: a tour appointment with a person, booked on the property's calendar in its time zone, with an outcome the agent records (toured, no-show, cancelled, rescheduled) (Leads, CRM, Tours & the Leasing Center).
• AI call scoring: a model that scores recorded calls, for example for "intent to rent"; if the score decides who gets a callback first it is an automated decision about people (Leads, CRM, Tours & the Leasing Center).
• AI leasing agent: software that answers prospects across chat, text, email and voice, schedules tours and says it's an AI; availability, price, fees and policies come from tools reading the property's data, never improvised (Leads, CRM, Tours & the Leasing Center).
• Amenity premium: an adjustment to a floor plan's base price for a unit's view, floor, renovation level or position, stored as data on the unit (Revenue Management & Pricing).
• Application: a household's request to lease a specific unit at a quoted rent, term and move-in date, with every adult and guarantor a member with their own consent, reports and result; minors are listed as occupants and never screened (Applications & Screening).
• Application fee: the per-member fee collected before any report is ordered, computed from the jurisdiction's rule version with its cap, waiver conditions, receipt contents and refund deadline (Applications & Screening).
• Asking rent, executed rent: what a property publishes, versus what it actually agreed with its concession and term; competitors' executed rents are the pooled data the antitrust cases are about (Revenue Management & Pricing).
• Association form: a lease form published and revised by an association; the operator adopts each revision and records its form number and revision as the template's source (The Lease).
• Auto-accept: a feature that applies price recommendations automatically; under the Final Judgment each licensee or user must configure it individually, and it belongs to a named person, never a vendor default (Revenue Management & Pricing).
• Balance due: a negative final statement, a receivable from a former resident that gets a demand, a payment window and then the collections path (Move-In & Move-Out).
• BIPA (Biometric Information Privacy Act): Illinois' law requiring consent before collecting or disclosing biometric identifiers, timely destruction, and a private right of action; the strictest state law and the one that drives design (Applications & Screening).
• Borrowed identity: a real person's identity used by someone else applying; the ID-and-selfie match is the check (Applications & Screening).
• Centralized leasing: moving leasing work (inquiries, follow-up, tour scheduling, applications) from each property's office to a team working many properties from one queue, while site staff give tours and hand over keys (Leads, CRM, Tours & the Leasing Center).
• Clause library: a library of versioned lease clauses with jurisdiction variants, from which a lease template version is compiled (The Lease).
• Clawback: what happens to a concession on early termination or default (repaid in full, prorated by the unserved term, or forgiven), set from the signed addendum and computed by the platform (The Lease).
• Common pricing algorithm: California AB 325's term for a pricing algorithm used by two or more persons that uses competitor data, public and nonpublic alike (Revenue Management & Pricing).
• Common use of software: the holding in Gibson v. Cendyn Group, followed in Mach v. Yardi, that competitors using the same pricing software is not by itself an agreement (Revenue Management & Pricing).
• Concession: value given to sign or renew (a free month, a rent discount, waived fees, a gift card), whose terms and conditions belong in the signed packet (The Lease).
• Condition inspection: a dated, itemized record of every area and item in the unit, with photos, made at move-in (the baseline), before move-out, at move-out, or for make-ready and periodic checks (Move-In & Move-Out).
• Conditional approval: an approval with typed conditions (an additional deposit, a guarantor, prepaid rent, a co-signer); when based on a report it is an adverse action and generates a notice (Applications & Screening).
• Conditional incentive: compensation in exchange for reviews expressing a particular sentiment, a violation of the FTC review rule; an incentive for any honest review is not (Leads, CRM, Tours & the Leasing Center).
• Conditional offer: in fair-chance jurisdictions, the written offer committing a unit after non-criminal screening, before which criminal history may not be checked (Applications & Screening).
• Consumer reporting agency, consumer report: a tenant screening company, and its report including any risk score or recommendation, both governed by the Fair Credit Reporting Act (Applications & Screening).
• Consumer Review Fairness Act (CRFA): the 2016 law voiding form-contract terms, a standard lease included, that restrict reviews, penalize them or claim the rights in review content, and making offering such a contract unlawful (Leads, CRM, Tours & the Leasing Center).
• Consumer Reviews and Testimonials Rule (16 CFR Part 465): the FTC rule, effective October 21, 2024, barring fake reviews, sentiment-conditioned incentives, undisclosed insider reviews and review suppression (Leads, CRM, Tours & the Leasing Center).
• Conversational message: a reply to a prospect who started the conversation, as opposed to a marketing drip to past inquirers, which carries marketing consent and opt-out rules (Leads, CRM, Tours & the Leasing Center).
• Coordinating function: New York S.7882's term for software whose recommendations landlords may not use to set rents or lease terms; the law is preliminarily enjoined (Revenue Management & Pricing).
• Countersignature: the landlord's agent signing last, for the landlord of record, after residents and guarantors, as a final check that the quote, screening decision and hold still stand (The Lease).
• Criteria version: screening criteria as a published document and as evaluable data, approved, effective for a date range and scoped to a property or portfolio; an application binds to the version in force at submission (Applications & Screening).
• Cross-property referral: a recorded event moving a household's interest to a sister property, rather than a new lead, so per-property metrics and owner marketing costs stay honest (Leads, CRM, Tours & the Leasing Center).
• Deduction: a charge on the resident's ledger from the charge catalog, with cost evidence and photos, settled by applying the deposit (Move-In & Move-Out).
• Deposit itemization deadline: the state deadline to return the deposit or account for deductions in writing, with the event that starts the clock, the evidence required and the penalty, stored as effective-dated rules data (Move-In & Move-Out).
• Directory listing: the property's entry in map and business directories, whose name, address, phone, hours and website must match everywhere; one more publication of the property's facts (Listings, Websites & Marketing).
• Document forensics: reading a pay stub's or bank statement's file metadata, fonts and structure for signs of editing, returning a finding per document (clean, edited, inconclusive) with the indicators (Applications & Screening).
• ESIGN eviction-notice exclusion: federal e-signature law's rule that notices of default, eviction or the right to cure under a primary-residence rental agreement can't rely on electronic records alone (The Lease).
• Executed document: the sealed lease PDF with the e-signature provider's certificate, stored write-once with its hash and delivered to every signer; it is the record (The Lease).
• Exposure-driven spend: setting marketing budgets from the pricing model's exposure forecast, so pricing and marketing read one forecast and each budget records which one it used (Listings, Websites & Marketing).
• Fair housing consistency: the leasing call scorecard section checking that the agent described availability, price, fees and criteria as the property's data says and avoided steering language (Leads, CRM, Tours & the Leasing Center).
• Fair Housing Testing Program: the Justice Department program, established in 1991, that sends testers with no intent to rent posing as prospects; a tester is a guest card like any other (Leads, CRM, Tours & the Leasing Center).
• Fair-chance law: a state or local rule limiting criminal history in screening: no arrests or sealed records, a lookback window, financial screening first, an individualized assessment and a chance to respond (Applications & Screening).
• FCRA (Fair Credit Reporting Act): the federal law that makes a screening report a consumer report, with duties of accuracy, notices and disputes on both the agency and the landlord (Applications & Screening).
• Fee terms: a property's effective-dated classification of each charge a prospect could face by obligation (mandatory, optional, conditional) and recurrence, which decides what goes in the advertised price (Listings, Websites & Marketing).
• Final account statement: the household's last view of its ledger: every unpaid charge and deduction, the deposit and interest held, applied like a payment, and the resulting refund or balance due (Move-In & Move-Out).
• Final Judgment (United States v. RealPage): the settlement resolving the United States' claims against RealPage, which expires seven years after entry and whose terms read as a design specification for a lawful pricing product (Revenue Management & Pricing).
• First-touch source, lease-attributed source, self-reported source: the source of the earliest touch, set once when the guest card is created; the source credited when the lease is signed under a named, versioned model; and what the household says, kept as a separate field (Leads, CRM, Tours & the Leasing Center).
• Foreign credit file: credit history from abroad translated into a US consumer report for applicants without an SSN or US file, with the same notices as any report (Applications & Screening).
• Forwarding address: the address the household gives in writing for the deposit statement; in Texas the obligation to refund or itemize waits for it (Move-In & Move-Out).
• Furnisher: anyone who supplies information to a consumer reporting agency; a landlord contributing rental history must not furnish known inaccuracies, must correct and update, flag disputes and investigate disputes forwarded by the agency (Applications & Screening).
• Good cause eviction law: a law removing the landlord's right to simply not renew; New York's (Real Property Law Article 6-A) bars removing a covered tenant by failure to renew without good cause (The Lease).
• Good funds: move-in money that can't be returned after keys are handed over, such as certified funds or a card, or ACH after settlement; a per-property policy (Move-In & Move-Out).
• Good-faith estimate: a deduction stated as an estimate when repairs can't be finished before the deadline, with documentation due afterward where the state allows it (Move-In & Move-Out).
• Guaranty: a separate written promise to answer for someone else's lease debt, stored as its own document, whose coverage, limit, duration and whose debt it covers are data the ledger and renewals read (The Lease).
• Guest card: the record of a prospect household's interest in a property: who they are, how to reach them, what they want, where they came from and everything since; named after the paper card visitors filled in at the leasing office (Leads, CRM, Tours & the Leasing Center).
• Holdover: a tenant staying after the term ends with no renewal and no notice; the lease stays current with the date the periodic (month-to-month) tenancy began, any premium as a new schedule, and periodic notice rules (The Lease).
• Household's share (income test): running the income multiple against the portion of rent the household pays rather than the full rent, so voucher holders aren't failed on the subsidized part (Applications & Screening).
• ILS (internet listing service): a rental listing network or apartment search site, the largest and a concentrated channel for apartment demand; ILSs charge per property, per lead or per lease (Listings, Websites & Marketing).
• Individualized assessment: a review of a criminal record against the applicant's circumstances and any mitigating information, required before an adverse criminal decision in several jurisdictions (Applications & Screening).
• Insider review: a review by an officer, manager, employee or agent (or solicited from relatives or staff) without clear disclosure of the relationship (Leads, CRM, Tours & the Leasing Center).
• Inventory checklist: a state-required record of condition at the start or end of a tenancy, such as Michigan's commencement and termination inventory checklists or Washington's signed checklist, without which a deposit may not be held (Move-In & Move-Out).
• Joint delegation: the DOJ and FTC position that competing landlords jointly delegating key aspects of pricing to a common algorithm is per se illegal even if they keep authority to deviate (Revenue Management & Pricing).
• Landlord revert agreement: a utility arrangement under which service reverts to the owner's account when a resident closes theirs (Move-In & Move-Out).
• Lead source: where a prospect came from: ILSs, the property and corporate website with its paid search and social, calls to a tracking number, walk-ins, resident referrals, apartment locators and the operator's other properties (Leads, CRM, Tours & the Leasing Center).
• Lead-based paint disclosure, target housing: the federal disclosure each lease of target housing (built before 1978, with exclusions) must include, with the Lead Warning Statement, known hazards, records given and dated signatures (The Lease).
• Lease packet: the base lease, the addenda that apply to this unit and household, required disclosures, any translation and, separately, any guaranty, each rendered from a template version; the packet as executed is the lease (The Lease).
• Lease states: draft, out_for_signature, signed, current, notice_given, ended and cancelled, with transitions checked by one command; the "future resident" between signing and move-in is signed (The Lease).
• Lease-term premium: the premium or discount on terms other than the 12-month reference, used mainly to steer the expiration month away from months that are hard to re-lease (Revenue Management & Pricing).
• Leasing contact center: an outsourced answering service for leasing calls and email, often also taking after-hours maintenance calls, that must write to the same guest card through the platform's leasing API (Leads, CRM, Tours & the Leasing Center).
• Listing: the marketable statement of what is for rent (a unit, a floor plan or a whole property) with its price, availability date, features, media and policies (Listings, Websites & Marketing).
• Liveness check: a test that an identity selfie is a live person rather than a photo or replay, run with a match against the government ID's photo as a step-up when passive data checks disagree (Applications & Screening).
• Local rent standard: under New York's Good Cause law, the lower of 5% plus the annual change in CPI or 10%; an increase above it is presumptively unreasonable (The Lease).
• Market survey (call-around): staff phoning or emailing competing properties for current rents and concessions, distinct from reading their public websites (Revenue Management & Pricing).
• Maximum possible accuracy: the FCRA standard for agency procedures; in tenant screening the hard part is matching name-only court records to the right applicant (Applications & Screening).
• MDL 3071: the consolidated renter class actions over RealPage pricing software in the Middle District of Tennessee, where landlords settled and the claims against RealPage continue (Revenue Management & Pricing).
• MITS format: the multifamily XML feed format some listing channels accept alongside their own schemas (Listings, Websites & Marketing).
• Move-in readiness gate: the conditions that must all hold before keys go out (lease executed, unit ready, move-in funds paid, insurance verified, utilities in the resident's name, inspection scheduled), each computed from the records that prove it (Move-In & Move-Out).
• No credit history: an outcome distinct from poor credit history, for which the criteria state the substitute (a larger lawful deposit, a guarantor, or prepaid rent where allowed) (Applications & Screening).
• Normal wear and tear: deterioration from ordinary use, not deductible from a deposit in any state the chapter tabulates; each deduction must say what was damaged and why it isn't wear (Move-In & Move-Out).
• Notice to vacate, nonrenewal: the household's notice ending the lease at term end or a periodic tenancy, and the landlord's notice not to renew, with any cause a good cause law requires (The Lease).
• Offline conversion feedback: sending lease-funnel outcomes that happen off the ad platform back to it so it can bid toward them; limited to funnel events, sent with recorded consent, never screening outcomes or inferred characteristics (Listings, Websites & Marketing).
• One-to-one consent rule: the FCC's 2023 rule requiring written consent to name a single seller, vacated by the Eleventh Circuit before it took effect; consent must still authorize the seller that calls (Leads, CRM, Tours & the Leasing Center).
• Override: a person's decision to deviate from a price recommendation, one click with a reason; nothing in pricing, commissions or reports may penalize it (Revenue Management & Pricing).
• Parallel pricing coordination: New Jersey's FAIR Act term reaching coordinators using shared nonpublic metrics, including manual workarounds (Revenue Management & Pricing).
• Per-lead fee, per-lease fee: ILS billing models charging for each lead delivered or each lease claimed; each claim is matched to a guest card or disputed, never paid unchecked (Leads, CRM, Tours & the Leasing Center).
• Permissible purpose: the FCRA basis for pulling a report (the consumer's written instructions, or a legitimate business need in a transaction the consumer initiated), recorded per member with the consent version it rests on (Applications & Screening).
• Pet screening: collecting a profile per animal (species, breed, weight, vaccination and license records, the owner's history) for pets, kept separate from the assistance animal path, which is a reasonable accommodation (Applications & Screening).
• Pooled nonpublic data: competitors' executed rents, lease terms, occupancy and traffic combined in a pricing product; the core of every antitrust case and barred at runtime by the Final Judgment and most of the laws (Revenue Management & Pricing).
• Portable report: a screening report the applicant already paid for, which some jurisdictions require landlords to accept within an age limit, waiving the application fee (Applications & Screening).
• Possession returned: the date keys and credentials come back, which usually starts the deposit clock rather than the lease end date (Move-In & Move-Out).
• Pre-move-out inspection: an inspection before the household leaves, with an itemized statement of proposed deductions they can cure; some states give tenants a right to one (Move-In & Move-Out).
• Quote: the unit of pricing: one unit, one lease term, one move-in date, one amount, valid until a stated time; applications and leases carry its ID (Revenue Management & Pricing).
• Reason code: a coded decision reason in the criteria version, read identically by the notice, the applicant portal and the audit (Applications & Screening).
• Reinvestigation: the agency's free investigation of a disputed report, with deadlines for notifying the furnisher and correcting or deleting what is inaccurate, incomplete or unverifiable (Applications & Screening).
• Release (of a leaseholder): a signed amendment ending a departing roommate's liability on a joint lease, effective on its date rather than the day they moved out (The Lease).
• Renewal: a new lease row pointing at the lease it renews: same unit and household, new term, price, packet and signatures, carrying the renewal offer it accepted (The Lease).
• Renewal offer: a per-household price for staying, weighed against the cost of a turn, clamped to any legal cap and sent before the notice period begins; often a menu of terms, one offer row each (Revenue Management & Pricing).
• Rent limit: the computed legal maximum for a lease's next increase, from the rent history in the lookback window, the published index and the rule version; the engine clamps a recommendation to it and blocks overrides above it (Revenue Management & Pricing).
• Renter-centric CRM, property-centric CRM: a CRM that keeps one record per renter across the operator's portfolio, versus one that creates a lead per property the household contacts (Leads, CRM, Tours & the Leasing Center).
• Representative media: photos or tours of a model or a sister unit rather than the specific unit, tagged as such and never shown as the unit itself (Listings, Websites & Marketing).
• Resident self-inspection: a resident walking the unit and capturing the condition record in an app; valid evidence from a different actor, recorded per photo (Move-In & Move-Out).
• Response parity: measuring response time and follow-up by property, agent, channel and language to show every inquiry got the same treatment, without recording prospects' protected traits (Leads, CRM, Tours & the Leasing Center).
• Revenue management: software that produces a recommended asking rent per unit, lease term and move-in date, premiums or discounts that steer lease expirations, and a renewal offer per household (Revenue Management & Pricing).
• Review gating: asking for a rating first and sending only happy residents to a public review site; not named in the FTC rule, but the FTC says it could violate the FTC Act and Google forbids it (Leads, CRM, Tours & the Leasing Center).
• Review suppression: preventing or removing a review by unfounded legal threats, intimidation or false accusations, or hiding reviews by rating while implying all are shown; withholding by criteria applied equally to all reviews is allowed (Leads, CRM, Tours & the Leasing Center).
• Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees: the FTC's general total-price rule, effective May 12, 2025, covering short-term lodging and live-event tickets but not long-term rental housing (Listings, Websites & Marketing).
• Runtime operation: in the Final Judgment, the generation of a price for a floor plan or unit, which may use no competing properties' nonpublic data, including in its ceiling and floor (Revenue Management & Pricing).
• Screening score: a model predicting lease performance; part of the consumer report, a fair housing practice of the operator who uses it, and decision support rather than a decision-maker (Applications & Screening).
• Section 3604(c): the Fair Housing Act provision making it unlawful to make, print or publish a notice, statement or advertisement indicating a preference, limitation or discrimination based on a protected characteristic; every listing, ad, page and post is covered (Listings, Websites & Marketing).
• Self-guided tour: a prospect entering a vacant unit or model without staff, after booking a window and passing an ID-and-selfie check, with access valid for that window only (Leads, CRM, Tours & the Leasing Center).
• SEO, GEO, AEO (search, generative and answer engine optimization): publishing accurate, structured, current facts at stable URLs so search engines and AI assistants can parse and quote them (Listings, Websites & Marketing).
• Seven-year rule: the FCRA bar on reporting most adverse items older than seven years, including civil suits such as eviction filings, with criminal convictions excepted (Applications & Screening).
• Sold-out guardrail: the rule that raises prices when a floor plan is full, which under the Final Judgment may not use competitor data (Revenue Management & Pricing).
• Special ad category (housing): the ad platforms' treatment of housing ads, under which Google bars targeting housing ads in the US and Canada by age, gender, marital or parental status, or by ZIP code (Listings, Websites & Marketing).
• Structured data: machine-readable markup of the property's facts, such as schema.org's ApartmentComplex and FloorPlan types, generated from the same price computation as the visible page (Listings, Websites & Marketing).
• Surrogate data: another owner's nonpublic data used for a property with under two years of its own history and no comparable property, only from a different CBSA and never the same surrogate for different owners in one CBSA (Revenue Management & Pricing).
• Survivor termination: a state-law right for victims of domestic violence and related crimes to end a lease early with written notice and documentation (The Lease).
• Symmetric bounds: prices may go below the floor by the same percentage they may exceed the ceiling, with the landlord setting that one band percentage (Revenue Management & Pricing).
• Syndication (listings): sending listings from the platform to channels, each with its own format and rules, recording what each channel accepted and pulling back leads; built as an outbox of change events per listing rather than a nightly export (Listings, Websites & Marketing).
• Synthetic identity: an invented person built from a real SSN (often a child's or a dormant one) and a made-up name, with a thin but clean credit file (Applications & Screening).
• Tenant Protection Act: California's statewide cap (Civil Code 1947.12) on increases over any 12 months, with exemptions; the landlord sets the initial rent at turnover (Revenue Management & Pricing).
• Total monthly price (all-in price): the advertised monthly price including every fixed mandatory recurring charge, with every other fee disclosed with its amount and purpose before any money is taken; the shape federal enforcement and state law are converging on (Listings, Websites & Marketing).
• Tour access grant: the record of which tour, person, lock and window a self-guided tour credential covered, issued after which verification, and when it was used and revoked; it never holds the code (Leads, CRM, Tours & the Leasing Center).
• Tracking number: a distinct phone number published per listing, website, map listing or print piece, so a call is attributed to a source and a property before anyone answers; its assignment is effective-dated (Leads, CRM, Tours & the Leasing Center).
• Unclaimed refund: a deposit refund never cashed, still the household's money and, after the state's dormancy period, reported and remitted as unclaimed property (Move-In & Move-Out).
• Unit transfer: a household moving to another unit at the same or a sister property: the old lease ends, a new one starts with a link to it, and the deposit can carry over by balanced entries (Move-In & Move-Out).
• Unit-level listing, floor-plan listing: advertising individual units with their own price and date, or a floor plan with a "from" price that is a query over the quotes for its units, terms and dates (Listings, Websites & Marketing).
• Upfront, recurring and digital concessions: a single credit on a date; a negative charge schedule beside the rent for some or all of the term; and rewards outside the rent, such as gift cards or points, that don't change the lease's rent (The Lease).
• Useful-life proration: charging only the share of a replacement's cost equal to the item's remaining useful life over its total life, from the install date in the asset register (Move-In & Move-Out).
• Utility transfer: starting the resident's direct utility account on the move-in date and stopping the owner's vacant-unit account the same day, and the reverse at move-out (Move-In & Move-Out).
• Variance reduction system: the delivery system Meta built under its June 2022 settlement with the Justice Department after retiring Special Ad Audiences for housing (Listings, Websites & Marketing).
• Virtual tour: either live (an agent on video walking the unit, recorded as a tour) or recorded (a 3D or video walkthrough on the listing, where viewing is a touch, not a tour) (Leads, CRM, Tours & the Leasing Center).

Rent and Resident Money#

• Abatement (HAP): stopping HAP payments to a landlord when a voucher unit fails inspection and isn't repaired in time (Subsidized & Affordable Housing).
• Aged receivables (aging): the report of open charges by age (current, 30, 60, 90 days), computed from open charges and their due dates rather than stored in a column, which is why payment application order changes it (Charges & Resident Ledgers).
• Agent of payee (collection agent): a model where the platform collects rent as the landlord's agent under a written agreement and the resident's obligation ends on the agent's receipt, relying on the agent-of-payee exemption where a state recognizes it (Collecting Rent).
• Ancillary agreement: the record of one product line's contract and economics: counterparty, what's sold, who sells and pays, revenue terms, exclusivity and the disclosure text residents see (Resident Financial Products & Ancillary Revenue).
• Automatic stay: the halt a bankruptcy petition imposes from the moment it's filed, which must stop the eviction, late fees, autopay retries and placements until counsel decides (Delinquency, Collections & Eviction).
• Autopay: recurring ACH debits or stored-card payments whose authorization covers the balance due with notice of varying amounts; it stops on move-out and pauses on a payment block (Collecting Rent).
• Average income test: the tax credit set-aside where the designated income limits of at least 40% of units average no more than 60% of area median income (Subsidized & Affordable Housing).
• Benchmarking (energy): annual reporting of a building's energy use to a city or state, commonly through ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager, tracked as a calendar of obligations per building (Utilities & Energy).
• BEPS (building performance standards): laws requiring buildings to meet limits on energy use or emissions, beyond reporting it; New York City's Local Law 97 and Washington's Clean Buildings Performance Standard are examples (Utilities & Energy).
• Blanket coverage: a master policy that enrolls every unit, with every resident paying through a scheduled charge or rent, making it a mandatory recurring charge in the advertised total (Insurance, Deposits & Guarantees).
• Breakage (points): the accounting for points and gift-card-like concessions never redeemed; unredeemed value is a liability until used or expired, with expiry and unclaimed-property rules varying by state (Resident Financial Products & Ancillary Revenue).
• Bulk agreement (bulk internet): an owner's contract with a provider to serve every unit at a discounted bulk rate, recovered through a monthly technology fee to residents, with the margin as ancillary income (Resident Financial Products & Ancillary Revenue).
• CARES Act notice: the 30-day notice to vacate required before a nonpayment eviction at properties in covered federal housing programs or with federally backed mortgage loans (Delinquency, Collections & Eviction).
• Cash network (rent): retail bill pay where a validation callback checks the lease's payment acceptance before the cashier takes the money (Collecting Rent).
• Certification (household): a household's eligibility and rent computed at a point in time, signed and kept: move-in, annual recertification, interim, unit transfer, gross rent change or termination; immutable, with corrections as new certifications (Subsidized & Affordable Housing).
• Collection arrangement: the per-property, effective-dated record of where rent sits in transit (direct settlement, licensed transmitter, agent of payee or sponsor bank FBO account), the account it settles to, who bears returns and the contract that grants the authority (Collecting Rent).
• Collection placement: sending a post-move-out balance to a collection agency with a file (identity, last address, itemized balance, lease, final account statement, disputes), with a return path for payments, disputes, recalls and closures (Delinquency, Collections & Eviction).
• Contingent commission: an insurance agency's commission from a carrier that depends partly on claims experience at the properties, a reason to watch who decides whether to file a claim (Insurance, Deposits & Guarantees).
• Convenience fee: a fee for paying rent a particular way, regulated by card network rules, general surcharge law and landlord law; a fee the platform charges never touches the resident ledger, and one the landlord charges always does (Collecting Rent).
• Counts as rent: a charge code's flag for whether a charge is rent for legal purposes (notices, application order, eviction for nonpayment), separate from its accounting category; it's a default the lease and jurisdiction can override (Charges & Resident Ledgers).
• CROA (Credit Repair Organizations Act): the federal law defining a credit repair organization as anyone selling a service to improve a consumer's credit record, history or rating, and forbidding charging for it before it's fully performed; why credit-building fees billed in advance are a question for counsel (Resident Financial Products & Ancillary Revenue).
• Delinquency case: one record per lease per delinquency episode, with a stage and holds that every action (notices, filings, late fees, autopay, outreach, placements) checks before it runs (Delinquency, Collections & Eviction).
• Deposit alternative: a product that replaces a cash deposit: a surety bond, an insurance policy, a deposit waiver fee, or a payment authorization or letter of credit; each leaves the resident owing for damage to a different degree (Insurance, Deposits & Guarantees).
• Deposit alternative claim: the move-out itemization a property submits to a deposit alternative provider, which pays and, depending on the structure, pursues the resident; the resident ledger shows its payment as a third-party payment (Insurance, Deposits & Guarantees).
• Deposit cap: a jurisdiction's limit on security demanded; California counts any charge imposed at the start of a tenancy for damage or default as security whatever it's called, so the cap is checked at lease generation across every code that counts (Insurance, Deposits & Guarantees).
• Deposit interest: interest a jurisdiction requires on a held deposit, accrued per deposit at the account's rate less any allowed administrative fee, then paid, credited to rent or returned at move-out (Insurance, Deposits & Guarantees).
• Deposit waiver: a deposit alternative where the resident pays a monthly fee with no insurance behind it, and the owner waives the deposit and pursues the resident directly for damage (Insurance, Deposits & Guarantees).
• Direct account (utilities): a resident holding their own account with the utility, so nothing posts to the resident ledger (Utilities & Energy).
• Door fee: a payment from a provider to a building owner for the right to market in the building or access its wiring, under a marketing and access agreement (Resident Financial Products & Ancillary Revenue).
• EIV (Enterprise Income Verification): HUD's system that checks reported income for tenants in HUD rental assistance programs (Subsidized & Affordable Housing).
• ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager: EPA's free benchmarking tool, which compares a building's energy use with its history and similar buildings and scores eligible buildings 1 to 100 (Utilities & Energy).
• Enrollment (resident product): a resident's participation in a product, with consent evidence (the offer version and price shown, the channel, the act of consent) rather than a flag (Resident Financial Products & Ancillary Revenue).
• Eviction filing: the court case a landlord files after a notice period ends unpaid, with the landlord entity as plaintiff and a package of lease, resident-portion ledger, notice with proof of service and required certifications (Delinquency, Collections & Eviction).
• Fair Market Rent: HUD's published rent by unit size, effective each October 1, from which a housing authority sets its payment standard (Subsidized & Affordable Housing).
• Family self-sufficiency escrow: an escrow account in a housing authority's case management program that grows as a family's earned income rises (Subsidized & Affordable Housing).
• FBO account (for benefit of): a sponsor bank account the bank controls, with the platform's ledger allocating its balance to owners; the common payfac structure for rent in transit (Collecting Rent).
• Fee waiver: a reversing charge with a reason and an approver that cancels a late fee, reported per property because waiver patterns are a fair housing question as much as a revenue one (Charges & Resident Ledgers).
• Flexible rent: credit, not a payment plan: a third party pays the property the full rent on time and the resident repays the provider in installments, so the lease is current and a missed installment isn't rent delinquency (Collecting Rent).
• Force-placed (gap) coverage: a master policy that automatically enrolls units without a compliant resident policy and charges the resident where the lease and law allow, often legal liability only (Insurance, Deposits & Guarantees).
• Gross rent change: a HUD-approved adjustment to assisted contract rents that reprices the whole property at once and flows into every household's certification (Subsidized & Affordable Housing).
• HAP contract (housing assistance payments): the contract under which HUD (project-based) or a housing authority (vouchers) pays the owner the part of the rent the household doesn't (Subsidized & Affordable Housing).
• HAP voucher: an owner's monthly request for project-based subsidy, listing assistance by unit from current certifications plus adjustments and special claims (Subsidized & Affordable Housing).
• Hold (delinquency): a pause on a case (bankruptcy, SCRA, pending rental assistance, a dispute or court order) that every collection path must honor at once (Delinquency, Collections & Eviction).
• HOTMA (Housing Opportunity Through Modernization Act of 2016): the law whose implementing rule changed how income and assets are counted (asset limits, imputed asset income, interim reexaminations, deductions, over-income families), with compliance dates staged by program (Subsidized & Affordable Housing).
• Housing Choice Voucher: tenant-based assistance where the household pays its share and the local housing authority pays the landlord the rest under a HAP contract for that unit (Subsidized & Affordable Housing).
• HUD 30-day notice rule: HUD's December 2024 rule requiring public housing agencies and project-based rental assistance owners to give 30 days' written notice before filing a nonpayment eviction, whose revocation HUD later delayed indefinitely (Delinquency, Collections & Eviction).
• HUD-50058: the form a housing authority records certifications on, transmitted to HUD's Inventory Management System / PIC and Housing Information Portal (Subsidized & Affordable Housing).
• HUD-50059: the form owners of project-based Section 8 and related HUD multifamily properties record household certifications on (Subsidized & Affordable Housing).
• iMAX: the TRACS module through which owners, management agents, housing authorities and contract administrators submit data to HUD (Subsidized & Affordable Housing).
• Income limits: HUD's annual limits by area and household size (and the tax credit's multifamily tax subsidy project limits) that certifications test against; every prior year is kept (Subsidized & Affordable Housing).
• In-house collection: a landlord or manager collecting in its own name, which is creditor collection; using a name suggesting a third party makes it a debt collector under the FDCPA (Delinquency, Collections & Eviction).
• Institutional guarantee (guarantor waiver): a company replacing a personal guarantor, usually as an insurance product the applicant pays for, covering some multiple of monthly rent; a record on the lease, not a lease member, with claims following delinquency (Insurance, Deposits & Guarantees).
• Interested party (additional interest): the property's listing on a resident's renters policy, so the carrier notifies it of cancellation or nonrenewal; the notice stream verification runs on (Insurance, Deposits & Guarantees).
• Interim certification (interim reexamination): a certification between annuals when income or household composition changes past the program's thresholds; HOTMA requires one when adjusted income rises by ten percent or more, with exceptions (Subsidized & Affordable Housing).
• Lapse (insurance): a gap in a resident's required coverage, which starts a clock: a cure period, then landlord-placed coverage with its charge or a violation notice, as the lease and jurisdiction say (Insurance, Deposits & Guarantees).
• Late fee: a charge posted by a rule when a lease's rent is still unpaid on a given day, with both the day and the formula regulated by state (Charges & Resident Ledgers).
• Late fee cap: a jurisdiction's limit on a late fee's amount, its base (monthly, past-due or period rent) and the first day it may post, kept as effective-dated data; the engine evaluates the law and the operator's policy and posts the lesser (Charges & Resident Ledgers).
• Ledger party: who owes a charge on one lease's ledger: the resident, a subsidy agency or another third party; late fees, aging and notices run only on the resident's share (Charges & Resident Ledgers).
• Licensed transmitter (rent): a platform that holds rent in its own custodial accounts, recorded as restricted cash owed to clients, under state money transmitter licenses with bonds, permissible-investment rules and exams (Collecting Rent).
• LIHTC (Low-Income Housing Tax Credit): the program where households pay a restricted rent and the owner's benefit is the tax credit rather than a subsidy payment, overseen by state allocating agencies and the IRS (Subsidized & Affordable Housing).
• Local Law 97: New York City's law setting greenhouse gas emission limits for large buildings, with annual emissions reports certified by a registered design professional (Utilities & Energy).
• Lockbox: mailed checks scanned at a bank or vendor facility and matched to a lease by remittance coupon, payer name or unit, with unmatched items waiting in suspense (Collecting Rent).
• Managed Wi-Fi: building-wide network gear owned or leased by the property and run by a managed provider, so residents are online on move-in day and devices like smart locks share the network (Resident Financial Products & Ancillary Revenue).
• Mandatory fee: a charge every resident must pay (pest control, valet trash, a technology package, utility administration), which is part of the price and belongs in the advertised total (Charges & Resident Ledgers).
• Master policy (rental): a policy the owner or its agency program buys that covers units rather than residents, in gap (force-placed), blanket or owner-only form (Insurance, Deposits & Guarantees).
• MINC: the transmission format owners use to report to USDA Rural Development (Subsidized & Affordable Housing).
• NSPIRE (National Standards for the Physical Inspection of Real Estate): HUD's inspection standard for assisted and public housing, with compliance dates that have moved program by program; each deficiency becomes a work order with proof of repair (Subsidized & Affordable Housing).
• Office check scanning: remote deposit capture at the leasing office, depositing to the property's own bank account (Collecting Rent).
• Opt-in, opt-out enrollment: waiting for a resident to choose a product, versus enrolling them and charging until they stop it; my rule is opt-in, per person, with the price shown before consent (Resident Financial Products & Ancillary Revenue).
• Over-income family: under HOTMA, a public housing family whose income exceeds 2.4 times the very low-income limit, subject to rent policies and annual reporting by the authority (Subsidized & Affordable Housing).
• Partial payment: a payment of less than the balance; accepted by default outside a legal process unless the lease's payment acceptance says otherwise, and applied by the application rule (Collecting Rent).
• Payment acceptance: a lease's effective-dated state (all, certified funds only, full balance only, none) with a reason, set by the delinquency workflow and checked by every channel (Collecting Rent).
• Payment application order (application rule): the versioned, ordered list of steps that decides which open charges a payment pays, resolved from the jurisdiction's mandatory order and the operator's policy and recorded on every application; my default is rent first, oldest first (Charges & Resident Ledgers).
• Payment blocking: refusing payments on a lease, not just a payment method, because accepting money can change the landlord's legal position; it must never refuse a payment the law requires accepting (Collecting Rent).
• Payment plan: a signed agreement scheduling installments against a balance, stating whether ongoing rent must be paid, what a missed installment does and what it pauses; it changes the lease's payment acceptance (Delinquency, Collections & Eviction).
• Payment standard: the amount a housing authority sets, without HUD approval, from 90% to 110% of HUD's Fair Market Rent for the unit size (Subsidized & Affordable Housing).
• Pay-or-quit notice: the notice demanding rent or possession that starts a nonpayment case, with period, counting, content and service set by state; generated from the ledger, demanding only what the jurisdiction allows (Delinquency, Collections & Eviction).
• Personal guarantor: a person, often a parent, who promises to pay if the resident doesn't; a lease member with role guarantor who is financially responsible but not an occupant (Insurance, Deposits & Guarantees).
• Points ledger: an append-only, per-person record of reward points earned, redeemed, expired and reversed, each with its cause and funder; a redemption against rent is a third-party payment (Resident Financial Products & Ancillary Revenue).
• Policy verification: the queue that checks program policies, uploaded proofs and carrier notices against the property's requirement, with compliance computed daily per lease rather than stored as a flag (Insurance, Deposits & Guarantees).
• Positive-only, full-file reporting: rent reporting that sends only on-time payments, versus reporting that also sends late and missed ones; California's statute defines positive rental payment information as complete, timely payments only (Resident Financial Products & Ancillary Revenue).
• Post on confirmation: posting a payment when the channel confirms it (a cash network's confirmation, an ACH debit's submission) rather than at settlement, reversing it if it returns (Collecting Rent).
• Posting run: the idempotent job, recorded as a row per property and business date, that turns recurring charge schedules into posted charges; late fee runs share it (Charges & Resident Ledgers).
• Prepaid rent (unapplied credit): money paid beyond what's due, held on the lease as unapplied credit and in the GL as a liability until the application rule applies it to the next charges (Charges & Resident Ledgers).
• Project-based Section 8: HUD multifamily assistance attached to units, where the household pays a share computed from income and HUD pays the rest of the contract rent under a HAP contract (Subsidized & Affordable Housing).
• Proration method: how a partial month is priced: actual days in the month, a 30-day month, or actual days in the year; a contract term recorded on every prorated charge (Charges & Resident Ledgers).
• Public housing authority: the local agency that runs public housing it owns and administers Housing Choice Vouchers: waitlists, eligibility, landlord contracts, inspections and HAP payments (Subsidized & Affordable Housing).
• Recurring charge, posted charge: a promise on the lease (a charge schedule) and the fact it produces (a charge on the ledger); schedules change by new effective-dated rows and posted charges by reversal (Charges & Resident Ledgers).
• Referral commerce (resident marketplace): partners selling internet, energy, moving and home services to residents through the portal, with the platform and sometimes the operator earning a referral fee; a paid recommendation is advertising (Resident Financial Products & Ancillary Revenue).
• Regulatory agreement: the agreement binding a subsidized property to a program's rules, saying which units are restricted to which income levels; a property can be under several (Subsidized & Affordable Housing).
• Reinstatement: restoring a tenancy by paying the rent, court costs, limited late fees and awarded fees before or shortly after judgment, as Washington allows; a payment block must let it through (Collecting Rent).
• Rent channel: how a rent payment arrived (portal, autopay, text to pay, cash network, lockbox, check scan, office or third party); every channel posts through one matching, acceptance and posting path (Collecting Rent).
• Rent reasonableness: a housing authority's test of a voucher unit's rent against comparable units before it signs a HAP contract (Subsidized & Affordable Housing).
• Rent reporting: sending a resident's rent payment history to consumer reporting agencies so it can count in credit scores, designed around positive-only or full-file, opt-in or opt-out, who pays and who furnishes (Resident Financial Products & Ancillary Revenue).
• Rental assistance award: a program's payment to the landlord for a household's rent or arrears, recorded with the months it covers and the conditions the landlord accepted, which become holds and acceptance rules (Delinquency, Collections & Eviction).
• Renters insurance requirement: a lease term requiring resident liability coverage at a minimum limit, with the property as interested party, in force from move-in through move-out, and a stated consequence for going without (Insurance, Deposits & Guarantees).
• Repayment agreement: an installment plan a household signs when it owes money for under-reported income, against a separate receivable that isn't rent (Subsidized & Affordable Housing).
• Request for tenancy approval: the landlord's request to a housing authority to rent a chosen unit to a voucher holder, followed by rent reasonableness, an inspection and a HAP contract (Subsidized & Affordable Housing).
• Responsible person (individual billing): a charge that names one lease member, so on individually billed leases (mostly student housing) each person's payment applies to their own charges first (Charges & Resident Ledgers).
• Retail choice (energy procurement): in states that allow it, buying electricity or gas from a competitive supplier at a fixed, index or blended price instead of the default utility rate; the platform tracks each account's supplier, contract and expiry (Utilities & Energy).
• Revenue share entry: a dollar earned from an ancillary product (a revenue share, referral fee, door fee or commission), tied to its agreement, property and recipient so owner statements and resident disclosures come from the same rows (Resident Financial Products & Ancillary Revenue).
• Right to counsel: programs providing free lawyers to tenants facing eviction, as in New York City, so cases take longer and settle more often, with stipulations tracked as payment plans with court consequences (Delinquency, Collections & Eviction).
• RUBS (ratio utility billing): allocating a master utility bill, less the common-area share, to units by a formula such as occupants, square feet or unit type (Utilities & Energy).
• SCRA eviction protection: the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act's bar on evicting a servicemember or dependents below a rent threshold except by court order, with a stay on request when service affects ability to pay (Delinquency, Collections & Eviction).
• Sealing (eviction records): court limits on public access to eviction records, which the platform honors with a sealed flag restricting who sees the case and by never using masked records in screening (Delinquency, Collections & Eviction).
• Security deposit: the resident's money held against what they may owe at the end of the tenancy, a liability on the landlord entity's books (not income), regulated on cap, holding, interest, return and evidence (Insurance, Deposits & Guarantees).
• Self-help eviction: taking possession by changing locks, removing doors or shutting off utilities instead of through a writ executed by an officer, which the platform must never enable (Delinquency, Collections & Eviction).
• Set-aside (minimum set-aside): the share of a tax credit property's units restricted to lower-income households: 20% at or below 50% of area median income, 40% at or below 60%, or the average income test (Subsidized & Affordable Housing).
• Special claims: claims on a HAP voucher for unpaid rent, damages and vacancy losses where the contract allows (Subsidized & Affordable Housing).
• Split payments: a portal feature letting each leaseholder pay a share with their own autopay; the obligation usually stays joint and several, so splitting is a convenience, not a change in who owes what (Collecting Rent).
• Submetering: billing each unit for its own measured usage: read, validate, price at the utility's rate for the period, and post, under state rules capping charges at the provider's cost plus enumerated fees (Utilities & Energy).
• Surety bond (deposit): a deposit alternative bought with a one-time, non-refundable premium, where the surety pays the owner up to the bond amount and the bond's indemnity terms decide whether the resident still owes (Insurance, Deposits & Guarantees).
• Tenant rent, assistance payment: the two portions of rent in an assisted unit, owed by the household and by the agency, posted as separate charges on the resident and subsidy ledger parties (Subsidized & Affordable Housing).
• Text to pay: a stored payment method charged by a text reply, which needs identity, a balance check and a confirmation, under TCPA consent rules (Collecting Rent).
• Third-party payer: an agency, employer, charity or relative paying rent; California requires accepting rent from one who signs an acknowledgment that they're not a tenant (Collecting Rent).
• TRACS (Tenant Rental Assistance Certification System): HUD's system that receives certifications and voucher requests, runs edit checks and validates income and contract funding; its record layouts by release are the software's contract (Subsidized & Affordable Housing).
• USDA Rural Development (Section 515): rural rental housing where households pay a share plus rental assistance, reported to USDA's Rural Housing Service through MINC (Subsidized & Affordable Housing).
• Utility administration fee: a mandatory fee for billing utilities that regulators look for in advertised prices; the Greystar order named it among fees disclosed late (Utilities & Energy).
• Utility allowance: a reduction in what a household pays when it pays utilities directly; part of gross rent under the tax credit rules, so changing it changes the maximum rent (Subsidized & Affordable Housing).
• Utility billing company: a third party that bills and collects utilities for a property, which raises whether it needs a collection agency license where states license collectors broadly (Utilities & Energy).
• Utility invoice audit: checking each provider bill's usage against prior periods, its rate against the tariff, and for estimated reads, duplicates, late fees and wrong tax rates before it's paid and allocated (Utilities & Energy).
• Utility sales tax recovery: recovering sales tax a property overpaid on utility bills billed at the wrong rate, often by specialist firms on contingency, from the tax lines kept on every bill (Utilities & Energy).
• Vacant unit share: the portion of an allocated or metered utility bill belonging to vacant units, which is the owner's operating expense and never spread across occupied units (Utilities & Energy).
• Vendor-funded, client-funded points: reward points the platform vendor pays to redeem, versus points the operator buys as its own marketing spend (Resident Financial Products & Ancillary Revenue).
• Visa US Rent Payment Program: Visa's program allowing a flat program fee on debit card rent payments for registered merchants coded as real estate agents and managers, card-not-present only (Collecting Rent).
• Waitlist (housing authority): an authority's ordered list of applicants with preferences, ordering rules, purges and reopenings, where every position change is kept because order is a fair housing and audit question (Subsidized & Affordable Housing).
• Waiver by acceptance: the risk that accepting rent after a nonpayment notice or filing waives the landlord's right to proceed; Oregon treats accepting partial rent after a termination notice as a waiver unless a signed agreement says otherwise (Collecting Rent).
• Whole-building data: aggregated usage for every unit, needed for benchmarking when residents hold direct accounts and supplied by many utilities on request (Utilities & Energy).
• Writ (of possession): the court order, executed by an officer after judgment, that is the only lawful way possession changes hands (Delinquency, Collections & Eviction).
• Write-off: moving an unpaid balance to bad debt in the GL while keeping it collectible, with recoveries posted as payments against the written-off charges (Delinquency, Collections & Eviction).

Operations#

• Access log: the append-only record of entries, denials, forced doors and doors held open, with the credential, the access point and the time the lock or reader reported it; evidence for lockout, entry-window and package-room questions, and the most sensitive data in access (Access, Smart Buildings & Parking).
• Access point: anything that opens (a unit door, building entry, gate, garage door, elevator, amenity room, package room or locker bank), belonging to a property and, for unit doors, to a unit (Access, Smart Buildings & Parking).
• After-hours intake: covering nights and weekends with an on-call technician, an answering service, a contact center or an AI agent with escalation rules; the emergency definition belongs to the operator's policy and the law, not to whoever answers (Maintenance & Work Orders).
• ALPR (automated license plate recognition): plate readers that turn parking enforcement into a database; California regulates their operators, requiring reasonable security and a published usage and privacy policy, and plate reads are treated as location data (Access, Smart Buildings & Parking).
• Amenity reservation: booking short-duration shared inventory (a clubhouse, guest suite, court or move elevator), with time-range exclusion for exclusive amenities, per-slot counters for shared ones, per-amenity rules and fees posted as charges (Resident Experience).
• Asset register: the list of equipment the owner is responsible for (appliances, water heaters, HVAC, boilers, roofs, elevators) with location, make, model, serial, install date, warranty end and expected useful life; it drives warranty checks, repair-or-replace decisions and reserves (Maintenance & Work Orders).
• BEC (business email compromise): fraud in which a message that appears to come from a vendor, owner or executive asks to change where the next payment goes; the controls are a verified change workflow with an out-of-band callback, a first-payment hold and separated duties (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
• Bid: the process for projects and contracts: a scope, invited or public vendors, a due date, responses, a comparison and an award, with any minimum number of bids held as policy data on the owner or agreement (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
• Bill: an invoice once captured, which then goes through matching, duplicate detection, coding and allocation, and approval routing; an invoice covering several owners' properties is split into one bill per paying entity (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
• Biometric credential: a face, fingerprint or similar identifier used to open doors, regulated by laws such as Illinois' BIPA (notice, a written release, a public retention policy); the design these laws push toward is an opt-in alternative, never the only way in (Access, Smart Buildings & Parking).
• Change of bank details: a workflow rather than a field edit: a request with its channel, a callback to a contact already on file, account validation and a hold on the first payment to the new account, applied to vendors and to owners' distribution accounts alike (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
• Chargeback (owner): work the manager's staff performs or a vendor cost rebilled to the owner on a third-party managed property, sometimes with a markup set by the management agreement, posted to the owner's ledger rather than a lease (Maintenance & Work Orders).
• Chargeback (resident): a link between a work order and a posted charge for damage the household caused, priced from recorded labor, parts and any markup the lease and law allow, with its basis and evidence, and reversed rather than edited (Maintenance & Work Orders).
• Communication kinds: the purposes a property message can have (legal notice, emergency, operational, transactional, community, marketing), each with its own rules; consent is recorded per purpose, so opting out of marketing never silences the tenancy (Resident Experience).
• Community wall, classifieds: user-generated posts inside the operator's resident portal, governed by posting rules, staff moderation and a review queue for posts that look like housing ads (Resident Experience).
• Credential: what opens an access point: a mobile key, fob or card, PIN, biometric template, or a tracked physical key (Access, Smart Buildings & Parking).
• Credential purpose: the reason a credential exists (resident, work order, vendor, staff, guest or delivery, tour), which sets how long it is valid and the event that revokes it; no credential without a purpose record (Access, Smart Buildings & Parking).
• Credentialing (vendor compliance): proof before a vendor works that it is insured, licensed for the trade, a legitimate business with a taxpayer ID and, for entry into occupied homes, that its workers are screened; a vendor is compliant for a property, not in general, and the check repeats as documents expire (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
• Data-on-card lock: an offline lock that learns about grants and revocations only when a credential carrying fresh data touches a reader, which is why revocation can lag (Access, Smart Buildings & Parking).
• Duplicate detection (invoices): catching the same invoice arriving by email and by portal (a unique vendor and invoice number) or resubmitted under a new number (fuzzy matching on amount, date and property) (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
• Emergency (maintenance): a threat to life, safety or the building, such as fire, gas, flooding, no heat in cold weather, no water, a door that won't lock or a sewage backup; the emergency list is configuration per portfolio and routes to a human before any model reasons about it (Maintenance & Work Orders).
• Entry notice: the notice state law requires before a landlord enters a home (minimum notice, form, hours, whether a service request counts as consent), modeled as an effective-dated rule plus a record of each notice served, with emergency entries recorded with their justification (Maintenance & Work Orders).
• GPO (group purchasing organization): an organization that aggregates many buyers' volume to negotiate prices from national suppliers, funded by supplier fees or rebates on members' purchases (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
• Habitability (implied warranty of habitability): the duty, read into residential leases in most US jurisdictions, to keep a home safe and fit to live in, measured largely by the housing code; a breach can excuse rent in whole or part (Maintenance & Work Orders).
• Inspection: a run of a versioned template (areas, items, rating scales, required photos) for move-in and move-out, annual, preventive, lender, insurer, code or due-diligence reasons; deficient findings create work orders, the work is done offline, and photos are evidence (Maintenance & Work Orders).
• Make-ready board: the standard view of turns, showing each unit's stage and its next blocker (Maintenance & Work Orders).
• Make-ready (turn): the work that takes a unit from the day the last household leaves to the day it's ready for the next (move-out inspection, trash-out, repairs, paint, flooring, cleaning, final inspection), scheduled backward from the next move-in with ordered, dependent tasks (Maintenance & Work Orders).
• Managed catalog: a procurement catalog that restricts staff to approved items at contract prices (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
• Merchant of record (resident services): whoever sells a resident service: usually the provider, which charges the resident directly; if the operator collects, the charge is on the lease ledger and the operator is responsible for it (Resident Experience).
• Package locker, package room: a locker bank or room where a carrier or staff member scans a package in, the household is notified and pickup is recorded; packages are matched to a household rather than a name string and held for a policy-set period (Access, Smart Buildings & Parking).
• Parking permit: a vehicle registered to a household for a period for unassigned parking, sometimes limited per unit or with guest passes; vehicles belong to households and permits to leases (Access, Smart Buildings & Parking).
• Payer of record: the legal entity recorded as making a vendor payment, whose name and TIN go on the 1099 (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
• Payment hold: a hold, with a reason, on paying a vendor whose compliance has lapsed, released when the missing document arrives; checked at work order or PO issue, invoice approval and payment release (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
• Payment run: a batch of approved bills paid out, grouped by paying entity and bank account so one owner's money never pays another owner's bills (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
• Permission to enter: the resident's answer at intake on whether staff may enter for a request, captured with pets and availability; where it's no or missing, entry notice rules apply (Maintenance & Work Orders).
• PM (preventive maintenance): recurring work generated from a schedule attached to an asset, a building or a property (filter changes, detector tests, water heater flushes, code-required inspections), with building-wide in-unit work generating one work order and one entry notice per unit (Maintenance & Work Orders).
• PO (purchase order): the operator's commitment to buy (vendor, property, priced lines, GL coding, and the work order or project it serves), issued for one property so the paying entity is known, and the thing an invoice is matched against (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
• Portal (resident portal, resident app): a client for records the platform already has (account, requests, lease, household, access, coverage, community, amenities, moving), with permissions derived from the person's current lease member roles on every request (Resident Experience).
• Priority (work order): emergency, urgent or routine; urgent work makes part of the home unusable, and categories map to priorities through the operator's policy, checked against the law (Maintenance & Work Orders).
• Procure-to-pay (P2P, source-to-pay): the chain from requisition through purchase order, receipt, invoice matching and approval to payment, sold whole by the suites and link by link by specialists (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
• Punchout: the catalog integration in which the buyer leaves the procurement system for the supplier's catalog site, fills a cart, and the cart returns as a requisition with prices and part numbers, using a protocol such as cXML (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
• Rebate: money returned on virtual card spending or GPO purchases, earned on spending the owner funded; whether the manager keeps, credits or shares it is a management agreement term, so each rebate is recorded by the property and bill that earned it (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
• Receipt: the recorded fact that goods arrived (what and how much) or, for services, completion of the linked work order; the third leg of a three-way match (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
• Rekeying: changing locks between households or on request, required by law in some states with a deadline from a start event; whether reissuing an electronic credential satisfies a statute written for keyed locks is a question for legal review (Access, Smart Buildings & Parking).
• Repair deadline: a statutory, code or program clock for correcting a condition, keyed by category and severity and by its trigger (the tenant's written notice, service of a violation, an inspection), stored on the work order as respond_by and complete_by with the rule that set them (Maintenance & Work Orders).
• Request channel: how a resident reached the operator with a request (portal, app, text, phone, email, walk-in), recorded because it decides whether the request counts as written notice for repair deadlines; a portal or app request is treated as written notice (Maintenance & Work Orders).
• Resident services: things a resident buys at home (cleaning, handyman work, dog walking, internet and utility setup, moving help), where the platform records the merchant, who funds any credit, what the operator earns and the provider's own access grant (Resident Experience).
• Retaliation: acting against a tenant for a protected act such as a repair notice or habitability complaint, which many states prohibit; retention signals may prioritize outreach and service, never a worse offer or a non-renewal (Resident Experience).
• Retention signal: evidence from a household's service history and stated feedback (reopened work orders, slow responses, negative survey answers, unanswered messages) that tells a manager whom to call before the renewal window opens; never drawn from protected characteristics, and always explainable (Resident Experience).
• Revocation sync: confirming that a revoked credential has actually reached the vendor cloud and the locks; each credential's sync state (pending, active, revoke pending, revoked, failed) is tracked, failures are retried, and a unit can't be marked ready while a prior-lease credential is unconfirmed (Access, Smart Buildings & Parking).
• Sentiment: a model's inferred label on residents' messages or feedback, stored with its model version and kept separate from what residents stated in surveys, and out of decisions the resident can't see or contest (Resident Experience).
• Smart access law: a law regulating keyless entry data, such as New York City's Tenant Data Privacy Act (Local Law 63 of 2021): express consent, data minimization, limited uses, no location tracking outside the building, no use to harass or evict, and destruction of authentication data on a deadline (Access, Smart Buildings & Parking).
• Smart devices: in-unit and common-area thermostats, leak sensors, hubs, lighting, submeters, parking sensors and cameras; their alerts become work orders, vacant units are managed remotely, and device health is maintenance (Access, Smart Buildings & Parking).
• Survey (resident): a check-in triggered by events (after move-in, after a work order closes, before renewal, at move-out), tied to its subject so a bad answer feeds vendor scorecards and reopens or escalates the request (Resident Experience).
• Tow request: the record of a vehicle removal: the vehicle, grounds, when and by whom it was first seen, any notice served, the authorizing user, police notification and towing company, with the rule evaluation that permitted it (Access, Smart Buildings & Parking).
• Triage: setting a request's category, priority and who does the work (site staff or an outside vendor), and merging duplicate reports of one root cause under one work order (Maintenance & Work Orders).
• Two-way match, three-way match: comparing an invoice with its purchase order (vendor, items, prices), and additionally with the receipt or completed work order; invoices within tolerance pass and others go to an exception queue (Vendors, Procurement & Payables).
• White-label app: a resident app carrying the operator's name, which keeps the resident relationship with the operator rather than building the vendor's audience (Resident Experience).

Other Property Types#

• À la carte care pricing: a base fee with care services added or removed as the resident's needs change (Senior Living).
• Abatement (free rent): months with base rent waived as a leasing incentive, usually while additional rent (recoveries) stays payable; one a default can forfeit is a contingent credit, not a fixed one (Commercial Property).
• Academic term: a property-level product (academic year, semester, quarter or summer) whose dates a student lease copies at signing, so a later calendar change is a new term rather than an edit to signed leases (Student Housing).
• Academic-year turn: turning almost every unit of a student property in the short window between one year's lease ends and the next year's starts, planned as one production schedule (Student Housing).
• Activities of daily living: bathing, dressing, medication, getting to meals and similar personal care, the help assisted living adds to an apartment (Senior Living).
• Administrative fee (recoveries): a fee the landlord adds on top of recoverable expenses, such as a management charge set as a percentage of operating income, which some leases cap separately (Commercial Property).
• ADT feed: the admit, discharge and transfer events of health care integration; in senior living, move-in, transfer, leave and move-out events sent from the property platform to the EHR and pharmacy (Senior Living).
• Advance payment (short-term rental): money a guest pays before a future stay, held for the owner and possibly refundable, so it's a liability until the stay is earned (Short-Term Rentals).
• All-inclusive care pricing: a monthly fee that includes room and board, care services and all other services and amenities (Senior Living).
• Allocated interests: the numbers the declaration fixes for each unit (its share of common expenses, its votes and, in a condominium, its undivided interest), changed only by amendment and kept as effective-dated reference data (Community Associations).
• Allotment: a standing deduction from military pay sent to a payee, the usual way privatized housing rent is paid; it starts at lease signing, stops at move-out and arrives as a file to reconcile (Military & Specialty Housing).
• Allowance entitlement: the housing allowance a specific service member is owed, stored per member as its own effective-dated record with the rate row and reason behind it, because rate protection and corrections make it differ from the current table (Military & Specialty Housing).
• Alternate contact (self storage): the second address a storage agreement must request in states such as California and Washington; without it the lien doesn't attach, and lien notices go to both addresses (Self Storage).
• Ancillary retail (self storage): locks, boxes and moving supplies sold at the counter, possibly to non-occupants, taxed as retail goods and tracked as inventory, unlike rent (Self Storage).
• API connection (channel): a partner integration in which a channel and the system exchange reservations, prices and availability as they happen; channels admit only a limited set of software partners (Short-Term Rentals).
• Architectural review (ARC, ACC): the committee or board review of an owner's request to change the outside of a home, with a submission, completeness date, committee votes, a decision and follow-through, and often a deemed approval if the deadline passes (Community Associations).
• Artificial breakpoint: a negotiated sales threshold for percentage rent other than the natural breakpoint, often fixed in dollars or stepped by year (Commercial Property).
• ASC 842, IFRS 16: the US and international lease accounting standards that put leases on the lessee's balance sheet as a lease liability and a right-of-use asset, and set how lessors recognize lease income (Commercial Property).
• Assessment: an owner's share of what it costs to run a community association, set from the board's adopted budget and allocated across units by the declaration's formula, usually billed monthly or quarterly (Community Associations).
• Assessment gate: the senior living sales funnel's dependence on a care assessment before move-in, because both the price and the admission decision depend on it (Senior Living).
• Assigned-benefit policy: a long-term care insurance policy whose benefits are paid to the provider, making it a payer the community bills directly (Senior Living).
• Assignment letter: the notice telling a student resident (and, with consent, the guarantor) their building, unit, bed and roommates' first names, sent once when an assignment board is published (Student Housing).
• Assisted living: apartments plus help with the activities of daily living, delivered by staff around the clock under a state license whose definition each state sets itself (Senior Living).
• Association (community association): the legal entity, usually a nonprofit corporation, that owns or administers a community's common property and acts through its elected board; it is the manager's client (Community Associations).
• BAH (Basic Allowance for Housing): the housing allowance for a service member not in government quarters, set by location, pay grade and dependency status, published annually and effective January 1; in privatized housing it is the rent (Military & Specialty Housing).
• Base year: a named year whose expenses set the baseline in a gross lease; the tenant pays its share only of increases above it, with the grossed-up base frozen once the year closes (Commercial Property).
• Bed: the leased, priced, assigned and counted space in by-the-bed student housing, under the unit and bedroom, which still own the door, meters and work orders (Student Housing).
• Bed hold: a senior living facility's agreement to reserve a resident's apartment while they are in a hospital, nursing home or other facility, usually with the rent still running; Florida requires a written policy (Senior Living).
• Bed type: a floor plan and room configuration (for example a private room in a four-bedroom, four-bath unit) that a student lease can be signed for before a specific unit and bed are assigned (Student Housing).
• Board and committee terms: the record of who held which seat on an association board or committee, from when to when, so any approval can be checked against the authority in force that day (Community Associations).
• Breakpoint: the sales level above which a retail tenant owes percentage rent (Commercial Property).
• Broker commission (commercial): the fee a landlord pays its own agent and often the tenant's broker, commonly a percentage of aggregate base rent, paid in installments on events such as execution or rent commencement, and an initial direct cost for the lessor (Commercial Property).
• Build-to-rent (BTR): a community of houses or townhomes built to be rented, which looks like a horizontal apartment community: one property, many buildings (Military & Specialty Housing).
• Bulk assignment: placing pre-leased student residents into specific beds in one pass, working signed-but-unplaced leases against open beds by bed type, as a draft that is validated and then published in one transaction (Student Housing).
• By-the-bed lease (individual lease): a lease for one bed and shared use of the unit's common areas, signed by one resident who owes only their own rent; the operator may fill a vacant bed without the roommates' consent (Student Housing).
• CAM (common area maintenance): the costs of running shared areas, one of the three cost families a net lease passes to tenants alongside real estate taxes and insurance (Commercial Property).
• Cap (expense recovery): a negotiated limit on how fast recoverable expenses, usually controllable ones, may rise; non-cumulative caps grow from the prior year, cumulative caps compound from the base and carry unused headroom forward (Commercial Property).
• Care assessment: a nurse's or qualified assessor's evaluation of a resident's needs, before admission and again on a schedule or a change of condition, that produces the care level; it is clinical and kept apart from the accepted price (Senior Living).
• Care fee: the part of an assisted living bill for the help a resident needs, separate from the base rate for the apartment, meals and basic services (Senior Living).
• Care level determination: the care level an operator accepted for billing after an assessment, with when and under which notice treatment; one accepted level per resident at a time, effective-dated, and the care fee schedule points to it (Senior Living).
• CC&Rs (declaration of covenants, conditions and restrictions): the recorded document that governs a planned community (HOA), the counterpart of a condominium's declaration (Community Associations).
• Census: senior living's word for occupancy, counting residents in house (by care level and payer, against licensed capacity) rather than units, derived nightly and snapshotted as reported (Senior Living).
• Change of condition: a change in a resident's health that triggers a focused reassessment outside the regular schedule (Senior Living).
• Channel: a place a short-term rental is sold, such as an online travel agency or the operator's direct booking site; each listing is the channel's copy of the unit with its own identifier, content, fees and policies (Short-Term Rentals).
• Channel manager: the software that keeps a unit's channel listings in step, pushing availability, prices and restrictions out and taking reservations, modifications and cancellations in; usually part of the property management system (Short-Term Rentals).
• Channel payout: one payment from a channel covering many stays, net of the channel's fees and any taxes it remits, reconciled through payout lines that tie it back to each stay (Short-Term Rentals).
• Climate-controlled unit: a heated and cooled (sometimes humidity-controlled) storage unit, a different product at a different price from an unconditioned one (Self Storage).
• Closed to arrival, closed to departure: restrictions that stop stays from starting or ending on given nights, such as Saturday-only arrivals in a weekly market (Short-Term Rentals).
• Community-owned home: a manufactured home the community owns and rents to a resident with the lot, or with an option to buy (Military & Specialty Housing).
• Condominium: a common interest community where each owner holds title to a unit plus an undivided interest in the common elements, governed by a declaration (or master deed) (Community Associations).
• Contactless move-in (online rental): renting storage in one online session: choose a unit type, hold a unit, identify the occupant, choose coverage, sign, pay and receive a gate code, with no staff present (Self Storage).
• Continuing care retirement community (CCRC), life plan community: a campus offering several levels of senior living under one long-term contract, usually with an entrance fee plus a monthly fee (Senior Living).
• Controllable expenses (expense cap): the operating expenses a lease's cap applies to, usually defined by excluding items such as insurance, utilities, snow removal and costs outside the landlord's control (Commercial Property).
• Cooperative (co-op): a common interest community where the association owns the whole real estate and each owner holds shares plus a proprietary lease; a sale transfers the shares and usually needs board consent (Community Associations).
• Corporate lease administration: the occupier's management of the leases it holds as lessee (paying rent, tracking options, auditing reconciliations and accounting under ASC 842 and IFRS 16) (Commercial Property).
• Covered entity: under HIPAA, a health plan, clearinghouse or health care provider that transmits health information electronically in a covered transaction; a senior living operator becomes one by, for example, billing Medicaid electronically (Senior Living).
• Critical date: a date a commercial lease clause makes someone act on (an option window, rent commencement, an audit deadline), stored with its window, owner and status so alerts fire from a stored date (Commercial Property).
• Damage waiver (short-term rental): a non-refundable per-stay fee in exchange for the operator absorbing accidental damage up to a limit; it's revenue, possibly taxable, not a deposit (Short-Term Rentals).
• Data plate: the plate near a manufactured home's main electrical panel giving the manufacturing plant, serial number, model and date of manufacture (Military & Specialty Housing).
• Deal (commercial leasing): a negotiation for space with a prospect, a stage and versioned proposals; executing it creates the lease, and the deal keeps a link to what it produced (Commercial Property).
• Denial of access (self storage): the statutory step of locking a delinquent occupant out of the facility, on a clock each state sets, enforced by suspending the gate code and overlocking the unit (Self Storage).
• Dependency status: whether a service member draws the with-dependents or without-dependents housing allowance; a marriage, birth or divorce can change it and reprice the lease (Military & Specialty Housing).
• Discount rate, IBR (incremental borrowing rate): the rate a lessee discounts lease payments at; in practice the IBR, the rate it would pay to borrow the lease payments on a collateralized basis over a similar term (Commercial Property).
• Dual-military household: a household in which both spouses serve; rent equals the senior grade member's with-dependents allowance, and the other member keeps their own (Military & Specialty Housing).
• ECRI (existing-customer rate increase): a storage rent increase for an occupant already in a unit, made by scheduled notice with a computed effective date and checked against disclosed maximums and any emergency order (Self Storage).
• EHR (electronic health record): the system that holds a resident's clinical chart; in senior living it sits outside the property platform, which integrates with it (Senior Living).
• eMAR (electronic medication administration record): the record of each dose given, refused or held against the pharmacy's orders (Senior Living).
• Embedded lease: a lease hidden inside a service contract (dedicated trucks, identified data center racks) that lease accounting still has to find and record (Commercial Property).
• Entrance fee: the up-front payment for a life plan community contract, often substantial and in part refundable, with rescission and refund arithmetic regulated where a state has a continuing care statute (Senior Living).
• Estimates and reconciliation: monthly recovery charges billed from the landlord's budget, then trued up after year-end against actual pool costs under each lease's terms, posted as a one-time charge or credit (Commercial Property).
• Estoppel certificate (association): a statement of what a unit owes the association, issued to an owner, buyer or lender on a statutory deadline; the association is bound by the figures stated to someone who relies on them in good faith (Community Associations).
• Exclusions (recoveries): costs a lease bars the landlord from passing through, such as capital improvements, leasing commissions and financing costs (Commercial Property).
• Expense recovery: billing commercial tenants their lease-defined shares of operating expenses, taxes and insurance through estimates and an annual reconciliation (Commercial Property).
• Expense stop: a base-year arrangement expressed as a fixed amount per square foot instead of a year's actual costs (Commercial Property).
• Finance lease, operating lease: ASC 842's two lessee classes; a finance lease transfers ownership in substance (by one of the standard's tests) and shows amortization and interest separately, an operating lease shows a single straight-line lease cost (Commercial Property).
• Flex space, coworking: commercial space resold in small, short slices (desk memberships, private offices, meeting rooms by the hour, day passes, virtual offices), run more like a subscription and booking system than a lease ledger (Commercial Property).
• Full-service gross lease: a lease where the landlord pays operating expenses, taxes and insurance out of a single rent, often only above a base year (Commercial Property).
• Gap (orphan) nights: a short hole between two stays that the minimum stay would otherwise make unsellable, which pricing tools adjust to fill (Short-Term Rentals).
• Gate code (access state): the credential that is possession in storage; the management system holds the desired state per agreement (issued, suspended, restored, revoked) and reconciles the gate's actual state against it (Self Storage).
• Gross booking revenue: a stay's accommodation charge net of discounts, the base for a vacation-rental manager's commission and the owner's statement (Short-Term Rentals).
• Gross-up: adjusting variable operating costs to what they would have been at a stated occupancy, in both the base year and the comparison year, so tenants don't pay for the landlord's vacancy (Commercial Property).
• HCBS (home and community-based services) settings rule: the federal rule requiring a person in a provider-owned or controlled setting to hold a legally enforceable agreement with tenant-like protections, plus privacy, lockable doors and a choice of roommates (Senior Living).
• Home placement: a manufactured home sitting on a lot for a date range; one home per lot and one lot per home at a time (Military & Specialty Housing).
• Hospital leave: a resident's absence in a hospital or a skilled nursing facility for rehab; they remain a resident, their apartment is not available and the rent usually keeps running (Senior Living).
• Host protection program: a channel's own damage and liability coverage for hosts on its bookings, with claims run on the channel's evidence rules and deadlines (Short-Term Rentals).
• HUD certification label: the permanent label on each transportable section of a manufactured home, numbered with a three-letter production inspection agency code and six digits (Military & Specialty Housing).
• Hybrid entity: under HIPAA, an organization that designates its health care components (such as a life plan community's skilled nursing wing), which must not pass protected health information to the rest of the organization (Senior Living).
• iCal (calendar feed): a polled URL listing blocked dates that carries availability only, with a lag that is the double-booking window (Short-Term Rentals).
• Independent living: apartments with meals, housekeeping, transportation and activities for older adults who need little or no personal care, usually under landlord-tenant law and paid privately (Senior Living).
• Indirect pre-lease: a student lease signed for a bed type but not yet placed in a specific unit and bed, shown against inventory until assignment (Student Housing).
• Initial direct costs: costs of obtaining a lease, such as broker commissions, that a lessor capitalizes and recognizes over the lease term, while travel, legal fees and allocated salaries are expensed (Commercial Property).
• In-place rate: what an existing storage occupant pays, set at move-in and raised over time; the gap to the street rate is the storage business model (Self Storage).
• IWMS (integrated workplace management system): software combining lease administration, space management, facilities maintenance and capital projects for occupiers (Commercial Property).
• Joint and several lease: one lease for a unit signed by every roommate, each liable for the whole rent; a roommate's departure or nonpayment leaves the others owing (Student Housing).
• Lease abstract: the structured summary of a long commercial lease (parties, premises, dates, rent, recovery terms, options and clauses), each field pointing back to its source section (Commercial Property).
• Lease amendment (commercial): a signed change to an existing commercial lease (expansion, extension, rent reset); unlike a residential renewal it amends the same lease, so base years, caps and straight-line schedules run across amendments (Commercial Property).
• Lease liability, ROU (right-of-use) asset: the present value of a lessee's unpaid lease payments, and the asset equal to that liability plus initial direct costs and prepaid rent, less incentives received (Commercial Property).
• Leased beds for a term: signed leases for a term, assigned to a bed or not, divided by the term's rentable beds; the student measure of pre-leasing (Student Housing).
• Liability model: whether a lease is joint and several or individual, chosen at signing and printed in the document, never inferred from how many people signed (Student Housing).
• Lien (association): the association's statutory or declared claim on a unit for unpaid assessments, enforced by foreclosure within state limits; which charges it can carry varies by state (Community Associations).
• Lien class: a classification on each charge code saying whether a charge can join an association's lien, count toward super-priority or support a foreclosure under the jurisdiction's rules (Community Associations).
• Lien sale (self storage): the statutory sequence for enforcing a storage owner's lien on a unit's contents: default, access denial, notices, cure period, advertisement and a commercially reasonable sale, often online (Self Storage).
• Load factor (R/U ratio): rentable area divided by usable area (Commercial Property).
• Lodging tax (transient occupancy tax): the state and local taxes on a short stay, taxed like a hotel room, each with its own rate, base, length-of-stay exemption and filing; who collects and remits depends on the channel (Short-Term Rentals).
• Long-term care insurance: policies that pay a daily amount up to a limit for help with activities of daily living, either reimbursing the resident or paid to the provider (Senior Living).
• Lot lease, lot rent: the lease of the ground under a resident-owned manufactured home, and its rent, kept as a charge code separate from home rent because rent-increase law usually governs lot rent (Military & Specialty Housing).
• MAC (Military Assistance Company): an allotment management contractor that collects and manages BAH payments for housing partnerships and reports to the service (Military & Specialty Housing).
• Management commission (short-term rental): the manager's percentage of gross or net accommodation revenue under the management agreement, sometimes different by booking source (Short-Term Rentals).
• Manufactured home: a factory-built home meeting HUD construction and safety standards, evidenced by a state title, and personal or real property depending on state law and what has been recorded (Military & Specialty Housing).
• Manufactured housing community: a community of lots, where the operator often rents only the ground and the resident owns the titled home on it, so the lot is the unit and the home is a separate asset (Military & Specialty Housing).
• Master policy (association): the association's property and liability insurance on what the declaration and statute make it insure: common elements, and in a co-op or vertical condominium the units' structure (Community Associations).
• Medicaid waiver (1915(c) waiver): a state program offering services such as personal care, homemaker and respite to people who meet an institutional level of care in their home or community; federal funds never pay room and board outside narrow exceptions (Senior Living).
• Members: the owners of a community association, who elect the board, vote, pay assessments and owe compliance with the covenants, without contracting with the manager (Community Associations).
• Membership (flex space): a recurring plan for a desk or office with included credits, overage charges and a notice period, billed like a subscription; one with no identified desk generally isn't a lease (Commercial Property).
• Memory care: assisted living for residents with dementia, in a secured building or neighborhood with more staff, often licensed as an endorsement or special license (Senior Living).
• MHPI (Military Housing Privatization Initiative): the DoD program under which long-term partnerships between a military department and a private company own, finance and operate family housing on or near installations (Military & Specialty Housing).
• Milestone inspection: Florida's required structural inspection of condominium and co-op buildings three habitable stories or higher, at a building age set by statute and every 10 years after, in two phases (Community Associations).
• MIMO file: a monthly outbound file of move-ins and move-outs sent to a military housing program, kept as sent with its acknowledgment (Military & Specialty Housing).
• Minimum and maximum stay: limits on stay length set per night or per arrival day, which pricing tools change dynamically (Short-Term Rentals).
• Modified gross lease: a lease that includes some costs in rent and passes others through, in whatever split the parties negotiated (Commercial Property).
• Natural breakpoint: base rent divided by the percentage-rent rate, the sales level at which percentage rent would equal base rent (Commercial Property).
• Negotiated service agreement (service plan): the plan, built from an assessment and agreed by the resident or representative, of how a facility will meet a resident's needs and monitor risks (Senior Living).
• Net effective rent: total rent over the term less the landlord's concessions and costs, spread per square foot per year; a deal-pipeline metric computed from a proposal, not a stored lease term (Commercial Property).
• NNN (triple net) lease: a lease where the tenant pays base rent plus its share of CAM, real estate taxes and property insurance; in an absolute net lease it also bears structural and capital items (Commercial Property).
• Occupant (self storage): the statutory name for the person renting storage space, who may not use it as a residence and so falls under a self-service storage act rather than landlord-tenant law (Self Storage).
• OHA (Overseas Housing Allowance): the allowance service members outside the US draw instead of BAH, with its own rules (Military & Specialty Housing).
• Options (commercial lease): tenant rights such as renewal, extension, expansion, contraction, early termination and purchase, each exercisable in a notice window (Commercial Property).
• OSCRE Industry Data Model: a free real estate data standard from the nonprofit OSCRE, defining entities across the asset lifecycle for exchanging properties, spaces, leases and rent rolls between parties (Commercial Property).
• OTA (online travel agency): a channel such as Airbnb, Vrbo or Booking.com that sells short-term stays alongside the operator's direct site (Short-Term Rentals).
• Overbooked stay: a channel-confirmed reservation that collides with nights another stay holds, recorded outside the overlap constraint and resolved by a person relocating or cancelling one guest (Short-Term Rentals).
• Overlock: a second lock the operator puts on a storage unit so the occupant's key no longer opens it, the physical form of denying access, recorded with who placed and removed it, when and with what photo (Self Storage).
• Owner nights: stays where a vacation-rental owner or the owner's guests use the home; they block the calendar, earn no accommodation revenue and may be limited by the management agreement (Short-Term Rentals).
• Ownership account: the ledger and membership for one owner, or set of co-owners, of one association unit for as long as they hold title; it replaces the lease, closes at sale and opens anew for the buyer (Community Associations).
• PAM report, Schedule G: the Army's and the Air Force's project oversight reports for privatized housing, built as report definitions and snapshotted as submitted (Military & Specialty Housing).
• Payer coverage: a payer source (private pay, Medicaid, long-term care insurance, VA benefits) attached to one resident for a date range, so each charge names whose receivable it is (Senior Living).
• Payer source: who pays for part of a senior living resident's month: private pay, Medicaid, long-term care insurance or VA Aid and Attendance, each with its own rules about what it pays for and to whom (Senior Living).
• Payment plan (association): an arrangement letting a delinquent owner pay arrears over time; in California the owner can request a board meeting on one and late fees stop accruing while it's kept (Community Associations).
• PCS (permanent change of station): orders moving a service member to a new duty station; under the SCRA they let the member terminate a residential lease (Military & Specialty Housing).
• Percentage rent: retail rent of a percentage of the tenant's gross sales above a breakpoint, computed from certified sales reports, cumulatively or not, with tiers, offsets and prorated breakpoints (Commercial Property).
• Pharmacy interface: the link that receives medication orders and sends refill requests over a standard such as NCPDP SCRIPT (Senior Living).
• Planned community (HOA): a common interest community that is neither a condominium nor a cooperative, where owners hold title to lots or homes and the association owns or leases the common areas (Community Associations).
• Points-based care pricing: a tiered variant in which the assessment scores each need, the points total falls in a band, and the band is a level with a price (Senior Living).
• Pre-leasing curve, pace: the share of next fall's beds leased by a given week, compared with the same week in prior years; student pricing is steered by pace against it (Student Housing).
• Preliminary lien notice: the first notice in a storage lien sequence, sent after a statutory number of consecutive unpaid days by an allowed delivery method and giving the occupant time to pay (Self Storage).
• Private pay: a resident or family paying the full senior living bill from savings, income or the sale of a home (Senior Living).
• Privatized military housing: family housing on or near an installation, owned and operated by a private partner under a long-term deal with a military department, priced by the resident's housing allowance and overseen by the installation and the service (Military & Specialty Housing).
• Proprietary lease: the lease a co-op shareholder holds that gives exclusive possession of a unit; it's assigned with the shares at sale (Community Associations).
• Pro-rata share: a tenant's area over a recovery pool's denominator, unless the lease stipulates the share (Commercial Property).
• Protection plan (self storage): the operator's own promise, for a monthly fee, to bear losses to stored goods up to a limit as a term of the rental agreement, with no insurer; whether it counts as insurance depends on the state (Self Storage).
• Rate protection: the BAH rule that a member staying at the same duty station keeps their allowance even if the published rate for the area falls (Military & Specialty Housing).
• Records request (association): an owner's statutory right to inspect association records, run as a case with a computed deadline and penalties for missing it (Community Associations).
• Recovery pool: a group of expenses recovered together and shared over a defined set of spaces (CAM, taxes, insurance, a marketing fund), with mapped expense accounts, an effective-dated membership and a denominator basis (Commercial Property).
• Redemption (self storage): an occupant paying the full lien and expenses before the sale to recover the property, which must cancel the auction, restore access and remove the overlock as one outcome (Self Storage).
• Registration (short-term rental): a city or regional record (registration, permit, license, certificate) a unit needs before it can be listed, with a number channels display and verify and validity dates the system watches (Short-Term Rentals).
• Reimbursement policy: a long-term care insurance policy that pays the resident, so the community bills the resident and supplies statements and care documentation for the claim (Senior Living).
• Rent commencement: the date base rent starts, which can differ from lease commencement (Commercial Property).
• Rentable area, usable area: usable area is the space inside a tenant's demising walls; rentable area adds the tenant's share of shared space such as corridors, restrooms and lobbies (Commercial Property).
• Rental agreement (self storage): the periodic, month-to-month contract under a state self-service storage act between an owner and an occupant, modeled as a lease with no end date and a different governing law (Self Storage).
• Resale certificate: the package an association furnishes when a unit sells (amounts owed, fees, budget, reserves, violations, restraints on transfer), on a statutory deadline and fee, frozen as issued because the association is bound by it (Community Associations).
• Reserve study: an inventory of an association's major components with each one's remaining useful life and replacement cost, plus a funding plan; each study is a new version, not an edit (Community Associations).
• Reserves: money an association sets aside to replace major components at the end of their lives, held in a restricted account whose transfers are governance events (Community Associations).
• Residency agreement: senior living's name for the lease, which a Medicaid resident's setting must make legally enforceable with landlord-tenant or comparable eviction protections (Senior Living).
• Resident representative: a person with scoped, verified, dated authority to act for a senior living resident (financial or health care power of attorney, guardian or conservator, responsible party); not a guarantor and not personally liable (Senior Living).
• Resident-owned home: a manufactured home the resident owns on a rented lot; it has an owner and a title but no lease of its own (Military & Specialty Housing).
• Respite stay: a short senior living stay, often while a family caregiver travels or after a hospital discharge, under its own agreement and usually a daily rate, counted in census while it lasts (Senior Living).
• Responsible party: a person who has agreed to pay for or be contacted about a senior living resident, and who can give notices such as a bed hold no-return notice (Senior Living).
• Retail protections: commercial clauses such as exclusive use, co-tenancy (rent relief if anchors leave), radius restrictions, operating covenants, go-dark rights and relocation rights (Commercial Property).
• Right of first refusal, right of first offer: a tenant's rights over other space in the building, each with dates attached (Commercial Property).
• Roommate matching: pairing students who don't arrive as a group by lifestyle questionnaires, compatibility scores and mutual requests; inputs must exclude protected characteristics and every placement keeps its decision record (Student Housing).
• Roommate request (mutual): two students asking to live with each other, recorded as the residents' own choice, separate from the operator's placement of strangers (Student Housing).
• RV site: a lot rented to a recreational vehicle; a monthly site is a lot with a lease, and a nightly site is a stay under the short-term rental model (Military & Specialty Housing).
• Scattered-site portfolio: single-family houses spread across a metro under one owner, each a building with one unit, where every maintenance visit is a drive (Military & Specialty Housing).
• SCRA lien protection (storage): the federal bar on enforcing a storage lien against a servicemember's property during military service and 90 days after without a court order, so a lien case needs a military check before the sale (Self Storage).
• SCRA (Servicemembers Civil Relief Act) lease termination: a service member's right to end a residential lease on entering service, on PCS orders, on a deployment of at least 90 days or under a stop-movement order, with no early termination charge and a computed effective date; it applies to every property type (Military & Specialty Housing).
• Second person: a spouse or companion sharing a senior living apartment, who pays a second-person fee for meals and services and has their own care level if they need care (Senior Living).
• Secret ballot: a member vote whose participation records and ballot choices are stored so they can't be joined, proving eligibility without revealing how anyone voted (Community Associations).
• Segment: a property attribute (student, senior, military, build-to-rent) that switches on segment behavior while the property type stays as the core defines it (Student Housing).
• Segregated rent: a privatized housing tenant's allowance and allotted pay held during a maintenance or habitability dispute with a commander's approval, so the landlord can't use it; it is charged and paid but posted to a held liability until the decision distributes it (Military & Specialty Housing).
• Self-showing: letting a prospect tour a vacant house alone after identity verification, with a short-lived single-use lockbox or smart lock code and a log of the entry (Military & Specialty Housing).
• Single-family rental (SFR): a portfolio of rented houses, scattered or built together, managed as many small properties with keys, yards and often homeowners associations of their own (Military & Specialty Housing).
• SIRS (structural integrity reserve study): Florida's required reserve study for condominium and co-op buildings three habitable stories or higher, covering listed structural components, whose reserves can't be waived (Community Associations).
• Skilled nursing facility (SNF): a federally certified nursing home billing Medicare and Medicaid as a clinical facility; the boundary of property software, integrated with rather than absorbed (Senior Living).
• Special assessment: a one-time levy outside the regular budget (a roof the reserves can't cover, an insurance deductible), allocated by the same formula unless the documents say otherwise and often needing an owner vote (Community Associations).
• Spend-down: a private-pay senior living resident running down their assets to Medicaid eligibility, recorded as a payer change on the existing agreement from the eligibility date, often retroactively (Senior Living).
• Stacking plan: floors drawn as a stack of suites with tenants and expirations, a view over units, premises and leases rather than a separate store (Commercial Property).
• Stay: a reservation of a unit for a range of nights, with a booker, guests, a whole-stay price and a cancellation policy; it is not a lease and falls under lodging law up to the jurisdiction's tenancy threshold (Short-Term Rentals).
• Straight-line rent: lessor income recognized evenly over an operating lease's term rather than as billed, building and unwinding an accrued rent receivable through free and stepped rent (Commercial Property).
• Street rate: the storage move-in rate a new customer pays today, posted on the website and marketplaces and changed as demand moves (Self Storage).
• Super-priority (association lien): the limited portion of an association's lien, a set number of months of budget-based assessments in states that grant it, that ranks ahead of a prior first mortgage (Community Associations).
• Surplus (lien sale): sale proceeds above the lien and costs, which belong to the occupant or a senior lienholder, are held for a statutory period, then go to a county, the state or are deemed abandoned (Self Storage).
• Tenancy threshold: the length of continuous occupancy, set per jurisdiction, at which a guest becomes a tenant; a stay reaching it needs a lease (Short-Term Rentals).
• Tenant audit rights: a commercial tenant's right to audit the books behind a reconciliation, with a frequency, a window from statement delivery and a cost-shifting threshold set per lease (Commercial Property).
• Tenant Bill of Rights, Tenant Responsibilities: the statutory rights and duties of privatized military housing tenants (10 U.S.C. 2890), including maintenance history before signing, an electronic work order system, no non-refundable fees and a dispute process (Military & Specialty Housing).
• Tenant insurance compliance (commercial): comparing a lease's insurance requirements (coverages, limits, additional insureds, maximum deductible) with each certificate received, producing findings such as missing, deficient or expiring (Commercial Property).
• Tenant insurance (self storage): a policy from a licensed insurer covering stored goods, sold at the counter or online and often reinsured by the operator's own subsidiary (Self Storage).
• TI (tenant improvement) allowance: money the landlord contributes to build out a tenant's space, quoted per rentable square foot and disbursed against invoices and lien waivers under the lease's rules (Commercial Property).
• Tiered care pricing (levels of care): different levels of care at different price points, with the level set by assessment (Senior Living).
• Turnover (short-term rental): the cleaning, restocking and inspection between one stay's departure and the next arrival, created from the calendar for every departure with a window from checkout to the next check-in (Short-Term Rentals).
• Type A, B and C contracts: life plan community contracts that are all-inclusive with a monthly fee that doesn't rise with care needs (A), cover a set number of nursing days before per diem rates (B), or charge for all health care as used (C) (Senior Living).
• UCIOA (Uniform Common Interest Ownership Act): the model act many states adopted in some form, which sorts common interest communities into condominiums, cooperatives and planned communities (Community Associations).
• Undivided interest: a condominium owner's share of the common elements, held with the other owners as tenants in common (Community Associations).
• Unhosted night cap: a city's limit on nights a unit may be rented without the host present, counted from confirmed unhosted stays rather than stored as a counter (Short-Term Rentals).
• Unit mix: the count of each storage unit type at a facility, a capital decision that changes when movable walls resize units (Self Storage).
• Unit type (self storage): the bundle of attributes a customer chooses (size, climate control, access, floor), the level at which storage is priced while the system rents a specific unit inside it (Self Storage).
• VA Aid and Attendance: monthly payments added to a VA pension for qualified veterans and survivors who need help with daily activities; paid to the veteran, so it is the resident's income rather than a receivable (Senior Living).
• Value limit: the cap a storage agreement sets on the value of property an occupant may store (Self Storage).
• Violation (covenant enforcement): a case recorded against a unit and a rule, moving through courtesy notice, notice of hearing, hearing and decision, and fine, with evidence and delivery proof for each step (Community Associations).
• Waterfall (military housing): an installation's ordered eligibility tiers for privatized homes, opening them to other groups in a fixed order when occupancy falls; kept as an effective-dated rule, with each waitlist entry recording the version that placed it (Military & Specialty Housing).

The Rules#

• Accommodation effect: what a granted accommodation changes in the rest of the system (a waived pet charge, an assigned space, a moved due day), stored so the ledger and the lease obey the decision instead of staff remembering it (Fair Housing).
• Affirmative Fair Housing Marketing Plan (AFHMP): the HUD-approved plan HUD-assisted properties must follow, marketing to those least likely to apply, carrying the Equal Housing Opportunity logo or statement and keeping records of media and activities for compliance reviews (Fair Housing).
• Applicability condition: a fact about the property, landlord or tenancy (building age, owner type, portfolio size, service-member status) that decides whether a rule or its exemption applies; a rule's conditions name the facts it needs (Landlord-Tenant Law as Data).
• As-of event: the event whose date selects a rule version for a rule type (date a deposit was collected, a notice served, a tenant vacated, a fee charged), recorded in the rule-type registry and stored on each evaluation (Landlord-Tenant Law as Data).
• Assistance animal: an animal a person with a disability needs, the highest-volume accommodation request; a granted request waives pet rent, fees and deposits for that animal on that lease (Fair Housing).
• Assured periodic tenancy: the default English tenancy since the Renters' Rights Act's 1 May 2026 changes, with no fixed term, continuing until a party ends it (Outside the US).
• Audit production: what an operator delivers for an audit request, generated as of a timestamp from the system of record with a manifest of hashes and a recorded reviewer, so it can be regenerated and compared if challenged (Records, Privacy & Audits).
• Audit request: an audit treated as a request with a requester, authority, scope, deadline and production, with a legal hold placed on its scope (Records, Privacy & Audits).
• Bacs Direct Debit, Direct Debit Guarantee: the UK's direct debit rail, and its consumer guarantee of advance notice of changes in amount, date or frequency and a full and immediate refund of an amount taken in error (Outside the US).
• BECS (Bulk Electronic Clearing System): Australia's direct entry batch rail for debits and credits, administered by AusPayNet (Outside the US).
• Bond authority: in most Australian states, the government body that holds rental bonds instead of the landlord (NSW Fair Trading, through Rental Bonds Online, in New South Wales); the landlord's ledger carries only a lodgement reference, a status and a claim at the end (Outside the US).
• Business, service provider (CCPA): under the California Consumer Privacy Act, the operator that meets the law's tests is the business, and the software vendor acting on its instructions under contract is normally its service provider or processor, until it uses resident data for its own purposes (Records, Privacy & Audits).
• Combination (of rules): how a rule type combines across a property's jurisdictions, decided once per type: strictest wins for caps, longest wins for notice periods, all apply for protected classes and disclosures, and most specific wins for a few replacing rules (Landlord-Tenant Law as Data).
• Consumer information: under the FTC Disposal Rule, consumer reports and information derived from them, including residential or tenant history (Records, Privacy & Audits).
• Costa-Hawkins Act: California's law letting an owner set initial and all subsequent rents for units with a certificate of occupancy after February 1, 1995 or that are separately alienable, notwithstanding local rent control; modelled as a carve-out on the state's preemption row (Landlord-Tenant Law as Data).
• Crypto-shredding: encrypting sensitive documents with per-record or per-person keys so destroying the key disposes of every copy, including those in backups that can't be edited (Records, Privacy & Audits).
• Custodial, insured scheme: the two types of UK deposit protection scheme: a custodial scheme holds the deposit itself, and an insured scheme lets the landlord or agent hold it while paying the scheme to insure it (Outside the US).
• Deposit protection: in England and Wales, the duty to put a tenant's deposit in a government-backed scheme and give the tenant the prescribed information within 30 days of receiving it, with the return running through the scheme (Outside the US).
• Disparate impact: liability for a practice because of its discriminatory effects, without intent, recognized under the Fair Housing Act in Inclusive Communities (2015) and codified by HUD as a three-step burden-shifting test at 24 CFR 100.500 (Fair Housing).
• Disposal event: the append-only proof that records were destroyed: what, under which schedule or request, by what method, in which stores, when and by which job (Records, Privacy & Audits).
• Disposal Rule (FTC): 16 CFR 682, requiring anyone holding consumer information for a business purpose, landlords and their service providers included, to dispose of it with reasonable measures against unauthorized access (Records, Privacy & Audits).
• Effective-dated rule: a legal rule stored as data with a jurisdiction, a rule type, typed parameters, a validity period and a source, so the rule in force on any date can be found (Landlord-Tenant Law as Data).
• Fail closed: when a fact needed to establish an exemption is missing, the evaluation applies the stricter outcome and asks for the fact rather than assuming the exemption (Landlord-Tenant Law as Data).
• Fair Housing Initiatives Program (FHIP): HUD's grant program that often funds the fair housing organizations sending paired testers; its funding has been in litigation since HUD terminated grants in February 2025 (Fair Housing).
• Fairness test: running a decision process (screening criteria, a model, ad delivery, an AI agent) over a population and comparing outcomes across groups, recorded with method, population, period, comparison, review threshold and what was done (Fair Housing).
• Field preemption: a higher law taking a whole field of regulation for itself, so lower jurisdictions' rules in that field don't apply at all (Florida § 83.425, Texas HB 2127); modelled as a row displacing subordinate rules of named types for a period (Landlord-Tenant Law as Data).
• Housing for older persons: housing that qualifies under 42 U.S.C. 3607(b) (all residents 62 or older, or 55-plus housing where at least 80% of occupied units have a resident 55 or older) and may exclude families with children, given published policies and recurring occupancy verification (Fair Housing).
• Impact query: the list, run before an approved rule change takes effect, of properties, leases and scheduled actions it affects (offers above a new cap, fees above a new limit) (Landlord-Tenant Law as Data).
• Interactive process: the exchange between provider and requester on an accommodation request (verification asked and received, alternatives offered, decision), tracked as a case with a response-by date; a denial can't close without an alternatives step (Fair Housing).
• Jurisdiction resolution: finding the effective-dated set of jurisdictions (state, county, city, special districts) a property or building sits in from its location, preferably its parcel, never its mailing address, and having a person confirm it (Landlord-Tenant Law as Data).
• Large holder (Spain): under Ley 12/2023, an owner of more than ten urban residential properties or more than 1,500 square meters of residential space (a regional declaration can lower it to five properties), whose rent in a stressed area may not exceed a reference price index (Outside the US).
• Legal hold: a suspension of disposal for records in a scope (usually a property or person over a period) until released, placed for complaints, suits, subpoenas, inquiries, audits and disputes; the disposal job never deletes held records (Records, Privacy & Audits).
• Legal review (of a rule): the workflow a rule passes before it applies: drafted from the source with open questions, shipped with test cases, approved by a second person (a lawyer for contested readings), impact-checked and announced to operators (Landlord-Tenant Law as Data).
• Legal source: the statute, ordinance, regulation, court order, guidance or published figure a rule comes from, stored with its URL, retrieval date, a content hash and how it is watched for change (Landlord-Tenant Law as Data).
• Mietpreisbremse: Germany's rent brake (BGB § 556d): in areas designated by state ordinance as tight markets, rent at the start of a tenancy may exceed the local comparative rent by at most 10% (Outside the US).
• Occupation contract: the Welsh replacement for tenancies under the Renting Homes (Wales) Act 2016, held by contract-holders and either secure or standard, with standard contracts periodic or fixed-term (Outside the US).
• Ontario rent increase guideline: the province's published annual maximum increase, calculated from Ontario CPI and capped at 2.5%, with units first occupied after November 15, 2018 exempt (Outside the US).
• Paired testing: sending testers (or synthetic applicants or prompts) identical except for a protected characteristic or its signal, to see whether people are treated differently; used by fair housing organizations and for testing AI agents (Fair Housing).
• PIPEDA: Canada's federal private-sector privacy law for commercial activity, displaced within Alberta, British Columbia and Quebec by their substantially similar laws, but still applying to information crossing provincial or national borders (Outside the US).
• Policy override: an evaluation outcome recording that an operator's setting was looser than the law, so the law applied instead (Landlord-Tenant Law as Data).
• Preemption: a higher law removing a lower law's force, so the lower rule doesn't apply however strict; it comes as field preemption, partial preemption that carves out cases, a state floor that allows stricter local rules, and federal law that stacks (Landlord-Tenant Law as Data).
• Prescribed form: a government-mandated lease or notice form (Ontario's standard lease, Quebec's mandatory forms), filled by the platform and recorded on the lease by version as signed or served (Outside the US).
• Prescribed information: the information about a protected deposit that an England or Wales landlord must give the tenant within 30 days of receipt under section 213 of the Housing Act 2004 (Outside the US).
• Privacy request: a person's request to know, access, correct, delete or opt out, handled as a case with a deadline from the applicable law, fulfilled across every store, and closed with a record of what was kept and why (Records, Privacy & Audits).
• Private residential tenancy (PRT): Scotland's open-ended tenancy created by the Private Housing (Tenancies) (Scotland) Act 2016, with rent increased by notice on a three-month minimum period (Outside the US).
• Protected class: a characteristic fair housing law protects (federally race, color, religion, sex, familial status, national origin and disability, plus state and local additions), resolved per property and date as the union across its jurisdictions (Fair Housing).
• Reasonable accommodation, reasonable modification: a change in rules, policies, practices or services a person with a disability needs for equal use of a dwelling, and a structural change to the premises, usually at the resident's expense in private housing; refusing either is discrimination (Fair Housing).
• Regulator of Social Housing, registered provider: England's regulator that keeps the register of social housing providers and sets the outcomes social landlords must deliver; registered housing associations and councils run on different rent, allocation and reporting rules from private landlords (Outside the US).
• Renters' Rights Act 2025: the English act whose main tenancy reforms commenced 1 May 2026: Section 21 abolished, assured periodic tenancies, one rent increase a year, no rental bidding, rent in advance capped, with registration and further phases to follow (Outside the US).
• Retention schedule: the operator's period for keeping a record type, running from a trigger event (move-out, waitlist removal, decision), checked to be at least the longest applicable legal minimum and no longer than the privacy ceiling (Records, Privacy & Audits).
• Right of publicity: the right against commercial use of a person's persona without consent (Ohio's statute is the example); displaying a public deed record and using a person's name to sell a subscription are different acts (Records, Privacy & Audits).
• Rule evaluation: the stored record of a computed result (a cap, deadline, fee or notice) with the as-of date, the rule versions and preemptions considered, any operator policy, the inputs and the outcome; evaluations are stored, never recomputed (Landlord-Tenant Law as Data).
• Rule type: a registered kind of legal rule (security_deposit_limit, entry_notice, rent_cap and so on) with a parameter schema, a combination, an as-of event and an owning chapter; adding one is a code change, adding a jurisdiction's version is a row (Landlord-Tenant Law as Data).
• Rules matrix: the table mapping each rule type to how it combines, which event's date selects its version, and the chapter that owns what it means (Landlord-Tenant Law as Data).
• Section 21: the English "no fault" eviction route, abolished from 1 May 2026, after which a landlord needs a legally valid possession ground (Outside the US).
• Source of income (SOI): a state and local protected class covering lawful income such as housing vouchers, the class that changes software most because it reaches income tests, minimum credit scores and screening scores (Fair Housing).
• Stressed residential market area: an area declared under Spain's Ley 12/2023 in which rent for a new contract on a previously rented home is generally limited to the previous contract's rent with its annual update (Outside the US).
• Sunset clause: a statute's built-in end date (California's statewide cap remains in effect until January 1, 2030), stored as the end of the rule's validity and raised for review ahead of time (Landlord-Tenant Law as Data).
• TAL, LTB, RTB: the provincial tenancy tribunals named in the volume: Quebec's Tribunal administratif du logement (which fixes rent when a tenant refuses an increase), Ontario's Landlord and Tenant Board, and British Columbia's Residential Tenancy Branch (Outside the US).
• Tenancy form: a lease attribute naming the kind of contract (fixed term, periodic, assured periodic, private residential tenancy, secure or standard occupation contract) that the lease state machine branches on instead of on country (Outside the US).
• Tenant policy: an operator's own setting for a rule type (a grace period, a lower late fee), which may be stricter than the law but never looser; it's checked against the applicable legal rules on write and on every rule change (Landlord-Tenant Law as Data).
• Undue burden, fundamental alteration: the narrow grounds on which a housing provider may deny an accommodation request, after discussing alternatives that meet the need (Fair Housing).
• VAWA documentation: certifications and documents of domestic violence, dating violence or stalking, which HUD-assisted properties must keep in a separate file in a separate secure location, confidential and out of any shared database (Records, Privacy & Audits).

Running the Platform#

• Accounting start date: the date a new platform's books begin, with opening balances as of that date and the old system remaining the record for everything before it (Switching Platforms & Acquisitions).
• ADMT (automated decision-making technology): technology used to make, guide or assist consequential or significant decisions, housing included, which Colorado's and California's laws attach notice, explanation, correction and human review duties to (AI in Property Management).
• Agent version, deployment: an immutable, eval-tested version of an AI agent's instructions, tools, knowledge and model policy, and the record that points a property and workflow at one version with its automation level (AI in Property Management).
• AI agent (actor type): an agent with its own user identity, acting for a user or for the operator, whose access is the intersection of its own grants and the user it acts for (Platform Architecture).
• AI audit trail: the record of what an agent said and did: transcript, tool calls including refusals, model and version, approver, data snapshots behind prices and fees, disclosure, language, and the property, owner and user it acted for (AI in Property Management).
• AI connector: an MCP server that a customer's AI client connects to with the user's own sign-in, so the model sees only what that user may see; reads first, restricted stores excluded (Platform Architecture).
• AI cost allocation: metering every agent interaction and model call by the property it served and billing an owner only under a management agreement term that allows it, shown as its own statement line (AI in Property Management).
• AI disclosure: an agent saying it's an AI at the start of a conversation, answering honestly when asked and logging that it did, the one behavior that satisfies California's bot law, Utah's act, Colorado and the EU AI Act (AI in Property Management).
• Ancillary revenue per occupied unit: other income (fees, parking, storage, pet rent, services, revenue shares) divided by occupied unit-months, split into mandatory charges and optional services (Operating Metrics).
• Approval limit: a permission with an amount, such as the invoice amount a property manager may approve, stored on the grant or the agreement and checked in code, with the approval kept as a record (Platform Architecture).
• Automation ceiling: the highest automation level a workflow may run at whatever the operator configures; denying housing, starting a legal clock, deciding an accommodation, moving money to a new destination or changing a lease never go above draft for approval (AI in Property Management).
• Automation level: how much an agent decides alone in a workflow (suggest, draft for approval, act within limits, act and report), set per workflow and property as dated data, under platform ceilings (AI in Property Management).
• Bad debt: write-offs of former residents' balances in the period less recoveries on earlier write-offs, over GPR or billed revenue; it depends on the write-off policy, whose version is part of the definition (Operating Metrics).
• Benchmark provenance: the source of every benchmark number (own portfolio, public listings, licensed survey or contributed nonpublic data), its age, aggregation and license, recorded so pooled competitor data never feeds pricing (Operating Metrics).
• Benchmarking (information-exchange risk): comparing a property with competitors using their nonpublic rents, occupancy and lease terms, which is an information exchange and what the pricing cases were about; the old safety zones were withdrawn, so there is no safe harbor (Operating Metrics).
• Budget variance: actual minus budget (and minus reforecast) by line and period, with explanations required above a threshold (Operating Metrics).
• Certified marketplace: an integration model with a developer portal, program-issued keys, a certification review and a per-client accept or deny step before any data flows (Platform Architecture).
• Changes feed: a cursor-based feed of changes per resource offered beside webhooks, so a partner can catch up after an outage and a nightly file can be replaced (Platform Architecture).
• Client sponsor: the operator that endorses a partner's application for API access in a partner-gated program; each further operator that turns the partner on is its own consent (Platform Architecture).
• Cohort migration: moving properties to a new platform in groups by risk (a pilot of ordinary properties first; affordable, student, commercial and strict-jurisdiction properties in their own cohorts), each cut over at a month boundary after close (Switching Platforms & Acquisitions).
• Collections rate: payments applied to a period's charges by a stated day after the due date, divided by the period's charges (Operating Metrics).
• Configuration hierarchy: settings defined with a type, default, allowed levels and approval rule, set on nodes of the operator's portfolio tree with effective dates and who set them, inherited downward; settings that encode law are rules, not settings (Platform Architecture).
• Consent handshake: a per-operator, per-property acceptance of an integration that the operator can see and revoke, and that expires if unanswered (Platform Architecture).
• Controllable expenses: operating expenses excluding taxes, insurance and utilities, what a manager can affect and the usual base for manager incentives (Operating Metrics).
• Cost per lease: marketing spend for a source in a period divided by leases attributed to it under the named attribution model (Operating Metrics).
• Cost per turn: labor, materials, vendor invoices and capitalized replacements linked to a turn, with capital items shown separately (Operating Metrics).
• Data share: a scoped feed of the platform's data into a customer's warehouse, treated as an integration with a consent record, shipped with versioned metric definitions and restricted data excluded (Platform Architecture).
• Days vacant: next move-in date minus vacated date, which is turn time plus days waiting for a resident (Operating Metrics).
• Delinquency %: resident-owed balances past due on a date for current residents, over the period's billed charges (or GPR, stated), split by aging bucket and charge category, never counting subsidy owed by an agency (Operating Metrics).
• Deposit transfer: the per-lease move of a security deposit with its interest to a new owner or manager on a sale or manager change, with the notice the jurisdiction's statute requires (Switching Platforms & Acquisitions).
• Derived access: access that comes from a relationship the domain already records (lease membership, a board seat, a guaranty, a verified representative, a work order assignment) and ends when the relationship's dates end, never copied into grants (Platform Architecture).
• Dry run: loading a migration cohort into a staging copy, running the tie-outs and simulating the first rent posting and autopay run before the real cutover (Switching Platforms & Acquisitions).
• Economic occupancy: rent actually earned divided by gross potential rent for the period, the number an owner's income follows (Operating Metrics).
• Effective rent: rent net of concessions, with a free month spread over the term (Operating Metrics).
• Entity ledger: one ledger holding many sets of books (each owning entity's, the manager's, funds' and associations'), every account dimensioned by legal entity and property, with the entity resolved at posting time (Platform Architecture).
• Exit rights: what an operator's contract gives it on leaving a platform: a full documented export, documents and audit logs, payment credentials moved to a PCI-compliant processor of its choice, and a read-only period (Switching Platforms & Acquisitions).
• Expenses per unit: operating expenses per unit by category, with the management fee and reimbursed payroll identified (Operating Metrics).
• Exposure, exposure %: vacant unleased units plus units on notice without a pre-lease over a stated horizon, the pricing and marketing input; and exposure divided by rentable units (Operating Metrics).
• Frozen metric value: a metric value reported to an owner or lender, kept as reported; a later correction creates a restatement that supersedes it while keeping both (Operating Metrics).
• GPR (gross potential rent): every unit at its rent for the full period, the top line of the operating statement; state whether it's at market rent or at lease rent for occupied units (Operating Metrics).
• Grant: an explicit assignment of a role at a node (tenant, portfolio, property, legal entity or integration) over a period, with a grantor who can't be the grantee and a reason; used for staff, owners, investors, integrations and agents (Platform Architecture).
• Headless front office: a third party owning the prospect and resident conversation, website, CRM and leasing workflow while the suite stays the system of record for screening, payments, the lease and the ledger (Platform Architecture).
• Hypercare: the period after a cutover with named owners for each property's open issues (Switching Platforms & Acquisitions).
• Identity: a platform-wide login with no tenant; one identity can belong to several tenants, each through its own user (Platform Architecture).
• Lead-to-lease conversion: guest cards created in a cohort period that reached leased, divided by guest cards in the cohort, measured after a fixed window (Operating Metrics).
• Lease audit (acquisition): checking the rent roll a buyer relied on against the leases (rents, terms, names, deposits, prepaid rent, concessions, fees, guarantors, options, rents above a cap), with each finding a row with evidence and resolution (Switching Platforms & Acquisitions).
• Leased %: rentable units with a current or future signed lease, net of units on notice without a pre-lease, divided by rentable units (Operating Metrics).
• Licensed interface: an integration model that splits the system of record into business areas, each interface licensed under its own agreement and fee (Platform Architecture).
• Licensing inventory: data on which entity holds which money transmitter license or registration in which state, its control persons and each state's change-of-control rule (Switching Platforms & Acquisitions).
• Load with side effects off: importing records as a migration actor with notifications, postings, access credentials and integrations suppressed, turned on per property at cutover (Switching Platforms & Acquisitions).
• Loss (gain) to lease: market rent minus in-place lease rent summed over occupied units, a statement about the market rent the operator chose, so its source and date are part of the record (Operating Metrics).
• Manager change: a move in which a different manager (a different tenant) takes over a property while the owner and leases stay; it brings trust and deposit transfer, records handover and a split-year 1099 (Switching Platforms & Acquisitions).
• Manager scorecard: the same metric definitions computed from every manager's submission after mapping and checking, never from each manager's own labels (Operating Metrics).
• Marketplace agent: an AI agent from a marketplace, with its publisher, version and terms, that the operator turns on per property the way it consents to an integration (AI in Property Management).
• MCP (Model Context Protocol): the protocol AI clients use to connect to tools; its authorization builds on OAuth 2.1, and the property connectors put the user's permissions at the center (Platform Architecture).
• Metric definition: a versioned row giving a metric's formula, denominator, basis, timing and population; every report and data share names the definition and version it used (Operating Metrics).
• Money transmitter change of control: the state requirement that anyone acquiring control of a licensed money transmitter get regulatory approval first, which can condition the sale of a payments vendor (Switching Platforms & Acquisitions).
• NOI (net operating income): total property revenue minus property operating expenses, before debt service, capital spending, depreciation and corporate costs; a non-GAAP measure whose exclusions are part of its definition (Operating Metrics).
• Notice reasons: move-out reasons coded at notice (purchase, relocation, price, service, eviction) and reported with renewal rate (Operating Metrics).
• Occupancy (bed, square foot, resident, night): occupancy on the segment's basis: rentable beds for student housing, net rentable square feet for storage and commercial, residents by care level for senior living, and nights sold over nights available for short-term rentals (Operating Metrics).
• Occupancy cost ratio: a retail tenant's occupancy costs divided by its sales; a rising ratio flags tenants at risk (Operating Metrics).
• OER (operating expense ratio): operating expenses divided by effective gross income, or by GPR in some surveys; state the denominator (Operating Metrics).
• Offline technician app: a device store scoped to the day's assignments, with inspection evidence hashed at capture and money and legal steps proposed offline but decided on the server (Platform Architecture).
• Opening items: a migration's opening balance imported as open charges by code, due date, service period and ledger party, plus unapplied credits, deposits held, plans and holds, so aging, late fees and eviction rules work unchanged (Switching Platforms & Acquisitions).
• Physical occupancy: units with a current lease whose move-in has happened and move-out hasn't, over rentable units, at a point in time or as an average of daily values (Operating Metrics).
• Plan-tier API: an integration model where the customer buys API access with its plan and creates its own keys, bound to a service user whose grants limit the properties it reaches (Platform Architecture).
• Pre-leased %: rentable units or beds with a signed lease starting by a future date or term, over rentable units or beds; the student metric, also used for lease-ups (Operating Metrics).
• Property sale (move): a move that changes the owner and landlord of record while residents and leases stay, bringing deposit transfer and tenant notices, closing prorations and new rent payees (Switching Platforms & Acquisitions).
• Renewal rate: expiring leases in a period that renewed for the same household, divided by leases expiring in the period, with endings the household didn't choose excluded or reported separately (Operating Metrics).
• Rentable units: units whose status period on a date is rentable (excluding down, model, employee or non-revenue periods), the default occupancy denominator (Operating Metrics).
• Repeat work orders: work orders for the same unit and category within 30 days of a completed one, divided by completed work orders (Operating Metrics).
• Restricted data: VAWA documentation, accommodation records, HUD demographic data, screening reports, clinical links and investor accreditation evidence, kept in stores with separate grants and read logging, and out of AI tools and data shares by default (Platform Architecture).
• Role: what kind of thing a grant allows a user to do, versioned per tenant; relationships decide which records (Platform Architecture).
• Rules service: the one service every module calls with the property, rule type and as-of facts, storing the evaluation id on the record the rule shaped instead of embedding legal limits (Platform Architecture).
• Same-store: a set of properties owned and stabilized for both periods compared, whose rule is versioned; same-store NOI growth is the NOI change for that set (Operating Metrics).
• Service account: an integration's identity, a user with explicit grants limited to the properties the operator consented to (Platform Architecture).
• Settings before data: deciding a tenant's settings (late fee policies, application order, charge codes, approval limits, notice templates) per tenant, portfolio and property before the first lease loads, because imports are validated against them (Switching Platforms & Acquisitions).
• Speed to lead: time from a lead's first contact to the first response by a person or agent, by channel and language, a sales metric and a fair housing parity check (Operating Metrics).
• System of record per property per day: the rule, recorded as data, that exactly one platform holds a property's lease and ledger on each date, so a dispute about a past balance goes to the right system (Switching Platforms & Acquisitions).
• Tie-out: a check that must hold before a migrated property goes live (open items to receivables, deposits to liability and bank, prepaid to liability, trust to bank, old trial balance to new), with any difference a reconciling item with an owner (Switching Platforms & Acquisitions).
• Trade-out (new, renewal, blended): the rent on a lease compared with the lease it replaces, for the same unit (new) or household (renewal), and their weighted combination; definitions differ on effective or gross, lease dating, term and weighting (Operating Metrics).
• Turn time: ready date minus vacated date in calendar days for standard turns, with renovation turns reported separately (Operating Metrics).
• Turnover: move-outs divided by a base that differs by source: expiring leases (retention) or total units (churn of the building); state the base (Operating Metrics).
• Two trees: the operator's portfolio tree, down which configuration inherits, and the owner's legal entity tree, up which money rolls, crossing at the property (Platform Architecture).
• User: an identity's membership in one tenant, with an actor type (human, service or AI agent); every actor column across the volume points at it (Platform Architecture).
• User property access: each user's grants resolved to a set of property ids on dates, rebuilt when grants, trees or ownership change, and the only thing row-level security policies read (Platform Architecture).
• Utility recovery: utility costs billed back to residents divided by recoverable utility expense, by property and service, with vacant-unit and common-area shares shown as the owner's absorbed cost (Operating Metrics).
• Vendor acquisition (move): a change in who owns the platform or payment provider, bringing money transmitter change-of-control approvals, contract assignment and data terms (Switching Platforms & Acquisitions).
• Work order response and completion: for each priority, the share of work orders first responded to and completed by the deadlines stored on the work order, with exclusions recorded as reasons rather than deletions (Operating Metrics).

References#

Reference

• 42 U.S.C. 3604: Discrimination in the sale or rental of housing, the Fair Housing Act's protected classes in rental housing
• 15 U.S.C. 1681a: Definitions, consumer report and consumer reporting agency
• HUD: Housing Choice Vouchers for tenants, the voucher program, its subsidy paid to the landlord and the public housing agencies that run it