Properties, Owners and Investors Glossary · PropTech

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).

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).