Property TechProperty Tech GlossaryPart 1 of 8
The Business Glossary
43 terms from the Property Tech book's The Business part, each defined in a line and linked to the chapter that explains it.
- 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).