The Showing That Falls Apart Without the Lockbox Code
You have a prospect who can see the unit in ninety minutes. The property is Active. You know the address. You do not know the lockbox code because it changed last week and you updated it in a text message that is now buried under forty other texts from three different landlords. The owner is not picking up. The prospect is twenty minutes away.
A real estate rental database that does not have showing instructions and lockbox/key information at the record level is not a rental database. It is a contact list with square footage. The Lockbox/Key field and Show instructions field are the two fields that make the difference between a smooth showing and a scramble.
Property Specs That Actually Answer Prospect Questions
The property specification fields cover the questions that come up on every call: BR (bedrooms: 0-5+), Bth (bathrooms: 1-5+), Kitch (EIK, Galley, None, Studio, Full), Basement (Full, Part, Walkout, Finished, None), Furnished (Y/N), Parking (driveway, 1/2/3+ car garage, none), Utilities type (electric, oil, gas), Utilities included (None, Elec, Cable, Heat, Hot Water, All).
The utilities included field is where landlord records break down most often in informal systems. A property where heat is included in the rent is a materially different value proposition from the same property where the tenant pays oil heat on a New Jersey winter — easily $400-600 per month. Having Utilities incl as a multichoice field that explicitly records what is covered, rather than a notes field where someone may or may not have written it, means a prospect calling at 6 PM on a Friday gets an accurate answer immediately.
The Commission field — Owner, Ten (tenant pays), Half, Full — captures the commission structure at the listing level. When you have ten active listings and two pending commission payments, knowing which commission structure applies to each property without opening a separate management spreadsheet is the difference between an accurate billing cycle and a billing dispute.
Tenant and Owner Together in One Record
Owner as a contact field links to the property owner's record in your contacts. The "Copy owner name or number to here" text field with its hint "So it can be added after sync" is a workaround for mobile database sync behavior — a practical solution to the problem that linked contact fields may not populate immediately after sync. The workaround is inelegant but the underlying logic is sound: the owner information needs to be accessible whether or not the link has resolved.
Tenant name, H phone, C phone, and email give you the tenant contact record at the property level. When a maintenance issue requires contacting both the owner and the tenant, you do not need to search two separate places. Both contacts are in the same property record.
Security deposit as a multichoice (1 month, 1.5 months, 2 months) and Lease term (month-to-month, 1 year, 2 year, multi-year, seasonal) define the financial and legal framework of each tenancy. These are the fields that a property manager looks at first when a lease is approaching renewal or when a tenant is in arrears.
The Renewal Reminder That Prevents a Vacancy
The Time to renew lease datetime field is the proactive management tool that most individual landlords and small property managers miss entirely. A lease that expires in three months on a property where you need 60 days notice to re-list requires action today, not in 60 days. Setting a renewal reminder at the record level — rather than in a separate calendar that may or may not stay synchronized with the property record — keeps the renewal timeline visible at the property level.
Date rented and Term together give you the calculated end date even if you have not set an explicit renewal reminder. A property rented on a specific date with a 1-year term is up for renewal in 12 months from that date. The map location field puts every property on a navigable map, which is useful when planning a showing route across multiple active listings in the same area.
The rate field (1-5 stars) is the property quality assessment that helps when a prospect is choosing between two available units at similar price points in the same area. Your own assessment of which property shows better, has better natural light, has fewer maintenance issues — that information belongs in the record, not just in your head.