How to onboard a tenant

Your property is being listed on a dedicated platform or directly on your website (link on how to add a property). Noàw you start receiving enquiries for it. Here we’ll show you how to add a tenant. 

There are 5 distinct steps to complete to onboard a tenant depending on the configuration we have set up for you.

1. Enquiry
2. Viewing
3. Holding Deposit
4. Tenant Referencing
5. Tenancy Agreement

Enquiries

Let’s start with the enquiries.

You can create an enquiry by getting to the onboarding section

You are now in what we call the onboarding flow. You have the ability to add all the prospective tenant details. But only 3 fields are required at this stage:

• First Name
• Last Name
• Email address

As soon as you have provided the contact details you can move on to what we call the qualifying information. These are just fields we recommend you get to know a bit more about the tenant and help you make a decision on whether to move one or not with this tenant.

Finally, you can continue by searching for the address of the property this prospective tenant is enquiring for.

Start typing any character and look for the result in the dropdown below it (as shown in the gif below). If the property you are searching for, then you first need to provide the address and after selecting the room the enquiry is for.

As you can see, as soon as the property is selected, the rent amount field below is automatically filled.

Finally, we enter the expected tenancy section of the enquiry. For that, and depending on the configuration of your company you have to provide the following details:

• Start date: required
• End date: required (and automatically calculated if you select a fixed term)
• Term: required (select other if you want a usual term like 1 month and 7 days)
• Weekly Rent: required
• Monthly rent: required (and automatically pulled from the system). Note: you still have the ability to change the amount

Note: the weekly & monthly rents change dynamically, this means you only need to change one to see the other being calculated automatically

Once you save you will be able to continue to the viewing stage (or abandon the application if the tenants retract themselves)

Viewing Stage

As soon as the enquiry is completed you are moved to the viewing stage. Here we pre-fill everything with what we have collected previously.

: if you don’t need to organise a viewing, you can skip this stage and move to the next one.

We allow you to: 

• Choose a date & time (required to send an invite)
• Assign one of your agents to the viewing (required to send an invite)
• Add some notes 

if you only organise virtual viewings we recommend that you add the link to the viewing in the notes.

As soon as you have added the required information you are able to send a reminder with a calendar invite to the tenant. 

Just hit Send viewing invite email to inform & invite the tenant. 

You as the user of our platform will also receive a reminder to add to your calendar.

Once the viewing is done, you can return to the onboarding application and move to the holding deposit stage.

Holding Deposit

The holding deposit stage is here to allow you to collect payment in order to secure the tenant’s interest in the property. 

First, you can enter the holding deposit amount of your choice and hit save. By default, we recommend our users ask the tenant to pay the holding deposit and then provide them with the ability to sign a booking form.

This order can be modified upon request at product@lofti.co

Once you have saved the payment is automatically created. You just have to mark it as paid to move on to the next stage.

To update the payment status, you simply need to click on the payment link (here TST2-PMT-44) and set a paid date to automatically change the status.

the holding deposit stage is something that not all agent require that is why, by default you have the ability to skip this stage. 

Tenant Referencing Stage

We are able to conduct tenant referencing. To launch the tenant referencing we need to know:

• How many tenants are living in the property
• If there is any guarantor
• When landing in the referencing stage, the contact details of the primary tenant are automatically added to this stage.

In order to have a valid tenant referencing, you will need to add all the tenants & guarantor details who will be considered as parties on the tenancy agreement later on.

You have the ability to search for existing users for both tenants and guarantors. Their contact details will be automatically added to the application.

After filling in the tenants & guarantor details, you can launch the tenant referencing. We will carry out the referencing checks swiftly.

Note: If you don’t need to reference your tenants and/or guarantor, you can skip the referencing by providing a reason.

As soon as the tenant referencing is conducted (see here our article on how tenants & guarantor complete their referencing application) you will receive a notification and the tenant referencing report is linked to the current onboarding application (screenshots below)

Tenancy Stage

This is the last stage of our onboarding of a tenant. We display all the details related to the tenancy (terms, rent amount, tenant(s), guarantor(s)…) for you to review. 

Now you have two options:

• Generate and send a tenancy agreement through our e-signature solution. We have set up a standard tenancy agreement and will prepopulate it with the data we have collected so far.
• Upload a signed tenancy agreement

As soon as all parties have signed the tenancy agreement, or as soon as you uploaded the document, the onboarding process is ended.

You will now be able to see the tenancy details inside the tenancy section.