Overview
Creating a lease in DoorLoop is a simple process when you only have to account for one tenant and one unit. However, what happens if a tenant wants to rent multiple units at once? This could be multiple units within a single building, or multiple separate properties. Not to worry because DoorLoop makes this process simple as well within the system.
The Steps
Option 1: Combine the units into one unit
If your tenant will be leasing multiple units, the most common option to take is to combine all the units into one unit. For example, if your tenant is renting units 101, 102, and 103 of a property, you would combine them into one unit called (101, 102, 103). Then you would deactivate units 102 and 103 for the remainder of the lease. How would you go about doing this?
On the main menu, click on Rentals and then click on Properties.
Find the property with the units that are going to be rented by your tenant. Click on that property.
On the Overview page, click the Units tab.
Using our example above, on the line item for Unit 101, click the three dots at the end of the line and click Edit.
In General Information and under Unit Details, change the Unit Name to something like “101, 102, 103” to show that you combined three different units.
Click Save to continue.
(Optional) Now you’ll want to find the line item for Unit 102, click the three dots at the end, and click Make Inactive. Do the same for Unit 103. The main reason for doing this is so you can’t accidentally make another lease with these units when they’re already occupied.
The last step is to create a new lease with the renamed Unit. You can do this by following the Add a New Lease article. You may be wondering though, why would you create a lease like this by combining multiple units into one. The answer is that when you do it this way, your tenant will only be making one payment with only one fee. This doesn't affect credit card payments but it does affect ACH payments.
Option 2: Create multiple separate leases for the same tenant
Another option is to create separate leases for the same tenants for all the units they are renting. The steps for this are exactly the same as when you Add a New Lease. We won’t really go through the process here as it is just a simple lease creation. There are some points you need to take into consideration if you do it this way.
The tenant will end up having to pay for three different leases and three different fees. It’s not a big deal if they’re paying by credit card since it goes by percentage, but if they’re making ACH payments, it’s a separate flat fee for each payment.
Speaking of which, they’ll still have only one Tenant Portal, but they need to make sure they click through each lease to make each separate payment.
You might be wondering why you'd want to create separate leases as opposed to just combining the units. There could be several reasons for this. If each unit being rented has different owners, for example, you would have to create separate leases for each unit in order to have the correct owner distributions. Another reason to do it this way would be if you are recording overall occupancy on your rentals.
That's pretty much it. These are two methods in which you can record a tenant who is renting multiple units. There are some special circumstances where it's possible to combine these two methods depending on how you want units to be recorded. You also have to take into consideration if the units being rented are on different properties. Ultimately, it's up to you how you want to account for a tenant renting multiple units.