Lease Agreement
Demo & Chat

I work as a product manager.

I’ve been at TurboTenant since August of 2021, and I work on our lease agreements product, which we’re here to talk about today, as well as our premium membership plan. And now, actually, all things leasing and residency. So after, on your side, after somebody moves into your property, everything that happens when you have that relationship.

So on the tech side, all of the UI that you interact with as a landlord, I have a property in Washington DC and I’ve had that since 2014, but only have been renting it out since we moved out of that house, which was in 2018. I’ve managed that remotely, I’m over in Colorado, and then also have another property here in Westminster, Colorado, but use that for a short-term rental, as an Airbnb. Beautiful.

Thank you so much. Well, we’ve introduced ourselves. Now we want to learn a little bit more about you. So we are going to launch a poll. Samantha, my polling machine doesn’t like that we are both logged in.

Oh, wait. So would you like to launch the first poll? I got you, Krista.

I’m glad you are. There it is. Okay. So if you can see the poll, we are just curious to learn a little bit more about you.

Specifically, we want to know about your experience with us, how many years you’ve been a landlord, all of the things that we have listed there. The interesting thing about these kinds of events is that we never know exactly who’s going to show up. So by asking you these questions, we can tailor the presentation to your needs. But of course, if anything pops up that you are curious about, please feel free to use the chat or the Q&A function to send those questions over.

That is what we are here to do today, answer your questions and show you our wonderful product. It looks like we’re kind of split down the middle between using setting up a TurboTenant account and not having set up a TurboTenant account yet. Got a couple of landlords today who have been managing rentals for over 10 years. And a mix of the less than one year and the five to nine-year landlords.

And the majority of landlords on the call today manage or own two to four rental properties. Amazing. It’s a pretty good spread. I think so. And it looks like quite a few of them are in the stage of the rental process where they are signing a lease or managing tenants.

So this is a great time for them to be here. Beautiful. Thank you so much, Samantha. I’m going to turn things over to your very capable hands.

Awesome. So we’re going to take a look at TurboTenant and the lease agreements in TurboTenant and the lease process. I narrowed it down to three different scenarios where we could have, as landlords using TurboTenant as it relates to lease agreements. So the first, and probably the most popular and also the most fun, is getting a new tenant and getting a new lease agreement, right? Going through that whole process to get that document signed to the new tenant. Another scenario would be if you have an existing tenant, and they already have a lease agreement in place. So you’re not quite ready to get them a new lease agreement, but maybe you want to start utilizing the TurboTenant system.

So we’ll look at what that looks like. And then finally, if you have a current tenant with a current lease agreement, but it’s coming up on expiration, so we’re ready for the renewal. So we’ll take a look at our lease agreement addendum to see what that renewal process looks like in TurboTenant as well. So let’s jump into my landlord portal here. Raj, before I start looking at leases, why a TurboTenant lease over a lease from my friends or my neighbor who’s a landlord, or something that I can download easily off the internet and it’s a page? That’s a great question.

So I mean, it’s one that is natural to think about. I think I got my first lease agreement actually from a friend who just had a rental a few years before me, and I reached out to that person and they gave me their copy. I think that’s how most people tend to do it. And the issue with that is, who knows where they got that lease agreement from. And what I started with, is that legal? How often has it been updated?

I mean, I know it hasn’t been updated for at least the years since I got it. And then, you know, I had to interpret legal language that’s in a lease agreement and figure out how to change it to meet my needs. Instead, with a TurboTenant lease, we are breaking things down into simple questions that you can answer. And we are building the lease agreement for you and the legal language in the back end to make it, you know, very simple and up to date.

Nice. Why don’t we should take a look? What do you think? We’re going to start with, we’re going to start with a tenant who is new. So they’re already in my TurboTenant account. I’ve already kind of started the process with them. We’re really focused on that lease agreement now. I’m going to first open up the lease profile in TurboTenant, which we’re going to dig into a little bit more with those new tenants that we’re adding or those current tenants that we’re adding.

But for now, we’re going to take a look at our current tenant or upcoming tenant at Sunshine Circle. So here in my lease profile, this is how we organize information in TurboTenant. You can see I have details up here at the top, an indicator that it’s an upcoming lease. I’ve got my lease dates here. I have a document that’s waiting on signature.

I’ve got a tenant. And then down here, we have the option for additional documents. So the lease profile is going to be replacing that old-school file folder that we used to use years and years ago with releasing.

You have somebody interested in a rental, you put their application in, their driver’s license, and their proof of income, and all the things in a file folder. Then maybe you store work orders in there, maybe they get a pet, so you put a picture of the pet in there.

You’ve got everything in that file folder. That’s what this lease is in TurboTenant. We’re organizing it all in one spot for you, for a specific tenant, a specific property, and a specific period of time. This is also how your tenant gets information in their tenant portal.

So it’s important to keep this up to date. What we’ve got going on right now is my tenant, Sasha Colby is moving in soon, June 1st. You can see my lease dates up here. I’ve already sent Sasha a welcome letter for signatures. And you can see that Sasha has signed this. So we’ll get into the e-sign a little bit later, but I’ve already sent that welcome letter. So I’m ready to start the process for the lease agreement. I’m going to jump in right here to get a California lease agreement. But Raj, what if I’m not in California?

It’s a great question. So we have coverage now, at least for the past year, for all 50 states and then also some additional jurisdictions where we decided to make more specific lease agreements. So for example, in the state of Illinois, we have three types of lease agreements. We have one for the city of Chicago and one for Cook County, Illinois, to get specific to the laws of that area. Awesome.

And since I linked my lease profile to my property in California, TurboTenant already knew that I was going to need that state’s lease agreement. Is that right? That’s right. Okay. All right. So each section, we’re just going to go through and we’re going to fill these in together.

And Raj, we may have questions for you along the way. But in our first section here, pretty basic, we’ve got our property address and we’re going to check out the lease term. So we’re going to ask, is this a fixed term or is this a month to month? For this tenant, this is going to be a fixed term starting June 1st through May 31st of next year.

Why would I have a month-to-month lease or a fixed-term lease difference? Do you have any input on that, Raj? It just depends on your situation. We’re trying to, with our wizard, be able to suit any sort of situation that a landlord has or as many as possible. And so some people go on a month-to-month basis at the start of their lease.

And then others, like in DC, there you have a lease agreement for the first year, and then it rolls into month-to-month. So we’re planning for that outcome and allowing you to choose that option. Cool.

So I can choose what happened at the end of my lease, whether that’s renewing month-to-month or is ending on the lease end date. All right. So we’re going to go through this and then that lease-specific section complete, done. Checking out our rent deposit and fees.

We’re just going to again fill in the blanks here. So our monthly base rent. I’m not charging any pet rent, but if I did allow pets at my rental, I could click yes right here and indicate the monthly pet rent. One of the things that’s really cool about TurboTenant and the lease agreement is that you get these little tool tips as you go along. And I believe that these are customized. Do you want to of course, a lot of the tool tips are talking about information that’s relative to your state. So for late fees in particular, it’s a good example of something that we’ve customized to your state. So a lot of people want to put in their own custom late fees. But we are trying to be compliant with the law of your state.

So we are putting in the late fees that are compliant with the law to the maximum there usually, or we have a standard late fee if there are no laws around that. We have gotten some feedback from some users that they want that to be more customizable. And that is something that we’re considering into how to do that in such a way that we’re allowing you to do that customization, but also keep you as compliant as possible. Absolutely.

And then you’ve got these tips here. If I wasn’t sure since we ask tenants and we ask additional occupants, I love that we explain this too. If you have additional occupants on your lease agreement that are not leaseholders, that’s going to be minors and dependents, but they should be on the legal contract.

This is that spot where you can do that. There’s also the ability to add the landlord as an individual or as a company. And if you have additional signers on the lease agreement, you can add an additional party there as an additional landlord. So something that’s happening as you’re going through this is in the background, what we’re doing is we’re building the lease agreement and all that legal language that goes behind it. You can preview that at any time by clicking on the preview lease in the top right-hand corner, or I think what we’re going to do is we’re going to show it to you at the end and see how that looks. So we’re keeping it pretty simple, just asking you these questions.

You answer them, you fill in the blanks, and then we’re building that document. Nice. You can see here in this section, I can add additional information about pets, not allowing pets at my property. And this is a cool new thing that I love in the lease agreement that I think I’ve shared with Raj that I love this. Do you want to include parking rules? Maybe I do.

Let’s see what happens. Whoa, parking rules already there that I can customize. So what’s the deal with the parking rules, Raj? Why did we customize these but have them editable? Yeah, so this is actually a new part of our lease agreement wizard. We noticed that in our additional term section, so there’s an area that Samantha’s going to show off later, which allows people to put in any extra language they want to add. And we looked at that and we saw that a lot of people were adding parking rules. So why don’t we just have a section for it? And what’s unique about the parking rule section that we added was that we are allowing people to edit the actual language themselves and make it customizable to their situation, because there are so many different situations. So we couldn’t build out a big survey and a big form and ask you ten things. Instead of doing that, we’re asking you a couple of questions and then giving you the language to modify yourself because we saw that so many people have rules around that and there’s not a lot of regulations.

So you could kind of go happy around that area of the lease agreement. Awesome. In this next section here, again, just fill in some blanks. We’ve got our utilities and services. We’ve got keys.

So let me go ahead and save that. You may have noticed in that last section right underneath the parking rules, we asked about renter’s insurance, which is definitely a recommendation from TurboTenant to have that required for your tenants. But we have a partnership with a company called Shure to help your tenants obtain renter’s insurance.

So in their tenant portal, we remind them that it’s required and we give them the option to upload their own policy or to get a quote from Shure, which keeps it all right in TurboTenant. All right, provisions and attachment section. So here is that additional term section that we were mentioning earlier. Raj mentioned that there is all these parking rules and a lot of lease agreements. So we just built out those parking rules for all lease agreements. Any language you add here will supersede the provisions within the lease agreement.

You can also just bulk up your lease here in this section. I’m also seeing that we have all of these additional disclosures. Can you tell me a little bit about this, Raj?

Sure. So this is where, I mean, along the way, we have been incorporating the laws of California if we’re looking at a California lease agreement. So in the security deposit section, we made sure to ask you the questions related to the security deposit. But in this particular part of the lease agreement wizard, we’re asking you a lot of the very unique situations of that state that we want you to be compliant with. So in California, there has to be a rent control disclosure. You have to disclose asbestos.

You have to disclose drugs. These are things that if you did not include in your lease agreement, there’s a possibility it would invalidate your lease agreement. So if you’re with one of our attendees in California, keep that in mind. So we’re trying to make it easy and inclusive of all those things by giving you simple questions that you can answer here to be in compliance. And then we’ll put the legal language in the lease agreement that’s required by that state. Perfect.

So this is the California lease agreement. I’ve got all of these disclosures that I want to read through. I love that up here, it looks there’s a lot of sections and numbers and abbreviations.

This is overwhelming to me, but then you break it down with additional details and you’ve got the links here. And this is different from every other state though, right? Like I’m not going to see these same questions in an Illinois lease agreement, for example.

It depends on the state you’re in. You’re going to see different questions. We chose to show a California here as an example because it’s on the extreme end of all of the things that need to be collected. And the way that we ask these questions also sometimes are regulated.

So actually some method you go back to the top. There’s we are actually like citing a particular law and that’s because we have to do it that way. Okay. This is actually not common we don’t usually say like, oh go look up this code and link to it, but we have to do that. So that’s why we’re, we’re, we’ve made, you know, conscious choices on how to present this information to you. Perfect. Okay, the last section down here is the attachments. I’m just going to drag and drop my animal agreement because this is not a pet-friendly rental. So I went ahead and snatched a little animal agreement from the forms pack over here. I’ve customized it outside of TurboTenant and I’m adding it as an attachment to my lease agreements that I can send everything at once to my tenant.

And you can see that’s right here. I also wanted to note one other thing, Samantha, above that you don’t have to go back, but there’s this mold disclosure section and what we’ve done is in California, if you choose based on your answer, we will automatically attach things for you that are required by that state. So in California, you have to provide a booklet on it and so if it applies to you, we apply that booklet. Awesome. So I’ve gone through, I’ve customized my lease agreement, I’ve got my attachments, we’re going to start the eSign process. And I mentioned I grabbed that document from the forms pack, which is over here on the left. The forms pack is going to be 32 documents, including addendums like the animal agreement, we’ve got a co-signer agreement, there’s community or property rules and regulations.

There’s also a move-in and move-out condition checklist, make-ready checklist, all kinds of essential documents for landlording. And as we’re scrolling through here, this is that custom lease agreement. So I just went through, filled in the blanks and you can see my whole lease agreement is now built out. We go to the next step, which is finalize an eSign. We’re going to get a kind of another preview of the lease agreement, but we’re going to actually get to apply signatures onto this one. So let’s set up some eSignatures. Perfect. You can see my lease agreement is here and that successfully attached document.

If I think of something else that I need to attach, I can do it here as well. We’ve got the lease agreement that starts in June. And we’re going to send a little message to our renters. When you’re using the TurboTenant lease agreement, we’re going to automatically apply the signature and the date fields onto the document for you. For those additional uploads that I had to that animal addendum that I uploaded, I’m going to scroll down to the bottom of my lease so I can drag and drop those fields.

TurboTenant doesn’t know what document I uploaded so they don’t know where the signatures go, so I have to make sure I place it on there. So again, I’m scrolling through my lease agreement. You can see I’ve built out that lease, got all the provisions, got our check marks where we need them, that bed bug information. So this whole section was built out from that wizard where we had this tiny little box.

We did all the work behind the scenes here. Okay, we’ve got that signature and date field on the lease agreement already. Here’s my animal agreement. We’re going to take my signature as the landlord right over here. We’re going to take the date right over here.

Switch over to our tenant. I’m going to click Send. I’ve got a signature. We’ve got a date. Send. I don’t know about you all, but that was a fast lease agreement.

I want to click Sounds Good. We’re going to get back into that lease profile. I’ve got that welcome letter that was already sent and already signed by my tenant. I’ve got another signature pending here for the lease agreement. You’ll see that this request was sent.

We’ve got a send reminder as well as when it was sent and an indicator that it’s not been viewed. As we scroll into here, there’s our tenant. We can go ahead and e-sign this welcome letter. The tenant has sent a letter. We’ve got a text message that’s been signed. It’s been passed back to us.

Because I’m in a test account, this is not legally binding. We sign. There we go. Continue.

Agreed. Raj, why does the landlord sign last? That’s a good question. We want the landlord to be in control of when it goes into effect. When you sign, because you sign last, that’s when it goes into effect. To give you maximum control, we’re having them. Any other signatures that are required will happen for you.

And then you’re controlling if it goes into effect and then making that final decision. Awesome. And then we’re going to have a new tenant. And then the other thing I wanted to show you is that we have a renewal coming up. So that’s going to be my lease for Lincoln Avenue. We already have our completed lease agreement here. And you can see that TurboTenant is letting me know my lease is expiring soon.

So I’m going to show off my renewal checklist. I already know they want to do a year lease. So I’m going to send a rental agreement addendum. This addendum is going to modify the terms of my existing lease agreement.

So it’s great for changing things like dates and rates. If you are adding a new tenant, we recommend a new lease agreement entirely as opposed to the addendum. And Raj, what’s different about the addendum than some of the other documents that we have on TurboTenant?

Sure. So like the lease agreement that we just, that Samantha just went through, we have a builder wizard, whatever you want to call it, a version of the product. So you answer questions, you fill in things, and then we’re creating the legal form behind it. And then it also includes eSign. If you do purchase this, this particular product, the forms are just basically common forms in the forms pack that you may use and they’re not, they’re not smart.

There’s no builder. You, you can modify them however you want in some PDF wizard. And you can get a Google doc version of it and modify it there.

And then it, those do not include eSign. So that’s what we’re going to do. So we went through a new lease agreement. This is what the addendum looks like for the renewal.

We’re going to go ahead and skip that eSign now. And then the last situation would be if you have a tenant with a lease agreement who is in place and you just want to get that into TurboTenant. You select your rental property. You add your lease nickname.

This is for my property in Wisconsin. This is at high street and it’s Jones. Hey, they moved in a while ago. And their lease is through July.

And I’m going to go month to month after this lease expires. I’m going to go ahead and do a quick list of things. I’m going to do a list of things. I’m just going to upload my document. And I’ve got it right over here. And then I’m going to choose to share it.

So once I add my tenant to this lease profile, they will have access to this legal document and the lease agreement in their profile. Okay, that was a lot, but we went through three scenarios. Do we have any questions come up, Krista?

Looking here. Okay, so I’m going to go ahead and do a quick list of things. Okay. Not a ton of questions. You must have done a great job explaining, but we do have this one.

What happens if I realized that I made a mistake after the lease is already sent to the tenant to sign? Raj, what do you do? Sure. So the key part of that question was like when, so it depends on when that mistake was made. If the tenant, you know, hasn’t signed or even if they have signed, you can, you can stop it and make modifications and send it out for signature again. If you, if they have signed and you signed, then that’s a different situation.

Right. That means the document is in effect and legal effect. According to the terms that were laid out there, and then you need an addendum.

And that’s what Samantha walked us through just a few moments ago. And that’s an addendum is to modify the terms and however you’re, you’re modifying choosing to modify them. Yeah, hopefully that answers the question. Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. Craig is wondering what is the cost for our lease?

Sure. So we, the cost for a lease agreement. It’s, it’s well, a lease agreement is included if you’re a premium member and a premium membership includes many different things.

I think Samantha’s going to show us. Here’s a little section where it talks about some of the things that you get prioritized marketing and faster rent payments, better applications, dedicated phone support and chat and you get unlimited e-sign. And then what we’re here to talk about today is lease agreements. So normally lease agreements cost $39 per lease agreement, which includes the e-sign. And here it says $145 value right here for the unlimited lease forms because then forms pack normally if you, if you buy that on on its own costs $99. Gotcha. Okay, so if you want to purchase a single lease, it’s going to be $39.

But if you have more than one lease that you’re managing, or if you just want to bulk up the rest of the tools in your arsenal, you can get a premium membership for $99 per year. Is that right? That’s right. Like if you just, if you just got a, you know, a lease agreement from us at 39 and if you’re doing another lease agreement within the year, I mean, it kind of makes sense to just get premium and 99. Make sense.

All right. Can a lease agreement be printed for tenants who prefer to read and sign a physical copy or for those who are not as tech savvy? Yes, they can. You can print it out and then physically sign it and then you can just like upload it to your, to your portal and I think Samantha showed that off at the end there like you could just upload the documents and it doesn’t have to be signed.

It can just be stored in your lease profile. Thank you very much. All right.

Next we have a question from Cheryl. Are the lease forms reviewed by an attorney in our state? And also if I could tack on, could you tell us a little bit more about the legal professionals behind the scenes in terms of our leases? Sure.

Every time we build a lease agreement, we work with some legal professionals to, to look at the laws of that particular state. And they’re also keeping updated about any changes to laws as they happen. And then they build the lease agreement that’s compliant with the laws there, like the legal form.

And then they work with my team to build the wizard, the builder that you see. So we can ask questions. And this is a, it’s a long process because they want to be, use the legal language and we want to make it easy to understand. So there’s a lot of back and forth between my team. And the legal team to figure out how to word the things in a certain way that we’re applying with the law, easy to understand, get the meeting across to you all. And then so you can answer those questions in us for us to build the forms. Did that answer the question?

Yeah, I think so very well. Any other questions that people have, we are right at time. But if you have anything else lingering, please feel free to drop it in the chat right now. Otherwise, we have one final poll for you to get a little bit more information. If you will indulge us.

I just popped that poll. And if you’re looking for what your lease agreement looks like in your specific state, you can go to support.turbotenant.com and type in your state. We’ve got help center articles right here. And when you open up that help center article, we’re going to walk through the lease agreement but also have a link to the example lease agreement. So you’ve got that available.

And we also have in terms of resources. If you’re looking for topics about landlording, whether that’s home warranties or property taxes or tenant screening or emotional support animals, we have all these free webinar recordings at turbotenant.com/webinars. And then we also have an onboarding course that is free in the academy tab of your landlord portal so that you can see walk-through videos of all of the features in TurboTenant right here. And if you’re going through that onboarding course and you have questions, there is a discuss option. You’re welcome to use that right there in the academy tab in the course.

You might see this is my face. So I’m the one that answers those questions if anything does come up along the way. It’s true. That’s one of the best ways to ask Samantha questions if you are not lucky enough to work with her.

Let’s see we got another question in the chat. If lease said in the terms change in the future, can it be edited and is there a cost so a little bit similar, but could you speak to the cost of Lisa Denham’s Sure. So the lease. So in that case, you would need a lease addendum if you know the lease agreement has been signed and everything you want to change the terms. So you just navigate here and start an addendum if you’re a premium member it’s included.

If you’re not a premium member that I believe it costs $15 to use the wizard and it includes the eSign for the free for you to sign in for the tenant to sign. Fantastic. Alrighty. Guys, thank you so much for joining us today. This was lovely to have a chance to chat with Raj and of course get Samantha’s expertise in the mix as well. If you have any follow-up questions, please do go check out our onboarding course.

It’s absolutely free. You can leave comments there. Samantha will follow up.

And we would love to hear from you so feel free to write in. Otherwise, have a fantastic rest of your Friday. Thank you so much. Thanks, everybody.