You can’t have a rental business without any buildings, so setting up a building will be your first task.
A building is the physical building that you own, usually with just one Title, that contains your rental units. A multi-family building (e.g. duplex, fourplex or whole apartment building) will contain more than one unit. A single-family home or a a half-duplex, if you own just that one side, will have just one unit. Before you can create a new Unit, you must first have created the building to which it belongs.
If you own only a single unit within a larger building that you do not fully own (eg a condominium unit within an apartment building), you should consider the unit to be its own building, so you should enter it into here as a building, and then again on the New Unit page as a unit within the building.
If you are renting out a unit in your own house, eg a basement or above-garage suite, you should enter your house as a whole as the building, and then create a unit within that building which is your rental suite.
Once you have entered the basic information below, you can go to the more detailed View Building page and enter additional information, such as buying costs etc. Entering the buying costs will enable you to calculate returns on your investment etc. through the Reports module. Most of these details are optional and can, of course, be modified in the future.
Entering the details is pretty self-explanatory. Neither the public, nor the tenants will see what you put in here, so don’t worry too much about your wording, this is just for your own reference, and for your accountant to correctly asign expense, depreciation and so on.
At bare minimum you need to give the building a name and an address. You can then add other details at any time when you find the need to do so.
You can also optionally add the details of the mortgage and/or the statement of adjustments, which is the statement your lawyer sends you when you buy the building. It itemizes all the costs involved in buying the building which allows you to calculate an accurate return on investment. You can fill this in even if you bought the building way in the past.
Then, you can add some details and notes that can be useful later on if, for example, you need to get repairs or parts for your furnace or water heater etc.
Finally you can add a Google map. To do this, click on the link below the Google Embed textarea, which will open up a new tab with Google Maps. put the address in the search bar and find your building. Then click on the share button, select ‘Embed a Map’ and then ‘Copy HTML’. You can now go back to the New Building page and paste that right into the textarea box.
Press the green ‘Save New Building’ button, and you are done.
Having set up your new building you can either edit it to add more details, or just go on to the next step of setting up some units within the buiding.
