When I first sat down with a New York property management company managing around 650 units, the owner said something I hear a lot: I’m scaling faster than my infrastructure.
He was right. They didn’t have a leasing workflow. They had people who knew how leasing was supposed to go, because they’d done it for years, and a spreadsheet that held it all together.
This is how we rebuilt their renewals, and why we didn’t touch their property management software to do it.
How renewals worked before
They ran on Yardi. Every so often someone downloaded the lease expiration report into Excel and worked from there. Notes went into the spreadsheet. When a tenant was going to vacate, the leasing coordinator copied them onto another tab. Everything else lived in email.
Renewal letters were filled out by hand. The coordinator sent them to the owner to review, then out to the tenant.
I want to be clear: this is not a bad team. This is how most of the industry was taught to run renewals. The spreadsheet helped the coordinator keep track, and it worked for him. But it had three problems baked in.
First, timing depended on someone remembering to pull the report. On a busy month that could happen a week before leases ended, which leaves no room to negotiate. Second, the spreadsheet was a copy, so it was out of date the moment it was saved. And third, every rule about who gets what offer lived in people’s heads.
Three kinds of tenant, three different paths
New York makes renewals harder than most markets. This portfolio has market-rate tenants, rent-stabilized tenants and commercial tenants, and each one follows different rules. Rent-stabilized renewals use the state’s own form and, for some tenants, have to go by certified mail.
So before building anything, we mapped every scenario in meetings with the team. What happens for each tenant type. Which properties the owners handle themselves. What a renewal can and can’t say. Only then did we build.
The 90-day pipeline
Yardi stays the system of record. Its API has limits, so we work with what it sends: the rent roll arrives by email, an agent reads that inbox, and the hub stays in sync with Yardi. There’s a human check at the end of that step.
From there, one rule runs everything. Ninety days before a lease ends, that tenant moves onto the renewals tab with a status of to do. The coordinator no longer goes looking for upcoming renewals. They arrive.
Before any offer is prepared, the system runs two checks. Is this still a building we manage? And is this tenant in court? If a tenant is in an active case, the coordinator gets a flag with the case attached, and no renewal goes out until whoever is handling it decides. Sending a renewal offer to someone you’ve been trying to evict for a year is one of the most expensive mistakes in this business, and it usually happens because two people are working from two different spreadsheets.
If both checks pass, the coordinator sets the rent and terms, and the letter fills itself in — including the correct owning entity for that property. He previews it and sends it. It goes out by DocuSign and email.
The follow-ups nobody had time for
Sending the offer is the part any property management software can do. The part that falls apart is everything after it, because tenants rarely answer the first email.
So the owners told us the timeline they wanted, and the system runs it:
90 days. A notice that their renewal is coming.
90 to 60 days. The offer goes out.
60 and 45 days. Reminders, with the 45-day one telling the tenant that without a reply, the unit will go to market.
30 days. The tenant is told the unit is going to market, and a calendar invite goes to the two owners and the coordinator.
When a unit is headed to market, the system also handles the handoff. The owners use specific brokers for specific properties, and they assumed that choice couldn’t be automated. It can. The system proposes the broker on file for that property and asks the owner to confirm or pick someone else, then sends it on.
The coordinator also wanted a weekly nudge to anyone who hadn’t replied, so we added that.
Then we had to protect him from his own inbox. At 650 units, a notification for every follow-up would bury him. So there’s one Monday digest instead: who was followed up with, who got which reminder, and what’s coming this week. He stays in the loop without doing the chasing.
When a tenant replies
A second agent reads the leasing inbox. When a tenant writes back to say they want to negotiate, the status changes to negotiating on its own.
So when the coordinator opens the hub, he sees exactly where every renewal stands. So do the owners, which matters more than it sounds. Owners trust a property manager who can answer “where are we with this tenant” in one look.
The edge cases are where it counts
Two scenarios show why mapping comes before building.
Certified mail. For rent-stabilized tenants who need it, the coordinator used to print letters and take them to the post office. We connected a certified mail service instead. He previews the letter in the same place and sends it in one click. The service prints and mails it, and the tracking ID comes back into the hub.
A roommate leaving. Anyone who has worked in property management knows roommate situations get messy. I always tell clients not to referee roommate conflicts; it isn’t your job and it only adds to the workload. What matters is the procedure. When one roommate leaves, two things happen at once: a move-out has to be processed, and there’s usually someone lined up to take their place who still has to apply. So the system sends both a move-out form and an application form, linked to that renewal. And because this company has two owners who each handle security deposits for different properties, the system knows which owner each deposit goes to. That used to live only in the coordinator’s head.
Why we didn’t replace Yardi
I get asked this a lot. Replacing a property management software to fix renewals would be outrageous, and in my opinion it’s the wrong answer. Yardi holds the records and does it well.
What was missing was a system of action: the place where the rules live and the work actually happens. Your system of action and your system of record need to talk to each other. That’s what we build.
Humans stay in the loop
I don’t automate everything, and I don’t think you should. AI is remarkable and it also makes mistakes. It says so in the fine print. So there’s a person at the points that matter: approving the offer, choosing the broker, deciding on a tenant in court. Every owner runs their company differently, and we build around how they want to decide. But we’re also opinionated, and we’ll tell you when we think there’s a better way.
The coordinator’s job didn’t disappear. It got better. He stopped copying rows between tabs and started doing the part that actually needs him: talking to tenants and negotiating.
If your renewals still start with downloading a report into Excel, DM me RENEWALS.