Quick start
Onboarding your first property
The short path from an address you’re looking at to a tenant paying rent through your own branded portal. Ten steps, in order, with the mistakes that cost people their first week called out as you go.
Already own the building? Skip to step 4. Already have the property in Return Grid and just need the portal live? Start at step 5.
1Before you start
The three things worth having in hand before you open the app.
This guide takes one building from “I’m looking at it” to “my tenant is paying rent through the portal.” It is deliberately linear. Everything here is covered in more depth in the Property Manager Guide — this is the short path through it.
You need
- An Owner Portal login
- Someone at your organization has to add you under Settings → Users first. That list is the allowlist for every sign-in method, including Zoho SSO — being in Zoho is not enough on its own.
- An address
- A real property you are underwriting or have already bought. You do not need to own it yet.
- Your numbers
- Purchase price, current rent, rehab cost, property taxes and unit count. These five are deal-specific and required on every analysis.
Sign in at returngrid.app. Sign-in is two steps: enter your email, press Continue, then enter your password. A password always works, on every plan. If your organization has Zoho SSO switched on, a Sign in with Zoho button appears above the password field — SSO is layered on top of passwords, it never replaces them.
Locked out? After too many failed attempts the account locks for 15 minutes, or an admin can clear it with Unlock account on your user record. If your email was never verified, the sign-in screen offers Resend verification email inline rather than leaving you stuck.
2Set your defaults first
Ten minutes here saves you re-typing the same assumptions on every deal for the rest of the year.
Go to Settings → Defaults before you analyze anything. Every field you set here pre-fills on every new analysis, so the only things you type per deal are the five that genuinely change.
| Set this | Why it matters on day one |
|---|---|
| Closing costs, down payment, interest rate, loan term | Your actual lending terms. Wrong defaults here quietly distort cash-on-cash and DSCR on every deal you look at. |
| Vacancy, maintenance, CapEx reserve, management, other expenses | Your operating assumptions. The CapEx reserve percentage also drives the monthly accruals once you own the building. |
| Insurance per unit | Scales with unit count instead of being a flat guess. |
| Comp radius and lookback | How far out and how far back the rent and sale comps search. |
| Appreciation, rent growth, projection length | Drives IRR and the long-run projection. |
Two more settings on the same page are worth a look before your first deal, though you can leave both alone:
- Deal Score formula. Cap rate, cash-on-cash, DSCR and cash flow each carry a weight that must total 100%, plus a low value scoring 0 and a high value scoring 100. The shipped weighting (cap rate 25% / CoC 35% / DSCR 20% / cash flow 20%) is Return Grid’s judgment call, not a published standard — tune it to how your firm actually decides.
- Average cap rate statuses. Which pipeline statuses feed that headline KPI. By default it excludes To Review and Not Interested, so unvetted and passed-on deals don’t drag the number around.
Changing a default later does not rewrite existing analyses. Defaults are applied when an analysis is created. That is usually what you want — but it means the ten minutes you spend now is genuinely cheaper than fixing thirty deals in March.
3Analyze the property
Turn an address and five numbers into an underwriting view you can defend.
- Go to Properties → Analyzing → Create new analysis.
- Enter the address. Return Grid pulls what it can and starts the comps search using your default radius and lookback.
- Or skip the typing. If the deal arrived as an email — an agent’s MLS alert, a link a partner sent you — forward it to your Deal Inbox address instead and pick it up from the queue with the address and asking price already filled in.
- Fill the five required fields. Purchase price, current rent, rehab cost, property taxes, unit count. Everything else is already filled from your defaults — override anything that is wrong for this specific deal.
- Read the Metrics tab. This is the point of the exercise.
- Set a pipeline status. To Review → Reviewing → Offer submitted → Offer accepted, or Offer lost / Not Interested. Status drives your landing-page pipeline widgets and the Dashboard and Map default filters, so keeping it current is what makes the rest of the app useful.
The numbers you’ll actually look at
| Metric | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Cap rate on cost | NOI against what you paid — whether you bought well. |
| Cap rate on current value | NOI against what it’s worth today — what the market would pay you now. |
| Cash-on-cash | Annual cash flow against cash actually invested. |
| DSCR | NOI against debt service. The number your lender asks for. |
| Breakeven occupancy | How empty it can get before it stops covering itself. |
| Deal Score | A weighted 0–100 score and letter grade, using the formula you set in step 2. |
Both cap rates are always shown, and neither replaces the other. If you only ever look at one, you will eventually confuse “I got a good price” with “this is a good asset today.”
Not every tab is live yet at this stage. Rent Roll and Actual vs. projected only carry real data once the property is Owned, and Sell Tracker only wakes up when you move it to Sell. That is expected — the record grows as the property moves through its life.
4Mark it as bought
One modal turns a pro-forma into an operating asset. This is the transition that unlocks everything else.
When the deal closes, open the property and use I bought it. Every field opens pre-filled with the pro-forma value, and the label shows you what the pro-forma said — so you can see exactly what you are overriding rather than guessing.
The four required fields
- Actual close price
- What you actually paid.
- Actual close date
- Editable even when pre-filled from the contract, because real closings slip.
- Owning entity
- Which LLC or entity holds it.
- Assigned teammates
- At least one. They receive the auto-generated tasks from future capital-forecast runs on this property, so don’t leave it as a placeholder.
Confirm those four and you are done. The optional sections — purchase details, financing, ops handoff, closing documents — are there if you want to capture the full close terms in the same pass, and you can come back to them.
Capture the tax reassessment now, not later. Most Wisconsin counties reassess to sale price on transfer. Tick Expect property tax reassessment at close and Return Grid asks for the new assessed value and annual tax, suggesting a figure based on your close price. Skipping this leaves year-one NOI overstated by exactly the amount the old assessment understated — and that error propagates into every report you run for the next twelve months.
Closing documents upload after the transition, not before. The phase change is what you came for and it isn’t held hostage to a 12 MB scan of a settlement statement. If an upload fails, Return Grid tells you the upload failed — it does not claim the purchase failed. Anything that arrives later goes in the property’s Purchase Closing Docs section.
What changes the moment it’s Owned
- Actual vs. projected appears — reported gross rent, reported operating expenses, trailing-twelve NOI, and monthly cash flow after debt service, against what you underwrote.
- Rent Roll starts holding real units, leases and tenants.
- CapEx reserve accruals post automatically on the 1st, for any owned property with a reserve percentage set.
- Tenant Portal provisioning becomes available for leases on this property.
- Maintenance requests from tenants start routing here.
5Add units and your first lease
Rent Roll is where the building stops being a spreadsheet row and starts being somewhere people live.
Open the property and go to Rent Roll. Add your units, then add a lease. The lease drawer is the single place where the money, the dates, the people and the paperwork all live together.
| Section | What goes in it |
|---|---|
| Status | Draft Active Notice given · Expired · Terminated early |
| Dates | Lease start and end, move-in and move-out |
| Money | Monthly rent, security deposit, pet deposit, rent due day, late fee, late fee grace period |
| Rent history | Mid-lease increases are kept as a dated history rather than overwriting the original rent |
| Deposit | Amount held, held since, holding account, and the Return deposit action |
| Inspections | Move-in and move-out condition records |
| Renters insurance | Tracked only — Return Grid does not broker or sell insurance |
Save it as a draft while you are still assembling it, then Activate lease when it’s real. If you have Zoho Sign connected you can instead use Send for signature… — and once it comes back signed, the tenant’s portal account is provisioned automatically, with no separate invite step.
Lease documents are typed and individually gated. Each one is tagged — Signed lease, Addendum, Amendment, Notice, Deposit letter, House rules, Move-in report, W-9 — and each carries its own Visible in Tenant Portal toggle. Nothing reaches the renter until you tick it. Uploading a document does not publish it.
6Put people on the lease
Tenants are created from leases, not from a separate “add tenant” button. This trips up almost everyone on their first day.
Inside the lease drawer, attach people and give each one a role:
They appear in the Tenants directory in the main navigation from that point on — you do not create them there. The directory lists everyone on a lease at any of your properties, with contact details and active-lease counts. Open a person to see their info, financial summary, every lease they are or have been on, and all their lease documents, including anything executed through e-sign.
Archive, don’t delete. When someone moves out, Archive hides them from the default directory without destroying their history. Unarchive brings them back if they rent from you again.
Once you have a few properties, Reports → Rent Roll gives you every unit across every Own- or Sell-phase property with its current lease and primary tenant, and Reports → Tenant Directory does the same for people. Sold properties drop out of both.
7Switch on the Tenant Portal
Branding is included on every plan. You can run the whole portal without connecting a single external service.
Go to Settings → Tenant Portal Branding. A live preview updates as you type, and Open Tenant Portal shows you the real thing.
- Portal URL
- tenant.returngrid.app/your-slug — lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens
- Portal display name
- What renters see as the name of the place they’re signing into
- Welcome message
- Your copy on the tenant dashboard
- Logo
- PNG or SVG, at least 200 × 60 px, up to 2 MB
- Accent color
- A preset or a custom hex. Return Grid checks it for WCAG AA contrast and warns you if it’s unreadable.
- Contact information
- Contact name, email, phone, emergency phone, office hours
- Move-in / move-out inspections
- Let tenants complete a condition checklist within 7 days of moving in
- Tenant two-factor
- Require a second factor — authenticator app or text message
Pick your portal slug once and leave it alone. Changing it breaks every invite link you have already sent. If you do change it, you have to resend them.
What you can’t change, and why. Your logo, accent color, copy and contact details are yours. Typography, neutral color tokens, accessibility behavior, core controls and page layout stay Return Grid-controlled — so every renter gets a portal that works and reads clearly regardless of who their landlord is.
Some jurisdictions require move-in and move-out inspections and will override your choice regardless of how you set that switch.
8Decide how rent gets paid
Every provider has a manual mode. Nothing here blocks you from going live today.
Settings → Tenant Portal Providers is admin-only. You do not have to connect anything to start — each capability has a native option and a manual fallback.
| Capability | Options |
|---|---|
| Invoicing | Zoho Books, or Manual (invoices live in Return Grid) |
| Payments | Zoho Payments hosted checkout, or Manual instructions plus recorded receipts |
| Lease e-signature | Zoho Sign |
| Maintenance tickets | Return Grid Native, or Zoho Desk |
| Applicant screening | Checkr Tenant, TransUnion SmartMove |
| SMS | Twilio, ClearlyIP |
| Email sending | Return Grid’s shared mail, or your own SMTP relay |
Running rent manually
- Write your instructions. In Instructions shown to tenants, say which methods you accept, who the payment goes to, and what reference the tenant should include.
- Record what arrives. Under Payment receipts, log each payment against an open invoice with an amount, a date received, a reference, and a method: Check, Zelle, Venmo, Cash App, Cash, or ACH recorded manually.
Never put bank passwords or card details in the tenant-facing instructions field. It is published to every renter on the lease.
9Invite your tenant
The last step, and the shortest one.
If the lease was signed through Zoho Sign, the portal account already exists — provisioning happens automatically when the signature comes back, and there is nothing for you to do here.
Otherwise, provision the account from the lease on the property’s Rent Roll. Before you send it, do a two-minute pass:
- Is the lease Active, not Draft?
- Is the monthly rent, due day, late fee and grace period right? Your tenant will see all of it.
- Have you ticked Visible in Tenant Portal on the documents you actually want them to have — usually the signed lease and house rules?
- Do your portal contact details and emergency phone point at someone who will answer?
- Are your payment instructions written, if you’re running manually?
Read the other side first. The Tenant Guide is the exact walkthrough your renters get — applying, signing, the move-in inspection, paying rent, requesting maintenance, and getting their deposit back. It is worth ten minutes before you turn the portal on, because it shows you precisely what you are about to publish.
10Day two and beyond
What to look at once the first property is live.
Your landing page is the answer to “what needs me today.” It is a stack of widgets — overdue rent, maintenance needing triage, applications awaiting review, offers awaiting response, tasks due, today’s important dates across the next 3, 30 or 90 days. Use Customize my view to hide or reorder them for yourself; a personal layout always beats the organization default, and an admin saving a new org default doesn’t disturb anyone who already has one.
Where to go next
| When you want to… | Read |
|---|---|
| List the unit and take applications | Listings & syndication and Applications & screening |
| Handle a maintenance request end to end | Maintenance & messages |
| Track capital spend and reserves | Repairs, CapEx & reserves |
| Return a security deposit correctly | Security deposits |
| Send deals in by email instead of typing them | The Deal Inbox |
| Get new listings found for you automatically | Search Watch |
| Add teammates and set permissions | Users, roles & org settings |
| Work out why something isn’t behaving | When something breaks |
Not everything is switched on for every organization. Search Watch, portfolio dashboards and custom domains need Team or Enterprise, and the integrations above are each optional with a manual mode. If a section of the full guide describes something you can’t find, check your plan and your connected providers before assuming it’s broken.