A property is the thing on the deed
One address, one purchase, one property. Your condo, your house, your duplex, your triplex. The rooms and suites inside it are not properties, they are units. Draw the line at the deed and the rest of your records fall into place.
The mistake worth avoiding is splitting a duplex into two properties because it has two tenants. You end up with two insurance policies that are really one, a roof repair you have to divide by hand, and a tax return that no longer matches your ownership.
Why the top-level container matters
Everything else links back to the property: units, leases, expenses, and documents. It is the layer where ownership-level costs actually live.
Some costs belong to the whole address and cannot be assigned to one tenant. Property tax, insurance, the roof, the furnace, the driveway. If you have no property layer, those costs have nowhere sensible to sit, so they get dumped against whichever unit you happened to be looking at.
What to record
| Field | Why it earns its place |
|---|---|
| Street address | The identity of the property, and what appears on every bill |
| City | Grouping, and it drives which rules apply |
| State or province | Retention periods and tenancy law both vary by jurisdiction |
That is genuinely all you need to start. Purchase price, mortgage details, and legal descriptions are useful later, but they are not what makes the records work day to day.
Where the property layer pays off
At tax time you need to say which expenses belong to which address, and defend it. A landlord with three properties and one shared expense list spends an evening reconstructing that split from memory and bank statements. A landlord who recorded the property on every transaction runs a filter.
The same is true when you sell. A buyer or lender asking for the operating history of one address wants that address, not your whole portfolio.
In UnitDocs
Add a property from your dashboard: enter the street address, then city and state or province. Save it, and it becomes the container you attach units, leases, transactions and documents to.
Start there before anything else. A unit with no property has nowhere to belong.