Real Estate: listings, inquiries, viewings, offers and deals

#Purpose and scope

This chapter covers the Real Estate module: listings for sale, rent and lease, buyer and renter inquiries, viewings, offers, the deal record, local market comparables and stale-listing tracking. Buyers and renters reach published listings through the public site and customer portal, and their inquiries, viewing requests and offers land in the same pipeline.

#Before you start

1. The roles PROPERTY-MANAGER and LEASING-AGENT are seeded. A leasing agent sees and changes only the records assigned to them; managers, administrators and superusers see everything.
2. Two actions have their own named permissions: realestate.propertylisting.publish (publish, unpublish and archive a listing) and realestate.propertyoffer.accept (accept an offer).
3. An agent assigned to each listing, so viewings can be scheduled and the public can reach the right person.

#1. Create and publish a listing

1. Open Property listings and create a listing: title, listing type (sale, rent or lease), property type, price, currency, rent period for rentals, address, city, country, bedrooms, bathrooms, area, amenities, images (one URL per line), expiry date and assigned agent.
2. Use the row actions to change status. The status cannot be edited as a field.
3. Publish. The listing needs a price greater than zero, a city and at least one image, and its expiry date cannot be in the past.

#2. Check the price with comparables

1. Enter local Market comparables with an as-of date. Comparables older than about 18 months are excluded.
2. The listing’s Price check compares your price with the average of comparables for the same segment (listing type, property type, city and bedrooms), falling back to your own published listings when there are too few. With fewer than 3 data points there is no suggestion.
3. A price at least 25% away from the suggestion is flagged as an outlier.

#3. Inquiries

1. Open Property inquiries. Inquiries arrive from the public site or are entered by an agent (company and agent are copied from the listing).
2. Move an inquiry along with Mark contacted, Close or Spam. Statuses are New, Contacted, Viewing scheduled, Closed and Spam. A closed inquiry can be reopened to Contacted, and Spam back to New.

#4. Viewings

1. Open Property viewings and schedule a viewing on a published listing: start and end time, optionally linked to an inquiry.
2. A viewing must be in the future, end after it starts, and last between 15 minutes and 4 hours.
3. Buyers can also request a viewing from the public site with up to 3 preferred times within 90 days. That creates a Requested viewing, which holds no slot. Confirm it with the buyer’s time or another, and the buyer is emailed.
4. Complete, cancel, reschedule or mark a viewing as no-show.

#5. Offers

1. Open Property offers and make an offer on a published listing: amount above zero, an expiry in the future, and a contact name or a linked inquiry.
2. Use the row actions: accept, counter, reject or withdraw. A counter marks the original Countered and creates a new open offer with the new terms.
3. Accept (needs realestate.propertyoffer.accept). This reserves the listing and supersedes every other live offer on it in one step.

#6. Close the deal

1. Mark the reserved listing Sold or Rented. BSuit creates one deal record from the accepted offer (idempotent) and closes the linked inquiry.
2. Open Property deals. Deals are created only this way and cannot be created by hand or deleted; cancel a deal instead of deleting it.
3. Record the downstream record type and its id or number on the deal to mark it Handed off. Until then it is Pending hand-off.

#7. Stale listings and public alerts

Stale listings lists Published listings that were published more than N days ago (60 by default), oldest first, so you can reprice or re-list. Customers can save property searches on the public site; an hourly background job emails matching alerts for the listings of their own company only.