The Property Website Handoff Sheet
Who has the domain login? Nobody at your property knows, and that is not your fault. Fill this in once, keep it where the next person will find it, and every blank line becomes a question worth asking.
Why nobody remembers. On-site teams turn over faster than websites do. Industry survey data puts average tenure for leasing consultants at roughly 357 days and maintenance technicians at 584, with on-site management turnover around 22.5 percent a year. Your leasing desk is effectively replaced annually. A website bought four years ago has outlasted everyone who was in the room.
A property manager describing her own site on Reddit put it the way most people would if they were being honest: "I am not sure who created ours but I think it was a combo of Appfolio work input from the president. But I go in and edit it regularly... I am by no means an expert." That is not negligence. That is turnover.
Property website handoff sheet
Property: [NAME] Completed by: [NAME] Date: [DATE]
The domain
| Item | Answer | Owned or licensed? |
|---|---|---|
| Domain name | [ ] | [ ] |
| Registrar (GoDaddy, Namecheap, etc.) | [ ] | [ ] |
| Account holder name and email on the registrar account | [ ] | [ ] |
| Renewal date | [ ] | [ ] |
| Auto-renew on? | [ ] | [ ] |
| Who controls DNS (may differ from the registrar) | [ ] | [ ] |
The website itself
| Item | Answer | Owned or licensed? |
|---|---|---|
| Platform or builder (RentCafe, AppFolio, WordPress, custom) | [ ] | [ ] |
| Admin login URL | [ ] | [ ] |
| Who currently has credentials | [ ] | [ ] |
| Hosting provider | [ ] | [ ] |
| SSL certificate provider and expiry | [ ] | [ ] |
| Can our team edit content without the vendor? What exactly? | [ ] | [ ] |
Accounts attached to it
| Item | Answer | Owned or licensed? |
|---|---|---|
| Google Analytics property and who has admin | [ ] | [ ] |
| Google Business Profile owner | [ ] | [ ] |
| Where website leads are delivered | [ ] | [ ] |
| Listing feeds and who pays for them | [ ] | [ ] |
| Resident portal deep link URL | [ ] | [ ] |
| Online application link URL | [ ] | [ ] |
| Rent collection platform (RentMerchant, or the one in your PMS) and who administers it | [ ] | [ ] |
The vendor
| Item | Answer |
|---|---|
| Company name and contact | [ ] |
| What we pay, and how often | [ ] |
| Contract end date and notice period | [ ] |
| What happens to the site if we stop paying | [ ] |
Every empty line is a question worth asking
If you cannot fill in the registrar row, start there. The domain is the one asset that can strand everything else, and renewal notices go to whichever inbox was used years ago. That is the row that turns into an emergency.
If the "owned or licensed" column is mostly blank, that is worth resolving before you next change vendors or management companies. We wrote up what vendor contracts actually say about ownership, including the exact clause language from one major platform, in who owns your apartment website.
If you cannot answer what your team can edit unaided, ask. An industry practitioner advising peers on choosing a vendor put it this way: "you need to know if your website vendor will prevent/limit access to your sites (to make the appropriate updates and add new content) first." That is a question to ask before signing, not after.
Fill it in, save it somewhere that is not one person's inbox, and hand it to whoever sits in your chair next. That is the whole point.
Found blanks you cannot fill?
Send us the sheet and we will help you work out what you actually control, whether or not you hire us.