How to Automate Lease Renewals in Yardi

Lease renewals are one of the most consequential workflows in property management, and also one of the most manually intensive for teams that have not set up automation.

A typical manual renewal process goes like this: someone runs a report, exports it to a spreadsheet, sorts by expiration date, drafts individual renewal letters, emails or mails them to tenants, logs the sent date somewhere, follows up two weeks later if there is no response, negotiates terms, and processes the signed renewal. For a portfolio of 200 units, with leases expiring throughout the year, this cycle is ongoing and never fully finished.

Yardi Voyager’s renewal workflow tools can automate most of this. Not everything, but enough to change lease renewal from a time-consuming manual process to an exception-management workflow where your team intervenes only when something requires a human decision.

What Yardi Can and Cannot Automate in Lease Renewals

Before setting up renewal automation, it is worth being clear about what the system actually does automatically versus what still requires human involvement.

What Yardi can automate: Identifying leases approaching expiration within a configurable look-ahead window. Sending initial renewal offer letters or notices to tenants at a defined number of days before expiration. Generating draft renewal leases with current terms pre-populated. Tracking whether a tenant has responded. Sending reminder notices if no response is received by a defined date. Moving leases to a month-to-month status if the expiration date passes without a signed renewal.

What still requires human involvement: Decisions about rent increases and new lease terms. Review of any tenant with a negative payment history before issuing a renewal offer. Negotiations with tenants who counter-offer on terms. Final approval of non-standard renewal terms. Notices of non-renewal to tenants who will not be offered a renewal.

The automation handles the routine cadence. Your team handles the exceptions and the decisions. That is the right division of labor.

Setting Up the Renewal Workflow in Yardi Voyager

Step 1: Configure the Renewal Look-Ahead Window

The renewal look-ahead window determines how far in advance Yardi identifies leases as approaching expiration. Voyager’s stock “Expiring Leases” dashboard defaults to 120 days, though most operations narrow that to 60–90 days for active renewal work—long enough to send an offer, negotiate, and get a signed renewal in place before the current lease expires.

Configuration lives at the property or property-type level under your lease policy or renewal settings, and the right setup depends on which Yardi vertical you’re in. For residential, this article’s workflow applies as written. Commercial leases don’t flow through the same module at all—they’re managed through CommAmendments and (where licensed) Deal Manager, so the look-ahead concept exists but the configuration looks different. Affordable housing runs on a HUD or LIHTC recertification cycle rather than a market-rent renewal cycle, so notice windows live in the affordable compliance module, not in the residential renewal policy.

Step 2: Build Renewal Letter Templates

The renewal offer letter is the document sent to the tenant when a lease enters the renewal window. In Yardi, this is a system-generated letter that pulls property name, tenant name, current lease end date, proposed new term, and proposed new rent from the system records.

You need to build this template before the automation can send it. Templates are created in Yardi’s correspondence configuration. Best practice is to have two or three template variations: a standard renewal offer with a rent increase, a renewal offer at current rent, and a short-term or month-to-month offer for situations where you want flexibility. Your system administrator builds these templates and associates them with the appropriate lease types.

Have your template reviewed by a local attorney before activating it. Renewal notice requirements, required language, and mandated delivery timelines vary by state and municipality. A template that does not comply with your jurisdiction’s requirements creates legal risk regardless of how well it is automated.

Step 3: Set Automated Task Rules

Automated task rules in Yardi are the engine of the renewal workflow. These rules define what happens automatically at each stage of the renewal timeline. A typical automated renewal workflow uses rules like these:

• 90 days before lease expiration: Lease is added to the renewal queue. In RentCafe CRM IQ, a task is created for the responsible property manager to review the tenant’s payment history and decide whether to issue a renewal offer. In Voyager-only environments without CRM IQ, the same trigger surfaces as a dashboard item rather than a person-assigned task.
• 75 days before expiration: If the renewal offer decision task is completed and marked ‘issue offer,’ the renewal letter is generated and sent to the tenant via the RentCafe portal and optionally by email.
• 45 days before expiration: If no response has been received, an automated reminder notice is sent to the tenant. A follow-up task is created for the property manager.
• 30 days before expiration: If the lease is still unsigned, a priority task is escalated to the property manager. Depending on your policy, this may also trigger a notice of non-renewal if no response has been received.
• Lease expiration date: If no renewal has been signed, the system can automatically convert the lease to month-to-month status per your configuration, or flag the unit for a leasing decision.

Your system administrator configures these rules in the automated task and workflow section of Voyager. The rules can be adjusted for different property types and different markets. A portfolio in a tight rental market may use a shorter notification window. A portfolio with higher natural turnover may use a longer window to leave more time for marketing preparation.

Step 4: Configure the Renewal Queue

The renewal queue is the working view your property managers use to manage active renewal decisions. It shows every lease in the look-ahead window, sorted by lease expiration date or days-to-expiration, with the current status of each renewal action.

A well-configured renewal queue shows: the tenant’s name, property and unit, current lease end date, days until expiration, current rent, proposed new rent, the status of the renewal offer, and the next scheduled action. In RentCafe CRM IQ, the status set typically reads as not sent, sent, awaiting signature, signed, or declined; Voyager-only sites without CRM IQ will see a different label set tied to the renewal proposal batch. Either way, this gives a manager everything they need to see the full renewal pipeline at a glance and take action on the exceptions that need their attention.

Configure the queue columns to match what your property managers actually need to see to make decisions. Default column configurations often include fields that are not useful for renewal decisions and exclude fields that are. Your administrator can customize the queue layout.

Step 5: Set Up Digital Lease Signing

The renewal workflow delivers its full value when the renewed lease is signed digitally through RentCafe. When a tenant receives the renewal offer, they log into their portal, review the new lease terms, and sign electronically. The signed document is stored automatically against their tenant record in Voyager. No paper, no scanning, no manual filing.

For digital signing to work, RentCafe must be configured with your renewal lease template, and tenants must have active RentCafe accounts. If your tenant population has low RentCafe adoption, a parallel email delivery process can be set up as an alternative. Your consultant can configure this during implementation or as a post-live addition.

Monitoring and Adjusting the Workflow

Once the renewal workflow is active, your primary management task shifts from doing the work to reviewing the outputs. A weekly review of the renewal queue covers: how many leases are in the pipeline, how many offers are pending tenant response, how many are signed, and how many require escalation because the expiration date is approaching without resolution.

In the first 30 to 60 days after activating the workflow, run the renewal queue output in parallel with your previous manual process to confirm the system is triggering at the right times and generating the correct correspondence. Issues at this stage are much easier to correct before you have fully retired the manual process.

Review the workflow rules at least annually and after any change in lease terms, local laws, or organizational policy. Automated workflows that run without periodic review can continue sending outdated letter templates or applying outdated notice windows if no one is maintaining them.