Contact Roles

A Contact Role is how a person gets onto a deal in REDA. It's a small junction record that says "this person is on this deal, as this kind of party" — a Lessee on a lease, a Buyer on a sale, a Guarantor backing a tenant. This article explains the role values and what each drives, how to add a person to a deal, how the primary contact works (and the one trap to avoid), and what contact roles quietly switch on downstream: resident-portal access, council eligibility, and payment payees. No prior REDA experience is assumed.

What a contact role is

A contact role links a Contact (a person) to an Opportunity (a deal or lease) and records the Role they play. It's REDA's equivalent of the standard deal-contact link. You never name these records — REDA numbers them for you (they show as "Contact Role #…"), so you identify a role by its contact and role, not by a name you typed.

Contact roles arrive two ways: inquiry conversion always creates exactly one (flagged primary), and you add the rest by hand with Add Contact.

The Role values and what they drive

The Role field offers ten values. Seven describe an active party; three "Ex -" values mark someone who has left:

Lessee · Seller · Occupant · Guarantor · PM Client · Buyer · Lender · Ex - Lessee · Ex - Occupant · Ex - Guarantor

The "Ex -" values are a status marker you set by hand: they record that someone has left without deleting the role, so the history of who was on the deal survives. Nothing in REDA acts on them automatically — no automation reads the "Ex -" prefix — so treat them as reporting and audit values, and as a signal to colleagues, rather than as a switch that changes behaviour.

If you leave the Role blank when adding someone, REDA fills it in based on the deal's type:

So a co-signer added to a lease with the role left blank comes out as Lessee — if you meant Guarantor, pick it explicitly.

Adding a person to a deal

Use Add Contact on the deal's Contact Roles list. It's a guided step-by-step that handles both existing and brand-new people:

A Contact Role record — it ties a contact to a deal and its account, carries the Role (here Lessee) and the Is Primary flag, and exposes the Council Info fields (Council Role, Council Voting Rights) used when the property is council-managed.

The Add Contact guided screen on a deal — it opens on the email step, which finds or creates the contact before you set its Role and Is Primary on the deal.

The primary contact

The Is Primary flag marks the deal's main contact. When you add, change, or remove a primary-flagged role, REDA re-derives the deal's Primary Contact — the contact of the first role flagged primary — and cascades that primary contact to any child leases. On a leasing deal, the primary contact even feeds the deal's auto-generated name.

What contact roles switch on downstream

Contact roles aren't just record-keeping — several REDA features read them:

Council roles and the two validation rules

Two rules can stop you when saving a contact role. The first guards the Council Role field — you can only set it when the related deal's property is under a council-enabled parent:

The Council Role values are Lease Hold Tenant and Tenant for Life. The second rule only applies in multi-currency orgs — if yours isn't one, you won't see it:

Worked example: Meridian Court #101

Converting Aisha Rahman's inquiry created Aisha Rahman — Lessee (primary) on the lease for Meridian Court #101. The agent uses Add Contact to add a co-tenant as an Occupant and a co-signer as a Guarantor (for the co-signer, REDA finds an existing contact by email and reuses it rather than creating a duplicate). The deal's Primary Contact stays Aisha. When the lease turns billing-active and the region's portal is on, portal users are provisioned for the active roles, and the finance features mark Aisha (the Lessee) as the payee.

Reference: fields and downstream effects

The fields you'll work with on a contact role:

Which role does what:

Where to go next

1. Working with Contacts — the person record a role points at.
2. Accounts in REDA — the account behind the people.
3. Converting an Inquiry — where the first contact role comes from.
4. The Resident Portal — how roles drive portal access.
5. Child Leases — how the primary contact cascades from parent to child.

Frequently asked questions