Promotions & Lease Discounts

A "First Month Free" offer, a percentage off rent for six months, a move-in incentive tied to a marketing campaign — these are promotions in REDA. A promotion is a reusable credit you build once and then apply to leases as a discount line. This article shows you how to create a valid promotion (the negative-amount and recurrence rules trip everyone the first time), how REDA decides which leases get offered it, how web inquiries are auto-tagged by campaign, and exactly how the credit lands on a lease. No prior REDA experience is assumed.

What a promotion is

A promotion is a saved discount. When you apply it to a lease, REDA turns it into a charge line — the same kind of line as rent or a fee, except its amount is negative, so it reduces what the tenant owes. Two fields decide whether a promotion is even eligible to appear on a lease:

• Type must be Leasing Promotion. The other type, Standard, is a marketing-tracking record that never reaches a lease — if a Standard promotion "doesn't work" on charges, that's why.
• Is Active must be ticked. This is the real on/off switch: it filters the offers shown on leases, the campaign auto-match, and the promotion picker everywhere.

Creating a promotion

From the Promotions tab, click New and fill in the record. The fields group into five blocks:

Recurring promotions

A one-time promotion credits once. A recurring promotion credits over several billing periods. To build one, tick Is Recurring and then set a Recurring Calculation — either:

• Fixed Instances — credit for a set number of periods. Provide the number of Recurring Instances and a Charge Period (month by default, or week or day).
• Date Range — credit across a From/To window set on the lease charge itself.

REDA enforces the pairing strictly: a recurring promotion needs a calculation type, and a non-recurring one must have those fields blank. The exact messages are in the FAQ.

Scoping: who gets offered the promotion

A promotion is offered on a lease when any of its scope fields matches — the logic is "or", not "and". A promotion is offered when:

• its Region matches the lease's region (when the promotion sets no property type or rule); or
• its Property Type matches, within the same region (a region is required whenever you set a property type); or
• its Leasing Rule matches the lease's rule (the rule's region must line up with the promotion's region); or
• its Property matches — a specific property and its child properties.

The Parent Leasing Promotion field is for grouping related promotions in reports only; nothing reads it when deciding what to offer.

Web attribution: matching campaigns automatically

The match, seen from the inquiry. First Month Free – Fall 2026 is sitting on Sara's inquiry without anyone having typed it. Below it are the details the promotion's scope was tested against — Region Harbour District, at Meridian Court #101.

When a web inquiry is saved with a UTM Campaign value and no promotion linked yet, REDA looks for the active promotion whose UTM Campaign matches exactly and stamps it onto the inquiry. This makes marketing attribution automatic — the inquiry that came from your "fall-2026-free-month" ad is tagged with that promotion without anyone typing it.

A few things to know about the match:

• It's one-shot, at inquiry save. There is no back-fill — activating a promotion later does not go back and tag inquiries that already exist.
• An existing link is never overwritten.
• If several active promotions share the same UTM tag, whichever REDA finds first wins — so keep UTM tags unique per active promotion.
• A promotion referenced by any inquiry can't be deleted; retire it by unticking Is Active instead.

Applying a promotion on a lease

Promotions attach to a lease as charge lines — there is no "promotion" field on the lease itself. To apply one:

Child leases in a family are included in the promotion offers alongside the master. And if your organization runs rent-inflation adjustments, promotion credits survive the restructuring — they carry onto the re-created charges rather than getting lost.

Worked example: First Month Free

You're running an autumn incentive on Meridian Court. You create a promotion named "First Month Free – Fall 2026": Type Leasing Promotion, Amount −1,200.00 (one month of the 1,200.00 rent), non-recurring, Charge Code "Rent Discount", Billing Label "First Month Free", scope Region = Harbour District, UTM Campaign "fall-2026-free-month", and Is Active ticked.

A web inquiry arrives carrying that UTM value, so REDA auto-links the promotion to it. When the lease is created for Aisha Rahman, you open Terms & Charges, see "First Month Free" in the offered list, tick it, and save — a −1,200.00 credit line (Optional) is added. The first invoice run credits it against the opening rent.

For a repeating incentive instead, you'd build "5% Off Rent for 6 Months": Amount −60.00, Is Recurring on, Recurring Calculation Fixed Instances, Recurring Instances 6, Charge Period month — six monthly credits of 60.00.

The Promotions list, showing a one-time and a recurring Leasing Promotion — both active, with their Type, Start Date, End Date and Is Active columns.

The "First Month Free – Fall 2026" promotion record, showing its type, effective dates, active flag and campaign tag, with the Inquiries and Child Promotions tabs.

An inquiry whose Promotion field is auto-linked to "First Month Free – Fall 2026", matched from the inquiry's UTM Campaign value.

Reference: the create-form validation rules

These checks fire while you build a promotion, quoted exactly as they appear:

Where to go next

1. Setting Up Lease Charges — the editor where promotion credits live on a lease.
2. Renewing a Lease — where renewal-applicable promotions are offered.
3. Web Attribution — how UTM values reach an inquiry.
4. How Billing Works — how a credit line posts to an invoice.
5. REDA Editions — Promotion versus Campaign across editions.

Frequently asked questions