Owners & Ownership History
Every property in REDA records who owns it and, just as importantly, who owned it before. The current owner drives whom you bill and whom you pay out; the history behind it drives how expenses and statements are attributed to the right owner for the right period. This article shows how to set the owner correctly (REDA insists on two fields together), how to read the Ownership Trail that REDA maintains automatically, and how to clear the two errors that can block a property save when the history can't be written. No prior REDA experience is assumed — every term is defined as we reach it.
Access you'll need. Editing a property's owner fields requires a property-editing set — for example REDA - Property Management User (which also carries the ability to create and edit Ownership Trail entries) or REDA - Master Data - Admin. You also need access to the account you're naming as the owner; your administrator grants account access separately, as it isn't part of the REDA permission sets.
Who owns this property?
An owner in REDA is an Account — the company or person record that holds the asset. You set it on the property through two fields that work as a pair:
| Field | What it records |
|---|---|
| Owner Account | The account that currently owns the property. This is the owner REDA bills and pays out against, and the property is listed back on that account under its owned properties. |
| Ownership Start Date | The date the current owner's period of ownership began. It anchors the history window, so REDA always knows which owner was in place on any given day. |
Because a period of ownership needs both a "who" and a "from when", REDA refuses to save one without the other. Set an Ownership Start Date with no owner and you'll see:
Name an Owner Account with no start date and REDA asks for the missing half:
The current owner is also the default party billed on the property's invoices, unless a pass-through or property-management arrangement redirects the receivable elsewhere (see Who Gets Billed). For most properties, "who owns it" and "who's billed for it" are the same account.
The Ownership Trail: history REDA writes for you
The Ownership Trail is a running record of who owned the property and for how long. Each entry is one period of ownership, and REDA opens and closes these entries for you — you don't create them by hand. You'll find them on the property's Sales | Acquisition tab, each carrying its own reference number (a Trail # such as POT-00001).
Every entry holds a small, consistent set of details:
| Entry field | What it means |
|---|---|
| Owner Account | The account that owned the property for this period. Required. |
| Ownership Start Date | The day this owner's period began. Required. |
| Ownership End Date | The day this owner's period ended. Left blank on the current owner's entry — a blank end date is what marks an entry as "open". |
| Notes | Free text for anything you want on the record about this period of ownership. |
So at any time there is exactly one open entry — the current owner, with no end date — and any number of closed entries behind it, each with a start and an end date bracketing a past owner's period. Read top to bottom, they tell you the property's complete ownership story.
What happens when the owner changes
When you change the Owner Account or the Ownership Start Date on a property — or set both for the first time — REDA updates the trail to match. What it does depends on whether the owner actually changed:
That "minus one day" is deliberate: it makes the old period end the day before the new one begins, so the two periods meet exactly. Your history has no gap and no overlap — and you never have to work out the arithmetic yourself.
When the trail blocks your save
Because the history is part of saving the property, a change that leaves the ownership information incomplete or inconsistent stops the save. There are two messages to recognise.
The first appears when the owner and start date are out of step — most commonly when you clear the Ownership Start Date while an open trail still exists for a different owner, or when the owner/date pair is incomplete as the trail is first created:
The fix is always the same: restore the Owner Account and Ownership Start Date together as a complete pair, then save. The second form of the message carries additional technical detail after the same opening words — it means the trail update itself couldn't complete and surfaced on the property save. Treat it the same way: make the owner and start date a clean, complete pair; if it persists, note the exact wording and contact your administrator.
What the history is used for
The trail isn't record-keeping for its own sake. REDA uses it to attribute money to the right owner for the right period. When it produces an owner statement, or reconciles a property's expenses across a date range, it reads the trail to decide which owner was in place on each day — so a cost incurred before a sale lands with the seller, and one incurred after it lands with the buyer, automatically.
That's why the dates matter as much as the names, and why letting REDA write the trail (rather than hand-editing it) keeps your statements honest. The full mechanics of statements and expense reconciliation belong to the property-management articles (see Owner Statements); here it's enough to know that clean ownership history is what those features stand on.
Building-level ownership for units
Sometimes you don't want to manage ownership unit by unit — you want to hold it at the building, and let the units inherit. Two fields on the unit handle that.
Ownership Level (Building) tells REDA to manage this unit's ownership and expenses at its parent building rather than on the unit itself. Because that only makes sense when the unit actually has a building above it, REDA requires a parent property to be set first:
Expense Allocation % records what share of the building's expenses this unit carries. By convention the units in a building add up to 100%, but REDA does not enforce that total — it's a data-quality practice you maintain, not a rule the system checks. Keeping the shares tidy is what makes building-level expense splits come out right.
Worked example: Meridian Court #101
Meridian Court #101 is created on 1 Jan 2026 with Owner Account set to Continental Holdings and Ownership Start Date 1 Jan 2026. Saving the property, REDA opens the first trail entry — POT-00001, start 1 Jan 2026, end blank — the open, current-owner entry.
On 15 Jun 2026 the unit is sold to Meridian Capital. A manager sets Owner Account to Meridian Capital and Ownership Start Date to 15 Jun 2026, then saves. Here's what REDA writes:
| Trail # | Owner Account | Start | End |
|---|---|---|---|
| POT-00001 | Continental Holdings | 1 Jan 2026 | 14 Jun 2026 (new start − 1 day) |
| POT-00002 | Meridian Capital | 15 Jun 2026 | (blank — current owner) |
The two periods meet on 14/15 June with no gap. Now the blocked-save case: a colleague later opens #101 and clears the Ownership Start Date to "tidy up", leaving Meridian Capital named but with no start date while its open trail exists. The save is refused with "Failed to update Property Ownership Trail. Missing ownership information on Property." — restoring the 15 Jun 2026 start date lets it save.
Reference: owner fields and trail behaviour
| You change… | REDA does… |
|---|---|
| Owner Account + Start Date, first time | Opens the first trail entry (start = your date, end blank) |
| Start date only, same owner | Updates the open entry's start date in place |
| Owner Account to a different account | Closes the old entry (end = new start − 1 day); opens a new entry for the new owner |
| Clear the start date with a different-owner open trail | Blocks the save: "Failed to update Property Ownership Trail. Missing ownership information on Property." |
| Ownership Level (Building) with no parent | Blocks the save: "Ownership can be managed at the building level only if parent property is provided." |
Where to go next
- Transferring Property Ownership — the full manual and sale-driven transfer procedure, start to finish.
- Ownership Behind an Account — the parties and percentages that sit behind an owner account.
- Portfolios — how owner-driven groupings pick up (and let go of) properties.
- Understanding Properties — where the owner fields sit among everything else on a property.
Frequently asked questions
The two fields anchor a period of ownership, so REDA insists on the pair. Set only one and you'll see either "The Owner Account must be provided if the Ownership Start Date is specified." or "Please provide the Ownership Start Date." Fill both and the save goes through.
The trail is written and closed for you when you change the property's owner fields, so hand-editing is rarely needed. If you do correct an entry, the end date can't precede the start date: "Ownership End Date cannot be earlier than Ownership Start Date." In almost every case it's cleaner to change the owner on the property and let REDA write the trail.
REDA couldn't write the ownership history for the change you made — usually because the owner and start date were left out of step: "Failed to update Property Ownership Trail. Missing ownership information on Property." Restore the Owner Account and Ownership Start Date as a complete pair and save again.
Not from normal transfers. When the owner changes, REDA closes the previous owner's entry the day before the new owner's start date, so the periods meet exactly with no gap. Gaps or overlaps only appear if someone hand-edits an entry's dates.
No. An account named on any ownership trail entry can't be deleted, so the history is protected. Remove the account from the trails first if you truly need to delete it — but that's almost never the right move, because it destroys the record of who owned what and when.
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