Rental Agreement & Digital Signatures

Haven lets you require a digital rental agreement that guests sign before arrival. Unlike House Rules — which are the friendly summary of what is allowed in the home — the Rental Agreement is the legal artifact: we snapshot the markdown to a PDF, capture the signer's name, IP address, browser, and timestamp, and store the signed PDF for your records.

When to require a rental agreement

Turn it on when you want a paper trail beyond the OTA's terms or your checkout-time checkbox. Common scenarios:

Higher-value or premium properties where damage policies need a real acceptance.
Direct bookings on your Haven site where you do not want to rely on a generic marketplace agreement.
Local regulations or insurance requirements that require a specific clause to be acknowledged before each stay.

Setting it up

Central hub: Rental Agreements page

Open Extras → Rental Agreements in the host sidebar (or /host?tab=rental-agreements). From there you’ll use up to four inner areas:

Library — author reusable markdown once, attach it to individual properties, and use it as the default for Multi-Unit Sites — branded booking sites that showcase multiple properties together.
Pending — chase upcoming stays that still owe a signature (reminders + deep link into the guide). Hidden when no upcoming bookings owe a signature.
Signed — sortable, searchable catalog across your portfolio (including reservation reference codes) with per-row PDF download. Hidden until you have at least one signed PDF on file.
Property settings — one toggle per property: Require signature before guests can access the property. Turning it on requires the guest to sign before WiFi, check-in steps, smart-lock / keypad codes, directions, and host contact unlock in their guide. Click Manage (or Set up when nothing is attached yet) on the same row to open a side sheet where you pick a template from your library or write a new one. To change the actual wording of an attached template, use Edit in library in that sheet — it deep-links to the template so your edit applies everywhere it's attached.

You can deep-link straight to a sub-panel with raSub=library, pending, signed, or settings on the same URL (for example /host?tab=rental-agreements&raSub=library).

Property editor & Guest Portal

Edit Listing → Arrival Guide → Rental agreement — same markdown editor as above, with a banner explaining whether the text is custom, pinned from the library, inherited from a multi-unit site default, or blocked until a conflict is resolved.
Guest Portal tab → Rental Agreement — sheet editor for the same fields when you are working from the dashboard’s property context.

On Edit Listing → Rental agreement and in the Rental Agreements → Property settings side sheet, a Guest preview (phone-shaped frame) loads your guide home tab as if the guest had a confirmed pre-arrival stay: when Require signature is on, switch Before signing and After signing to see gated tiles versus everything unlocked; when it is off, the preview shows the unlocked guide. Saving agreement text or using refresh reloads the preview so you see your latest markdown and version.

Signature gating & markdown

Under Rental Agreements → Property settings (or the property / Guest Portal surfaces), turn Require signature before guests can access the property on for each property that should collect a signed agreement. We keep gating implied — when the toggle is on, sensitive arrival info stays locked in the guide until the booking is signed.
Author or paste agreement language in the Agreement text (markdown) editor — opened inline as a side sheet from each property row, or directly on the property edit page. Markdown supports headings, bold, and bullet lists; substantive edits bump the version number so upcoming stays can be asked to re-sign.

Agreement library, property pins, and multi-unit site defaults

Use Rental Agreements → Library to maintain your library of markdown definitions.

Attach to a property when you want Haven to keep that property’s markdown in sync with a specific library row (a “pin”). Property-level attachments always override whatever a multi-unit site might suggest.
Multi-unit site default — on each multi-unit site edit page (Book with Haven → Sites → Multi-Unit → edit), set a default library agreement for properties that do not have their own property-level pin. Haven materializes the effective markdown onto each property so guests always read property-shaped text in the guide and at booking time.
No silent mixing — if a property sits on more than one multi-unit site and those sites would imply different library agreements, Haven blocks the conflicting setup until you either pin an agreement directly on that property, align your multi-unit site defaults, or adjust which sites the property belongs to.

Editing an attached agreement (do it in the library)

A pinned listing renders a snapshot of its library template. To change the wording, edit the template in the library — not on the listing. Use the Edit in library button (on the Property settings side sheet, the Edit Listing → Rental agreement section, and the multi-unit site default card) to jump straight to that template; saving there propagates the new text to every listing and site it's attached to. A substantive edit bumps the version and may ask upcoming guests to re-sign.

Saving agreement text from Edit Listing or Guest Portal (rather than editing the shared library row) instead converts the property to custom text and clears a direct pin, so library sync cannot overwrite local edits unexpectedly.

This library + attach + multi-unit-default + inheritance pattern is shared with Local Guides, FAQs, Blog, and Taxes — see Reusable Content Libraries & Inheritance for the cross-feature model.

What guests see

Inside /properties/[code]/guide, the guest sees a tile labeled Sign agreement with an amber "action needed" treatment. Tapping it opens a sheet with:

The full agreement markdown rendered for reading.
A typed-name input pre-filled with the booking's guest name.
An I agree and sign button.

On a phone, guests both type their legal name and draw their signature with a finger before tapping I agree and sign; the drawn signature is embedded in the audit PDF.

After signing, the tile flips to Signed with a download link to the signed PDF. The previously locked tiles — WiFi, check-in steps, smart-lock / keypad codes, directions, and host contact — unlock immediately on the same screen.

Where signed PDFs live

The dedicated Rental Agreements page (under Extras → Rental Agreements in the host sidebar) is the central place to manage every aspect of digital rental agreements across your portfolio. From there you get:

A summary header with at-a-glance counts: properties using rental agreements, pending signatures (with re-sign callouts when applicable), and total signed PDFs on file.
A Library tab for the reusable markdown definitions plus property and landing-page attachments.
A Pending tab property every upcoming booking that still owes a signature, with one-click Send reminder and Open guide actions per row. (Hidden when no signatures are owed.)
A Signed tab — a sortable, searchable cross-property catalog (filter by property, guest email, or reservation code) with per-row PDF download. (Hidden until at least one PDF exists.)
Property settings with one Require signature before guests can access the property toggle per property and a Manage side-sheet for attaching a library template (and an Edit in library shortcut to change that template’s wording where it’s authored).

In addition, you can find signed PDFs in two more contextual places:

Per-booking, in the reservation drawer: every reservation that is on a property with Require pre-arrival signature enabled shows a Rental Agreement card. As the host you see signer name, signed-at timestamp, IP address, browser, agreement version, and a Download PDF button. Unsigned bookings show a Send reminder button.
Per-property, in the Guest Portal Rental Agreement section sheet: a Recent signatures panel lists the property's last few signed bookings with per-row download. A View all signed PDFs → link in the panel header jumps to the full Rental Agreements page.

Versioning and re-sign behavior

Each time you change the agreement markdown in a way that changes the legal text, Haven increments rentalAgreementVersion. Existing signatures keep referencing the version they signed (you can still see and download those historical PDFs), but upcoming bookings — anyone whose stay has not yet checked out — sees a Re-sign needed banner in their guide and must sign the new version before access gating clears again.

When you save a version bump we show a small banner letting you know how many upcoming bookings will be asked to re-sign. The historical signed PDF is retained on every booking for your audit trail, so you always know exactly what was agreed to and when.

Difference vs House Rules

Concept	What it is	Where guests see it
House Rules	Friendly markdown of the dos & don'ts in the home	Booking modal + guide tile + welcome book PDF
Rental Agreement	Legally signed acceptance with audit trail	Booking modal preview + guide signing sheet

Both can be on at the same time and they appear stacked in the booking checkout modal: the house-rules summary first, the rental-agreement preview second. The booking-time checkbox stores houseRulesAccepted = true; the real signed acceptance happens later inside the guide.

Limitations (today)

Typed-name signatures only — no drawn canvas signature yet.
Lead booker signs on behalf of the party. Co-guest invitee signatures are on the roadmap.
Only markdown agreements are supported in this release. We generate the PDF from markdown so we can stamp the signature footer reliably — host-uploaded PDFs as the source agreement are planned separately.
Reusable Content Libraries & Inheritance
Managing Bookings
Document Builder for Properties
Guest Communication & Reminders
Guest Identity Verification — adds an optional Stripe Identity check on top of the rental agreement signature.