The digital property file: what belongs in it (and what you may throw away)

A digital property file holds everything legally or operationally tied to one property: the lease, the energy performance certificate, the mandatory inspections, the schedule of condition, the insurance policies and the arrangements with owner and tenant — attached to the property itself, not buried in a folder structure or a mailbox. Get that in order and you find any document in seconds, and see expiry dates coming on their own.

What definitely belongs in it

• Contracts: the lease with annexes, the schedule of condition at entry and exit, rental guarantee documents.
• Certificates with an expiry date: energy performance certificate, electrical inspection, inspections of lift, oil tank or gas installation where applicable, asbestos certificate.
• Insurance: block policy or fire policy, liability, legal expenses — with renewal date and premium due date.
• Management records: minutes and decisions of general meetings (for managing agents), contractors' quotes and invoices, handover documents.
• Correspondence that counts: arrangements with the owner, tenant reports, damage files — the piece of "memory" that otherwise lives in mailboxes.

What you may archive or discard

Not everything deserves a place in the active file. Expired certificates superseded by a newer version, intermediate contract drafts and duplicate invoices can move to the archive — keeping them is fine, but they do not belong among the current records. Note: statutory retention periods apply to accounting records and contractual documents; archive them, do not throw them away. Rule of thumb: per property, the active file shows only the version in force of each document type.

From folder to metadata

The classic approach — a folder per property, subfolders per year — breaks the moment one document belongs to two properties, or someone creates a folder called "2023 OLD". The robust approach inverts it: every document gets metadata (property, document type, expiry date, counterparty) and the file is simply a filter. The same certificate can then appear in the property overview, the expiry list and the audit overview without a single copy.

Where AI takes over the work

Filling in that metadata is precisely the work nobody wants to do — and precisely what generative AI can do reliably today: an uploaded lease is recognised, linked to the right property and tagged with start date, indexation date and certificate expiry. A human approves with one click. At Cibus Real Estate, 35,000+ documents across 700+ properties were AI-tagged this way, in a two-week implementation. That turns the property file from a filing project into a by-product of ordinary work.