When you flip into Edit Mode on a property, Relm acquires a lock so no one else on your team can edit the same property concurrently. Locks prevent classic last-write-wins overwrites where two people independently change the same field and one update silently disappears.
How locks work
- Locks are per-property, not per-section. If you're editing Taxes, no one else can edit Comps, Financial, or any other section on that property.
- Locks are held by the user, tied to their authenticated account.
- Locks have a short idle timeout. If you walk away for ~10 minutes without saving or interacting, the lock expires and someone else can take it.
- When you save and exit Edit Mode, the lock is released immediately.
What another user sees
If you're holding a lock and a teammate opens the same property:
- They see a banner naming you ("Sarah is editing this property") with the time you started.
- They land in read-only mode by default.
- Their Edit Mode toggle is disabled until your lock releases.
They can still read the property freely, run chat queries, and view history. They just can't make changes that would commit to the same shared state.
Stale locks
A lock can get "stale" if:
- Someone closes their browser without saving.
- Their network drops while in Edit Mode.
- They put their laptop to sleep mid-edit.
The idle timeout takes care of most stale locks automatically. If you need to take over a property more urgently, you can wait for the timeout or — if you're an admin — force unlock it.
Force unlock (admin only)
From the property header, an admin can click Force unlock. This:
- Releases the active lock.
- Discards any unsaved edits the previous holder had pending.
- Logs an entry in Version history noting the force-unlock action and who performed it.
Force unlock is final — there's no recovery of the discarded edits. Use it when someone's clearly walked away and you need to keep working. See Force unlock a stuck property for the full procedure.
Best practices
- Save often. A 30-second save discipline means a lost lock costs you 30 seconds, not an hour.
- Communicate with your team. "Heads up, I'll be in [property] for an hour" goes a long way before someone gets locked out.
- Don't force-unlock without checking. A force-unlock discards the other person's work. Slack them first.
What if I keep getting locked out
If you're consistently bouncing off other people's locks, that's a process issue more than a tooling issue — get on the same calendar or split the work by section. If two analysts truly need to work the same property at the same time, today they can split section by section: one in Comps, one in Financial. Just don't both flip Edit Mode on at the same property.