When you click Edit 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 Tax History, no one else can edit Comparable Properties, the pro-forma, 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 stop interacting with the page (no mouse, keyboard, or scrolling) for about 5 minutes, Relm releases your lock and someone else can take it. If your browser closes or loses its connection, the lock expires on its own within 15 minutes.
- When you save or discard, you leave Edit Mode and the lock is released immediately.
What another user sees
If you're holding a lock and a teammate opens the same property:
- In place of the Edit button they see a badge naming you ("Sarah is editing"). On the Financial Pro-Forma page the banner also shows how long ago you started.
- They're in read-only mode, the default for everyone.
- They can't enter Edit Mode 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)
On a section page, next to the "… is editing" badge, an admin sees Force Unlock (on the Financial Pro-Forma page it's in the editing banner). This:
- Releases the active lock, so you can click Edit.
- Doesn't save the previous holder's pending edits — anything they hadn't saved stays unsaved in their browser.
Force unlock isn't recorded in Version history. 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 leaves the other person's unsaved work stranded. 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 need to work the same property, they have to take turns: the lock covers the whole property, so only one person can be in Edit Mode at a time.