Terms of Service

The agreement

These terms are an agreement between you and [Company legal name] ("Steward", "we", "us"). They cover the Steward website, the owner workspace, the resident portal, the Steward assistant and any other part of the service (together, "Steward"). By creating an account, accepting an invitation or using Steward, you agree to these terms and to our Privacy Policy. If you use Steward for a business, you agree on its behalf and confirm that you may bind it.

Steward is offered in the United States only. You must be at least 18 years old to use it.

Owners and residents

Steward has two kinds of users. Owners are landlords and property managers who register properties, units and residents, record tenancies and rent, and collect rent through Steward. Residents are tenants whom an owner invites to the resident portal to pay rent, make maintenance requests, message the owner and see the documents the owner shares with them.

The owner, not Steward, is the resident's landlord. Steward provides software to the owner. Any lease, deposit, repair, notice or other obligation is between the owner and the resident. Steward is not a party to it and does not act as either side's agent, broker or property manager.

Sections of these terms that concern owners (for example "Owner responsibilities" and "Rent payments") apply to owners. The rest applies to everyone.

Accounts and security

Keep your sign-in details to yourself and tell us promptly if you think someone else has used your account. You are responsible for what happens under your account.

Owners must turn on two-step sign-in (an authenticator app) before they can change records or take payments. Residents may turn it on. You can sign out of every device from your settings.

Owners must give accurate information about themselves, their properties and their business, and keep it current.

Owner responsibilities

As an owner you are responsible for:

• the accuracy of what you record in Steward, including residents, rent amounts, dates, terms and payments you record as received outside Steward;
• having a lawful basis to add each resident and their contact details to Steward and to invite them, and telling residents that you use Steward;
• complying with the laws that apply to you and your properties, including landlord-tenant, fair-housing, consumer-protection, debt-collection, privacy and record-keeping laws;
• the leases, notices and decisions you make, including any you draft or send with help from Steward;
• the people you give access to your account.

You must not use Steward to discriminate against anyone on a basis prohibited by fair-housing law, or to harass, threaten or unlawfully pressure a resident.

Rules and warnings are information, not legal advice

Steward can show landlord-tenant rules for a property's state or city (for example late-fee caps, grace periods, deposit limits and notice periods) and warn before you save something a rule touches. Each ruleset shows its status. A "draft" ruleset was compiled from published statutes and has not been reviewed by a lawyer. A "reviewed" one has been reviewed on the date shown. A state with no ruleset has no warnings at all.

Steward shows rules drawn from published statutes for information only. This is not legal advice, the rules may be incomplete or out of date, and you remain responsible for complying with the law where the property is.

Steward never blocks a save because of a rule and never tells you what to do. A warning, or the absence of one, is not a statement that something is lawful. Steward does not serve notices, terminate tenancies or give legal, tax or financial advice, and using it does not create an attorney-client relationship with anyone. If you need advice, ask a lawyer licensed where the property is.

Address checks confirm only that an address is complete and correctly formatted. They do not confirm that the address exists.

Rent payments

Rent collection is provided by Stripe, Inc. and its affiliates ("Stripe"). Steward is not a bank, money transmitter or payment processor, and never holds your funds.

To take rent through Steward, an owner opens a Stripe connected account through Steward and agrees to the Stripe Connected Account Agreement, which includes the Stripe Services Agreement (stripe.com/legal/connect-account). Stripe may verify your identity and business and may decline or restrict your account. You authorise Steward to share with Stripe the information it needs about you, your business and your payments.

Residents pay by bank debit (ACH) [and debit card: confirm which methods Steward offers]. Credit cards are declined before any charge is made. Bank and card details are entered into Stripe's own form and are sent to Stripe, not to Steward. Steward stores only a reference and a label such as the bank name and last four digits. The amount due comes from the rent the owner recorded. A resident may pay part of what is open, but never more.

Payouts to owners are delayed by three business days after the payment settles, so that returned payments can be caught first. Timing also depends on Stripe and the banks involved.

Reversals. A bank debit can be returned for weeks after it settles (for example, for insufficient funds, or because the account holder says it was unauthorised), and a card payment can be disputed. If money is reversed after it has been paid out to you, you must repay it. You authorise Stripe and Steward to recover the amount, and any related fee, by debiting the bank account linked to your connected account or by deducting it from future payouts. This applies whether the reversal is Stripe's doing or a bank's.

Rent you record as received outside Steward (for example by check) is labelled as owner-recorded. Steward cannot confirm it.

Disputes about whether rent is owed, how much, or late fees are between the owner and the resident. Steward can show the records it holds, but it does not decide those disputes.

Fees

[Subscription price, billing period and how fees are charged, once decided (HAV-37)]

Residents are not charged by Steward to use the resident portal or to pay rent through it, unless their owner tells them otherwise in writing and applicable law allows it.

We will give owners at least 30 days' notice before a price increase takes effect.

The Steward assistant

Owners can turn on assistant features that use AI models. These include:

• suggested triage for maintenance requests;
• draft replies and message summaries;
• translation of messages;
• a weekly digest;
• reading uploaded documents to suggest details;
• answers to residents' questions about their own lease;
• Reeve, an agent that proposes changes to your records.

Each feature is off until the owner turns it on, and the owner can turn it off at any time.

AI output can be wrong. Steward never sends a message, changes a record or takes a payment on the strength of AI output alone:

• Suggestions and drafts are shown to you to accept, edit or discard.
• Every change Reeve proposes waits for your approval.

Lease answers quote the lease they are drawn from. They are not legal advice and do not interpret whether a lease term is enforceable.

You are responsible for what you accept or send. Do not use the assistant to screen, rank or make decisions about applicants or residents.

Your content

You keep ownership of what you put into Steward: records, messages, documents and files ("your content"). You give Steward a limited licence to host, store, copy, process, transmit and display your content only to provide, secure and support the service for you and the people you share it with, and as our Privacy Policy describes. Steward does not sell your content.

Owners control the records they create. A resident sees their own records and the documents their owner shares with them. Documents are scanned for malware when uploaded. A scan result is not proof that a document is genuine, and a stored insurance document does not verify that a policy is active or what it covers.

You must have the right to upload what you upload.

Acceptable use

You must not:

• use Steward to break the law or to infringe anyone's rights;
• upload malware, or content you know to be unlawful;
• try to reach accounts, records or systems that are not yours, or probe, scan or test Steward's security without our written permission;
• interfere with Steward's operation, or send it automated traffic beyond ordinary use;
• copy, resell or reverse-engineer Steward, except where the law allows it;
• use messaging for spam or for anything unrelated to a tenancy.

Report security problems privately to us at the security contact below.

Services from other providers

Steward relies on other providers, including Amazon Web Services (hosting, storage, sign-in, email and AI models), Cloudflare (the website), Stripe (payments) and, where an owner allows it, Anthropic (AI models). Their own terms may also apply to you. Where a feature depends on one of them, it may be unavailable when they are.

Suspension and ending

You can stop using Steward at any time. Owners can close their account by contacting us.

Owners can remove a resident at any time. That ends the resident's portal access. The owner keeps the records.

We may suspend or end access that breaks these terms, puts others at risk, or that we must stop by law. Where we reasonably can, we will tell you first and give you a chance to put it right.

When an owner account closes, the owner may export their records and documents. We delete them 90 days after closure, except what we must keep by law. Financial and audit records are kept for as long as the law or our payment provider requires; see our Privacy Policy.

Disclaimers

Steward is provided "as is" and "as available". To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy and non-infringement. We do not promise that Steward will be uninterrupted or error-free, or that rulesets, AI output, translations or address checks will be complete or correct.

Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, Steward is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits, revenue, rent or data. Steward's total liability for all claims relating to the service is limited to the greater of the fees you paid Steward in the 12 months before the claim arose, or $100.

Some places do not allow some of these limits, so they may not apply to you in full.

Indemnity

Owners will defend and indemnify Steward against third-party claims arising from their properties, their leases and tenancies, how they treat residents, their content, or their breach of these terms or the law. This includes claims by residents and reversals under "Rent payments".

Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of [Governing-law state], without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. [Counsel to decide the forum: courts of a named county, or arbitration with a small-claims carve-out and a class-action waiver.]

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. If a change materially affects you, we will tell you in Steward or by email at least 30 days before it takes effect. By continuing to use Steward after that, you accept the change. The date at the top shows the latest version.

Contact

[Company legal name], [Postal address]. Support: [support@steward.rent]. Security reports and legal notices: [support@steward.rent].