Trigger
In the context of workflow automation, a trigger is the event or condition that initiates an automated process. Triggers can be time-based, such as a scheduled daily report, action-based, such as a new file uploaded to a shared drive, or data-based, such as a lease expiration date falling within 90 days. In commercial real estate automation, triggers are the starting points for workflows that might route deals for review, notify asset managers of lease events, or initiate a data pull from a property management system.
Putting Trigger in Context
An asset management team configures a data-based trigger in their automation platform that fires whenever a tenant’s lease expiration date in Yardi falls within 180 days, automatically creating a renewal task in the team’s project management system, notifying the responsible leasing broker, and pulling the current rent roll into a shared folder so the renewal analysis can begin without any manual handoff.
Frequently Asked Questions about Trigger
What are the most common trigger types used in CRE automation workflows?
The most common trigger types in CRE are time-based triggers that fire on a schedule, such as pulling an updated rent roll every Monday morning, action-based triggers that respond to a user or system event like a new deal submission form being completed, and data-based triggers that monitor a field in a property management system for a condition like a DSCR falling below a defined threshold. Most mature CRE automation workflows combine more than one trigger type across different stages of the same process.
How is a trigger different from the rest of an automated workflow?
The trigger is exclusively the starting condition, not the work itself. Once a trigger fires, it hands off to a sequence of actions such as sending a notification, creating a record, generating a document, or calling an API. Distinguishing the trigger from the downstream actions matters when troubleshooting a workflow, because a process that fails to start is usually a trigger configuration problem, while a process that starts but produces the wrong output is an action or logic problem.
How do I identify the right trigger for a CRE workflow I want to automate?
Start by identifying what currently causes a person to begin the process manually, whether that is receiving an email, noticing a date on a calendar, or checking a report and seeing a number cross a threshold. That human observation is what the trigger needs to replicate. If the initiating condition is a date or number already stored in a system like a property management platform or a lease database, a data-based trigger is usually the most reliable approach because it eliminates the dependency on a person noticing the condition in the first place.
What are the risks of a poorly configured trigger in a CRE automation workflow?
An overly broad trigger can cause a workflow to fire more often than intended, generating duplicate notifications, redundant tasks, or repeated data pulls that create noise and erode team trust in the automation. An overly narrow trigger may miss events it was designed to catch, such as a lease expiration check that fails to account for leases stored with inconsistent date formats in the source system. Both failure modes are common and are best caught by testing the trigger against historical data before deploying the workflow to a live environment.
Can a single CRE workflow have more than one trigger?
Most automation platforms support multiple triggers for a single workflow, which is useful when the same downstream process needs to start from more than one initiating condition. A deal intake workflow, for example, might be triggered by a form submission from a broker, an email forwarded to a dedicated inbox, or a manual entry by an acquisitions analyst, with all three paths feeding into the same routing and review sequence. Managing multiple triggers cleanly requires careful documentation so that future changes to the workflow account for all entry points.
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