Document Retention Policy
A document retention policy defines how long specific categories of documents must be kept before they can be archived or destroyed, based on legal, tax, or regulatory obligations.
How ARC-Files supports this
ARC-Files lets governance teams define retention rules once and apply them consistently across every SharePoint library and market through the Retention Manager module.
Why this matters for real estate teams
Document retention rules for commercial real estate are rarely optional — they are shaped by a mix of overlapping obligations: state statutes of limitations on written contracts (commonly 6–10 years), IRS recordkeeping requirements for property-related tax documents, lender and loan-covenant requirements that often specify their own retention periods, and lease-specific obligations such as ASC 842 and IFRS 16 lease-accounting standards, which require documentation supporting right-of-use asset calculations to remain available for audit throughout the life of the lease and beyond.
The practical difficulty is not knowing that retention rules exist — it is applying them consistently across thousands of documents spanning multiple markets, property types, and document categories, each with a different retention clock. A signed lease, a certificate of insurance, a vendor invoice, and an environmental report each have different retention triggers and different destruction risk if kept improperly or too briefly.
Standard SharePoint provides retention labels and policies through Microsoft Purview, but configuring distinct rules for every document category, across every market's libraries, and keeping them synchronized as new markets are provisioned is a manual, ongoing effort. ARC-Files' Retention Manager module lets governance teams define a retention rule once per document category — for example, 365 days as a default, or longer for lease and financial records — and apply it consistently across every library and market from a single control panel, with Expiration Alerts surfacing anything approaching its retention boundary before action is required.
Common mistakes: applying one blanket retention period to every document type regardless of its legal basis, deleting documents on a fixed schedule without checking for litigation holds or open audits, and failing to document the retention schedule itself — which auditors will ask for as evidence that destruction was policy-driven rather than arbitrary.