How to Tag Inventory as Rental, Sale, or Dual-Purpose

How to Tag Inventory as Rental, Sale, or Dual-Purpose

Once your business type is set to Dealership or Hybrid, every trailer in your fleet gets a new field on the edit form: Inventory Type. That single field decides where each unit shows up across TrailerBase, including the booking widget, the public website, and the Sales Leads page. Getting it right saves you a lot of cleanup later.

The Three Values

The Inventory Type field has exactly three options:

• RENTAL — The trailer is in the rental fleet only. It appears in your booking widget, on your public rental site, and on the calendar. It does not appear on any sales listing page.
• SALES — The trailer is on the sales floor only. It shows on your dealer listings, but it is hidden from rental availability checks and the booking widget. The calendar ignores it.
• DUAL_PURPOSE — The trailer is bookable as a rental AND publicly listed for sale. If a renter books it, the sale listing remains live; if a buyer picks it up, you mark it sold and it leaves the rental pool automatically.

Where the Field Appears

The Inventory Type field is only rendered for hybrid dealers. If your tenant is set to a pure-rental business type, you will not see it (every trailer is implicitly RENTAL). For pure-sales tenants without a rental program, the field is also hidden. Switch to Dealership or Hybrid in Settings then Company Branding to make it appear.

When editing a trailer, you will find the field in the top section near the Year, Make, Model, and VIN inputs. Pick the value that matches how you intend to use that unit today.

How the Value Flows Through the Platform

The Inventory Type field acts as a routing rule:

1. The public booking widget filters availability to RENTAL and DUAL_PURPOSE units only.
2. The public sales listings page shows SALES and DUAL_PURPOSE units.
3. The rental calendar ignores SALES units, so they cannot be accidentally booked.
4. The Sales Leads page at /leads connects renter activity to whichever DUAL_PURPOSE units they touched.

Step-by-Step: Tag a New Unit

1. In Fleet, click Add Trailer or open an existing trailer.
2. Scroll to the Inventory Type field.
3. Pick RENTAL, SALES, or DUAL_PURPOSE.
4. Fill in the rest of the form (rates only matter for RENTAL or DUAL_PURPOSE; sale price only matters for SALES or DUAL_PURPOSE).
5. Save.

The change takes effect immediately. Public listings refresh within a minute.

Promoting a SALES Unit to DUAL_PURPOSE

A common workflow at dealerships is opening up an aging sales unit for rentals while keeping the sale listing live. Just edit the trailer, change Inventory Type from SALES to DUAL_PURPOSE, and add rental rates. The sale listing stays in place untouched. From that point on, the unit is available for both purposes.

When the unit eventually sells, mark it as Sold in the trailer detail page. TrailerBase removes it from the rental pool and cancels any future rental holds (refunding deposits cleanly).

A Few Common Questions

• Can I bulk-set Inventory Type? Yes. From the Fleet list, multi-select rows and use Bulk Edit to set the field across many trailers at once.
• What if I forget to set it? New trailers default to RENTAL on dealership tenants if you skip the field. You can change it any time without losing booking history.
• Does it affect reports? Yes. The Reports page lets you filter revenue by Inventory Type, so you can answer "How much did rentals generate this quarter?" without manual tagging.