Getting started for residents
1. Create your account
How you start depends on what your community sent you.
You got an invitation email. Click its link. The invitation already knows which community you belong to and which address you live at, so you do not type either one. If your community screens new residents, the invitation link opens the application (see step 3) and creates your account from the same submit.
You got a join code. Go to your community's sign-in page and register with the code. A join code is a short string your community shares with everyone, so it identifies the community but not you.
You have neither. Register with your street address. CivicPort matches the address to a community that covers it. If no community claims your address, ask your board or property manager for an invitation instead. This path exists mainly for municipalities, where anyone at a covered address belongs.
You can sign up with an email and password, or with Google or Apple. See accounts and signing in for the differences.
2. Verify your email
CivicPort emails you a verification link. Some things stay locked until you click it, most importantly anything that links accounts together: household invitations and family grouping only ever link verified addresses, because an unverified address is not yet proof of anything.
3. Finish the application, if your community asks for one
Communities that run background checks (most apartment communities, some HOAs) hold new members outside the community until a decision is recorded. Until then you see the application and nothing else, which is deliberate rather than broken.
The application asks for your full legal name as it appears on your ID, your date of birth, your previous address, and your consent to the check. It also asks you to list everyone else who will live on the lease.
CivicPort never asks for a Social Security number and never runs the check itself. Your community's screening vendor emails you its own form; anything genuinely sensitive goes to the vendor directly, not through CivicPort. Your date of birth and previous address are masked everywhere in the admin console, every reveal is logged, and both are deleted once the check is decided.
Each co-tenant gives their own consent on their own application. Yours does not carry across to them.
4. Work through your checklist
If your community turned the checklist on, My Checklist is the shortest path
through everything you owe: contact details, registering vehicles and pets,
acknowledging the governing documents, paying what is due, signing a lease.
Most items complete themselves. The checklist reads your actual records, so paying your dues on the Payments page ticks the dues item without your pressing anything. Items that work this way cannot be ticked by hand.
The checklist disappears from the sidebar once nothing is outstanding, and comes back when something changes: a new violation, an open ballot, next year's dues cycle.
5. Set up the rest of your household
If your spouse, roommate or adult child needs their own login, invite them from My Household. They join at your address without an admin having to do anything.
While you are there, register your vehicles and pets if your community asks for them. There is an explicit "I do not have any" answer for each, which is how the checklist tells "nothing to declare" apart from "has not answered yet".
6. Choose how you hear from us
On your profile, notification preferences control what reaches you by email and push, per category: issue updates, announcements, messages, payment reminders, violations, board activity. Everything is on until you change it.
Your first week, in order
- Verify your email.
- Fill in your profile: display name, phone, unit number.
- Register vehicles and pets, or declare that you have none.
- Read the governing documents if your community publishes them.
- Check Payments for anything due, and set up autopay if a recurring fee offers it.
- Install the mobile app if you want push notifications.