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How Pipeline Stages Work

How pipeline stages work in LRM, how to manage them, and how to use them to track deals across your team.

Written by Mikaila McLane

Pipeline stages are how LRM tracks where every deal stands. Each project lives in exactly one stage at any time, and moving projects through stages is how your team communicates deal progress without relying on meetings or status emails.

What Stages Are

Stages represent the phases of your acquisition process — from initial identification through underwriting, contract, and closing. Every organization starts with a default set of stages, but admins can fully customize them to match how your team actually works. Some organizations have chosen to set stages that cannot be edited, to ensure continuity across multiple divisions and proper integration with CRM.

Managing Your Stages

Organization admins can manage stages from Pipeline → Settings → Manage Stages. From there you can:

  • Add a stage at any position in the pipeline

  • Reorder stages by dragging them into the sequence that matches your workflow

  • Delete a stage — you'll be asked to reassign any projects currently in that stage before the deletion goes through

  • Load default stages — applies a recommended starter set without replacing any stages you've already created

  • Assign a color to each stage — the color appears on project pins on the map, so you can see where deals stand geographically at a glance

Moving Projects Between Stages

Drag a project card to a new column in the pipeline board, or use the stage selector inside the project record. If the destination stage has task templates configured, a transition dialog will appear before the move completes, showing which tasks will be created and letting you confirm assignees.

Visibility Controls

You can set a stage as a visibility trigger — when a project reaches that stage, it becomes visible to the broader team. This lets senior acquisition managers work deals privately in early stages and share them with the team only when they're ready for wider involvement.

Using Stage Colors on the Map

Enable the Project layer from the map layers panel to see all your pipeline projects plotted as colored pins. Each color corresponds to a stage, so you can immediately see which deals are in early research, which are under contract, and which have closed — all on the same map you use to find new opportunities.

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