Critique my holding deposit agreement

[Bienes Raices]

[moderators: sorry I posted this by mistake on the Commercial Real Estate forum and then reposted here. Could you please delete the one on the Commercial forum]

So far, I have been having the tenants pay the holding deposit and then only sign the lease the day before move in. However I'm thinking it may be better to have them sign the lease immediately when they provide the holding deposit. My questions are:

1) Should I demand the pet deposit up front with the holding deposit or wait until they move in?

2) If tenant pays holding deposit, signs lease well in advance of move in date, and then never moves in/pays rent, can language be put in the lease that voids the lease in this scenario or would I still need to go through the formalities of eviction/declaring the property abandoned?

Here is the clause I've come up with:

Tenant agrees to pay holding fee of ________ to reserve property until start of lease on __________. At that time holding deposit will convert to security deposit. Tenant will also have to provide additional pet deposit (if applicable) at the beginning of the lease for the lease to take effect. Tenant understands that holding deposit is non-refundable in the event that tenant does not sign lease and take occupancy of the unit.

[Chris Martin]

Steve Babiak thanks for the nudge. I forgot all about this.

I've uploaded two files, the Binder Agreement and the Binder Documentation.

As I posted before, my company uses a "binder" to facilitate leasing property. Similar to what people a "deposit", in a binder we collect "consideration" from an applicant to "hold" a property call. Unlike a conventional "deposit", there is no lease associated with a binder. At the lease signing, the applicant brings the deposit and we sign the lease (tenant gets possession at lease signing).

The document is intended to be as simple and single focused as possible. Also these files are in simple HTML format without any PHP or links, and the formatting is far from ideal. Feel free to improve. Side bar- Many of my company's forms are integrated into other MySQL or proprietary (e.g. Yardi P2PM) databases so I'm basically dealing with the stripped out text and putting in text (underline character) fields.