Amenity Automation. Free. In every HomeHerald community.

Starting today, every HomeHerald community runs its amenities like a SaaS product runs a checkout flow. A resident opens the app, picks a Saturday afternoon at the clubhouse, pays the rental fee and the cleaning deposit, gets back a confirmation email, and an hour before their reservation a one-time access code appears in their Booking Pass. They punch it on the smart lock, the bolt retracts, they hold their party, and seven days later their cleaning deposit auto-refunds back to the card they paid with. The board did nothing. No one drove a key over. No one chased a deposit refund through a spreadsheet.

This isn’t a paid plan. This isn’t an enterprise add-on. This is the free tier.

What “Amenity Automation” actually is

Most HOA management software gives you a booking calendar and stops there. Residents book a time, an admin gets an email, and at that point everyone goes back to the way amenities have been run since 1985: a key in a lockbox, a sticker with a 4-digit code that hasn’t been changed in five years, a paper sign-out sheet, a $50 check in an envelope.

HomeHerald’s Amenity Automation is the full workflow:

1. Reservation. Resident picks a time on the calendar. The moment they book, Stripe places an authorization hold on their card for the rental fee and the cleaning deposit. Nothing has actually been charged yet, but the funds are reserved.
2. Confirmation. Email confirmation goes out. The booking sits in the resident’s app under “Upcoming Reservations” with a live status.
3. Charge. 24 hours before the booking, the rental fee is charged automatically. The cleaning deposit hold stays on the card.
4. Access code. One hour before the booking starts, a 9-digit one-time access code appears in the resident’s Booking Pass. It’s also in their booking confirmation email. The code works at the physical lock during their reservation window only.
5. Cleanup window. After the booking ends, the lock auto-secures. The cleaning deposit hold sits on the card.
6. Auto-refund. Five days later, the deposit hold is released back to the resident’s card automatically. The board can intervene to forfeit (damage was reported) or refund immediately, but the default is: nothing breaks, everyone gets their money back, no spreadsheet.

The board’s only job is to set the rental fee, the deposit amount, and the operating hours. After that, the system runs itself.

Why offline-at-the-lock matters

Most of the smart-lock products HOAs have looked at in the past require WiFi or cellular at the lock. That’s fine on a clubhouse door inside a building. It’s a deal-breaker on a pool gate or a tennis court fence, where running power and a network connection costs more than the lock itself.

We launched with iglooHome because their algoPIN technology generates codes that work without any internet at the lock at all. The code is a time-derived one-time password, like a Google Authenticator code for your front door. The lock validates it locally against its internal clock. Cell signal goes down, WiFi goes down, doesn’t matter. The code still works.

That means the pool gate at the back of the community, the gym door in the unfinished basement, the tennis court that’s a 50-yard walk from the nearest power outlet: all of these become bookable amenities with the same level of automation as the indoor clubhouse.

What you’ll spend

This is HomeHerald, so the software is free. There are two costs that aren’t ours and that we want to be transparent about:

• The lock itself. An igloohome Deadbolt Go runs around $200 retail. Other igloohome models (mortise, padlock, gate-mount) run $150 to $350 depending on the form factor. You install them yourself. Most boards swap a deadbolt in under 15 minutes, no electrician.
• iglooaccess subscription. Igloohome charges $2 per active lock per month for their API. That’s billed by igloohome directly, not by HomeHerald. There’s a 30-day free trial. For a community running one clubhouse lock, that’s $24 a year. For a community running a clubhouse, a pool gate, and a gym door, that’s $72 a year.

We don’t take a cut of either. The math: a community charging $50 to rent the clubhouse twice a month covers their iglooaccess subscription with the first booking and earns $1,176 a year doing the next 23.

What about other lock vendors

iglooHome is the first integration we shipped. August, Yale, Schlage Encode, and Latch are on the roadmap. The architecture is vendor-agnostic, so adding a new lock provider is a focused engineering project, not an architectural rebuild. We’ll announce each new vendor as it ships.

If you’re considering hardware right now and want to be safe, iglooHome is the easiest path. If you already have August or Yale at your clubhouse and want to wait, those are coming.

How a resident experiences it

Picture Sarah, who lives in unit 14. On Wednesday she opens HomeHerald on her phone, taps Amenities, picks Saturday 2 PM to 6 PM at the Clubhouse, and pays the $50 rental fee. Her cleaning deposit hold ($100) goes onto her card. She gets a confirmation email that says “Your access code will be available in HomeHerald starting Saturday at 1:00 PM, an hour before your booking. The code works at the door from 2:00 PM to 6:00 PM and expires automatically afterward.”

Saturday at 1:01 PM her phone shows the code in her Booking Pass. She arrives at the clubhouse at 2:00 PM, types 4 7 8 2 9 1 6 6 6 on the keypad, the deadbolt retracts. Party happens. At 6:00 PM the lock secures itself. Five days later her $100 deposit hold is released back to her card.

The board didn’t field a single text message, didn’t drop off a key, didn’t process a deposit refund.

How an admin gets it set up

Three steps:

1. Buy an igloohome smart lock (Amazon, igloohome direct, GoKeyless). Install it on the door yourself.
2. Sign up for iglooaccess ($2/lock/month, 30-day trial), pair the lock to your account via the igloohome app, and copy your Client ID + Client Secret from the iglooaccess portal.
3. In HomeHerald: Admin → Amenities → Manage → Digital Lock tile → Test & Connect. Paste your credentials. Pick the lock from the dropdown for whichever amenity it belongs to. Save.

That’s the entire setup. The full walkthrough with screenshots is in our igloohome install guide.

A side benefit: every resident gets a different code

The 9-digit codes are unique per booking. Sarah’s code on Saturday is different from Mike’s code on Sunday, which is different from the code the cleaning crew used on Wednesday. There’s no shared “pool gate code” floating around the neighborhood. When a resident moves out, there’s nothing to revoke and no fob to collect. The codes they had stop working when their reservations end, just like Stripe’s payment authorizations stop working when the hold expires.

This is a meaningful upgrade over “the same code since 2019 that everyone’s kids know.”

What’s next

We’re going to keep extending what “automated” means for HOA amenities. On the immediate roadmap: per-window admin grants (decoration access the night before, cleanup crew access the morning after), shared access codes for common areas that don’t take bookings, vendor expansion to August and Yale, and lock activity logs in the admin booking detail.

If your HOA has a clubhouse, a pool gate, a gym, or any door residents need to get through at a specific time, this is for you. Free. Today. Every HomeHerald community.

Read the install guide →