Herald Welcome

Herald Welcome is the AI agent that handles every “I have a closing in your HOA” call the board would otherwise field by hand. It tracks new for-sale listings in your community, matches them to your properties, and gives the listing agent a private one-click portal with the welcome letter, covenants, and the current HOA balance.

Herald Welcome runs in one of three modes. Manual Listing Entry is included on the free HomeHerald plan and ships with the full real-estate agent portal experience. Automatic Listing Detection (HomeHerald finds new listings for you the moment a home goes on the market) is part of Herald Automate ($49/mo). Fully Automated (preemptive outreach to the listing agent with no board click required) is on the roadmap.

Modes at a glance

• Manual Listing Entry (Free): The board adds listings by hand using the Add Listing button. The full agent portal, magic-link sessions, welcome PDF, balance lookup, AI chat, and Hello Email outreach are all included.
• Automatic Listing Detection (Herald Automate, $49/mo): HomeHerald automatically detects new for-sale homes in your community and preemptively reaches out to the listing agent the moment a home goes on the market. The board reviews and clicks send.
• Fully Automated (coming soon): HomeHerald detects the listing and sends the Hello Email with no board review step.

Choosing a mode

If you want zero spend and don’t mind dropping in 2-3 listings a month yourself, stay on Manual Listing Entry. The whole agent portal, magic-link sessions, welcome PDF, balance lookup, and Herald AI chat still work the same - the only difference is you’re the one telling Herald Welcome a listing exists.

Upgrade to Automatic Listing Detection when you don’t want to remember to keep an eye on the market, or when your community has enough turnover that missing a listing means missing an estoppel-style fee or a chance to onboard a buyer cleanly. HomeHerald watches the market for you and creates the same listing records you’d otherwise create by hand - usually within a day of the listing going live.

Fully Automated (coming soon) is for boards that trust the template fully and want the Hello Email to go out the moment a listing is detected, with no human in the loop.

The Add Listing button is available in every mode. Even on Herald Automate, you can add one-off listings the automatic detection missed (a pocket listing, a for-sale-by-owner, anything off the public market). Manually added listings are owned by the admin and are never overwritten by automatic detection.

What it does

In Automatic Listing Detection mode, Herald Welcome:

1. Watches the public listings market for new for-sale homes in your community
2. Matches them by address against the properties in your community
3. Writes any new matches to your Admin > Herald Welcome screen
4. Pushes a notification to the board
5. Prepares a Hello Email outreach with a magic-link portal ready to send to the listing agent

In Manual mode, the board does step 1 via the Add Listing button. Everything from step 3 onward is identical, and the listing agent gets the exact same portal experience.

The board reviews and clicks send when ready. (Fully automatic send is on the roadmap but not enabled.)

Adding a listing manually (any plan)

On the Herald Welcome screen, click Add Listing. The form has:

• Property (required): typeahead dropdown that searches the community roster. Start typing the address and pick the property the listing is for. Address, annual dues, and current balance all auto-populate from the property record. The dropdown is locked to your community roster, so you can’t accidentally attach a listing to a property that isn’t on file.
• Agent name (required): the listing agent’s full name.
• Agent email (required if you want to send a Hello Email): the agent’s contact email. Without it, the listing is created but the Send Hello Email button is disabled.
• Agent phone (optional): used for board reference only.
• List price (optional): for display on the listing row.
• Notify board members (checkbox, defaults on): push an in-app notification to the board when the listing is saved.

Click Save and the listing appears in the Herald Welcome list with the same detail screen, activity timeline, and Send Hello Email flow that automatically detected listings get. The agent gets the same magic-link portal, the same welcome PDF, the same covenants, the same balance lookup, and the same Herald AI chat - regardless of whether the listing came in manually or via Automatic Listing Detection.

If you’re on the Free plan

The Add Listing button is your one-and-only way to seed Herald Welcome. Drop in each listing as you become aware of it (a neighbor mentions the for-sale sign, a closing agent calls the board, you spot it on the local MLS). Once saved, the full agent portal experience is unlocked at no charge.

If you’re on Herald Automate

You’ll mostly let Automatic Listing Detection do the work, but the Add Listing button stays available for pocket listings, for-sale-by-owner sales, and anything else the public market doesn’t surface. The board can still drop those in by hand, and they live alongside the auto-detected listings without conflict.

Upgrading from Free to Herald Automate

If you try to enable Automatic Listing Detection on the Free plan, Herald Welcome shows an “Upgrade required” panel pointing you to Automate > Subscription. Free covers manual entry plus the full agent portal. Herald Automate adds the preemptive listing detection, the weekly community-wide watch, and the rest of the agent suite (Herald Shield, Dues Chaser, Amenity Automation, Herald Dispatch, and physical mail).

What the listing agent gets

When the Hello Email goes out, the agent receives a personal email from your HOA’s address with a button to “Open your HomeHerald page.” Clicking it sends them a 6-digit code to verify their email. After they enter the code, they have a private session for 30 minutes showing:

• Welcome letter for new residents, downloadable as PDF
• Covenants (CC&R) for the community, downloadable as PDF
• Current HOA balance on the specific property they’re listing
• Annual dues for the community
• Herald AI chat scoped to that property, trained on the HOA’s rules, dues, amenities, and board info

Replies to the email land in the HOA’s connected Gmail inbox (assuming Email Integration is set up), so the board can continue the conversation naturally.

Setting it up

Admin sidebar > Automate > Configuration > Herald Welcome card > Configure

You’ll see two main tabs in the Configure screen:

Settings tab

• When a new listing is detected:
  • Notify board, manual email outreach (default): board gets notified and reviews the Hello Email before sending
  • Notify board, automatic email outreach: notified, then the email auto-sends. Currently grayed out as Coming Soon.
• Test against a real property (optional): pick a property in your community to drive the email preview. Variables like address, balance, and annual dues will populate with that property’s actual values so you can see exactly what an agent would receive.
• Include portal link toggle (defaults on): controls whether the magic-link CTA block appears at the bottom of the email. Turn this off and the email becomes a plain-text note from the board without the portal call-to-action.
• CC the board on agent emails (defaults on): the board gets a BCC of every outbound Hello Email.
• Notify board on new listing: whether to push an in-app notification when a new listing is detected.

Agent Email tab

The email template the listing agent receives. Variables you can use:

• {{address}} - the listing’s street address
• {{agentName}} - the listing agent’s name
• {{communityName}} - your HOA name
• {{annualDues}} - annual dues amount
• {{duesOwed}} - current balance on this property
• {{listPrice}} - the asking price
• {{boardSignoff}} - “The [Community Name] Board”

Click “Write with AI” to generate a draft template based on your community’s actual data. Edit before saving.

Welcome Letter tab

The PDF the agent downloads from their portal and hands to the buyer at closing. Same variable substitution as the agent email. Click “Download PDF preview” to see exactly what will be generated.

The PDF includes:

• Your HOA name and the welcome letter body
• An auto-generated QR code linking to your community’s join page
• The HOA’s join code in the footer
• Per-page footer with “Powered by HomeHerald”

The Herald Welcome screen

Admin sidebar > Manage > Herald Welcome

Top of the screen shows:

• Add Listing button (always available on every plan)
• Automatic Listing Detection status (next check time, last check summary - Herald Automate plan only)
• Active listings count
• Recently off the market count

The list of detected listings, each with:

• Address and list price
• Listing agent name + email
• Detection date
• Listing source
• Outreach status: Not contacted, Sent, Handled
• Listing status: Active, Off-market, Sold

Click a listing to open the detail view with the agent’s contact info, the activity timeline, and the action bar (Send Hello Email, Edit template, Mark handled, Mark off-market).

Sending the Hello Email

From a listing’s detail screen, click Send Hello Email. You’ll see:

• The recipient (the listing agent’s email)
• The subject line
• The body of the email, with all variables substituted for this listing
• A preview frame showing exactly what the agent will receive

If you’re happy with it, click Send. The email goes out and the listing’s outreach status flips to Sent. The activity timeline gets an OUTREACH_SENT event.

If you want to change the template before sending, click Edit template to jump to the Configure screen.

Activity timeline

Every listing has an activity log showing:

• DETECTED - when Herald Welcome first saw this listing (or when an admin added it manually)
• OUTREACH_SENT - when a Hello Email went out
• MARKED_HANDLED - when an admin closed the loop
• STATUS_CHANGED - when the listing went off-market or sold

The same events appear in the central Activity & Usage feed for cross-automation oversight.

Agent magic-link sessions

The detail screen has an “Agent Magic Links” card showing every portal link minted for this listing:

• Token (truncated)
• Created date and expiration
• Agent email
• Status (Active, Expired, Revoked)
• Revoke button

If a sale falls through or the listing changes agents, click Revoke to immediately disable the link. The agent’s existing session stops working.

How the email is sent

The Hello Email sends through one of two backends:

• Your HOA’s Gmail (preferred): if you’ve connected your Gmail under Configuration > Email Integration and toggled outbound email on, the email sends from your HOA’s address. Replies land in your inbox.
• HomeHerald platform email: fallback. Sends from hello@homeherald.ai with the admin who clicked Send as the reply-to.

The first option is recommended because the agent sees an authentic from-address and the reply chain stays where the board already reads email.

Lifecycle states

A detected listing moves through:

• Active (initial): listing is on the market, agent hasn’t been contacted yet
• Active + Sent: agent has been contacted, awaiting reply or closing
• Active + Handled: admin marked the outreach complete
• Off-market: the listing was pulled, or manually flipped via “Mark off-market”
• Sold: the listing closed (marked manually by an admin)

Edge cases worth knowing

Listing reappears after going off-market. If a home goes Off-market and then back to Active (relisted, often with a new agent), a new listing record is created. The board is notified again. Each listing is a fresh outreach.

Same agent has multiple listings in your HOA. Each listing gets its own portal link. The agent ends up with separate emails for separate properties, which is the right behavior - they’re closing distinct deals.

Listing agent has no email on file. This happens occasionally when the public listing doesn’t expose an agent email (Automatic Listing Detection) or the field was left blank (Manual). The listing still appears in your Herald Welcome screen for board awareness, but the Send Hello Email button is disabled until you add an email.

Automatic Listing Detection has a bad day. Herald Welcome has a built-in guard: if an automatic check errors out for any reason, existing Active listings are left alone. You won’t get false “listing pulled” alerts when the check just couldn’t reach the data source.

A manually added listing is later detected automatically. Manually added listings are owned by the admin. Automatic Listing Detection will never overwrite them or create a duplicate for the same property.

Manual listing for a property that’s not in the roster. The property dropdown is scoped to your community roster. If a property doesn’t appear, add it under Manage > Properties first, then come back to Add Listing.

Common questions

Q: How often does it check? A: On Herald Automate, Automatic Listing Detection runs on its own schedule and catches new for-sale homes the moment they go on the market (in practice, within a day). On the Free plan, there’s no automatic check - the board adds listings by hand via Add Listing.

Q: Does it cost extra to use? A: Manual Listing Entry is free on the HomeHerald $0 plan, and it includes the full agent portal (magic-link sessions, welcome PDF, covenants, balance lookup, AI chat, Hello Email outreach). Automatic Listing Detection is part of Herald Automate ($49/mo), bundled with Herald Shield, Dues Chaser, and the rest of the agent suite.

Q: What if the agent never clicks the link? A: That’s fine. The board sees the listing on their screen and can follow up however they want. Nothing breaks.

Q: Can I revoke an agent’s access after they’ve used it? A: Yes. Click Revoke on the Agent Magic Links card. The agent’s session is killed immediately.

Q: Does the agent see other properties or residents? A: No. The portal is scoped to a single property. The agent sees the welcome letter, covenants, that property’s balance, the community’s annual dues, and an AI chat that knows the HOA’s general rules. No directory access, no other balances, no internal info.

Q: Can I use my own Gmail to send the Hello Email? A: Yes. Connect Gmail under Configuration > Email Integration, enable outbound, and Herald Welcome will use it automatically.