Properties are the unit of record

This is the deeper companion to How HomeHerald is organized. If you haven’t read that one yet, start there.

The short version: in HomeHerald, the property is the unit of record. Residents come and go. Money attaches to the property. This article gets specific about what that means in the data model and how to handle the trickier real-world cases.

What a property is, in HomeHerald

A property record represents a single billable unit in your community. That can be:

• A house on a lot in a single-family-home HOA
• A unit in a condo association
• A townhome
• A lot that’s vacant but still owes dues
• A commercial unit in a mixed-use community

What it isn’t:

• The clubhouse, pool, or any other shared amenity (those are Assets)
• A rental contract or lease (HomeHerald doesn’t model those — the property is the same whether it’s owner-occupied or rented)
• A person (people are Users, attached to properties)

Fields on a property

Field	Purpose
Address	The physical address. Required.
Lot	Lot number if your community uses them
Block	Block letter/number for larger communities
Monthly dues	The recurring charge amount (or annual — see below)
Initial balance	Carry-over balance from a previous system
Current balance	Computed — sum of all financial records on this property
Status	Occupied, Vacant, or Delinquent — see Property statuses
Primary resident	The User who is the main contact for this property
Co-residents	Additional Users in the household
Pre-approved emails	Emails that auto-approve when they sign up for this property

Why money attaches here, not to people

Three reasons:

1. Continuity. Owners change. If you charge a person, you have to migrate their balance every time the property is sold. If you charge the property, the balance just stays put — the new owner inherits whatever was outstanding (or you write it off at closing, but that’s a transaction, not a data migration).

2. Enforcement. HOAs collect against properties, legally. Liens attach to the property, not the homeowner. If a resident skips town, the next owner is on the hook for unpaid dues. The data model has to match the legal model.

3. Households. Multiple residents can share a property — spouses, family, roommates. There’s one balance, paid by whoever pays. If money attached to people, you’d have to figure out which household member “owns” the dues. With property-attached money, the question doesn’t come up.

What “current balance” actually means

The balance shown on a property is computed live from its financial records:

Balance = Initial balance
        + Sum of all charges (dues, fines, assessments, booking fees)
        - Sum of all payments
        - Sum of all credits
        + Sum of all refunds (refunds add back to the balance)

Positive balance = the property owes money. Negative balance = the property has a credit.

If you see a balance that looks wrong, the transaction log is the source of truth. Don’t try to “correct” the balance directly — find the wrong record and fix it (or add a corrective entry).

Edge cases worth knowing

Vacant lots

A property with no resident is still a property. It still owes dues (if your bylaws say so). The balance grows. No one sees it in the resident portal, but the admin side tracks it normally.

When a buyer eventually shows up, you link them as the primary resident, and they inherit the balance (or you settle it at closing with a one-time credit).

Splits — one property becomes two

Some communities subdivide. Original Lot 12 becomes Lot 12-A and Lot 12-B. The right approach in HomeHerald:

1. Archive the original property (don’t delete — you want the history)
2. Create two new properties for 12-A and 12-B
3. Decide how to handle the old balance: write it off via a credit, or transfer it (proportional) to the new lots with explanatory transactions
4. Re-link any current residents to the appropriate new property

This is rare enough that it’s worth emailing support@homeherald.ai if you’re doing more than one — they can do bulk operations faster than the UI.

Mergers — two properties become one

Reverse of a split. Lots 5 and 6 get combined into a single property.

1. Pick which property to keep as the “merged” record
2. Update its address to reflect the merger
3. Move any residents from the disappearing property to the kept one
4. Archive the disappearing property
5. Decide how to handle balances — usually combined into a single balance via transfer transactions

Shared lots (e.g., common-area buildings)

Don’t model the clubhouse, pool, or any shared building as a Property. Those are Assets — bookable amenities that can have rules, capacity, fees, and reservations.

If your community has something genuinely odd (e.g., a maintenance shed that’s billed separately for some reason), you can create a property for it with a $0 dues amount and no resident. But this is rare.

Owner with multiple properties in the same community

A user can be the primary resident of multiple properties. Each property has its own balance, its own dues, its own ledger. The user sees all of them in their portal and pays each one separately.

There’s no concept of a “consolidated bill” — each property’s dues are independent. If a homeowner asks “why do I have two charges this month,” the answer is “because you own two units.”

What you can’t do

A few things admins occasionally try that the system doesn’t support, by design:

• Split a single dues charge between residents. The dues are on the property. If two residents want to split the cost, that’s between them.
• Move a balance to a person without a property. Money has to live somewhere — on a property’s ledger, ultimately. If you really need to charge someone who has no property (e.g., an ex-resident with an outstanding violation fine), keep the property record around (status = INACTIVE) until it’s paid.
• Have a property without an address. The address is required. If your community uses lot numbers only, use the lot number as the address (e.g., “Lot 47, Section B”).

Where to go next

• Editing a property — day-to-day changes
• Property statuses — Occupied vs. Vacant vs. Delinquent
• Linking residents to a property — household structure
• How the ledger works — the financial side of the property