Every morning at 6:00am Mountain, on its own, with nobody involved:

1. Reads the two listing searches Michelle Bies set up for 5 Star: homes for sale at $715,000 and above in 80904, 80905, 80906, 80908, 80918, 80920, 80923, 80924.
2. Compares today against yesterday to find what changed: newly listed, price cut, back on market, and homes that disappeared from the list.
3. Looks up every address in El Paso County Assessor records to get the owner’s real name and where they get their mail.
4. Throws out anything not worth postage.
5. Creates every surviving lead in the Business Bob Account, always, whether or not postcards are switched on.
6. Tags it for Mailbox Power only if the switch is ON.

A home disappearing is the most valuable signal we get. It almost always means it went under contract: a family with a signed contract and a closing date, usually two to four weeks out. That is the best moment to reach someone who has not booked a mover yet.

OFF stops the mailing. It never stops the collecting.

So a pause costs nothing. Pause for the whole of July and every lead is still captured, still counted in reporting, and still there when you come back.

Turning the switch ON does not send the leads already waiting. It only affects leads found from the next morning onward. To send the ones already held, use the release section above.

If the system cannot read the switch for any reason, it treats it as OFF and mails nobody. It always fails toward doing nothing.

Of 357 homes currently for sale in those zip codes, about three in four are worth mailing. Here is where the rest go:

That skipped quarter is the point. Mailing a spec house owned by a builder wastes postage and puts 5 Star’s brand in an empty mailbox.

Most owners live in the house they are selling, so the postcard goes to that address. But a meaningful share are landlords or investors who live somewhere else. For those, the postcard goes to where the owner actually is, not the house on the market. They are tagged absentee-owner.

This is the single easiest thing to get wrong. If your postcard says “we noticed your home at 123 Main Street”, that text must merge from the Property Address custom field, not from the contact’s address. Otherwise a landlord gets a postcard about their own house, sent to their own house, and it reads as a mistake.

Every contact carries these fields for your copy: MLS Number, Listing Price, Change Type, Property Address, Parcel Number, Absentee Owner, Listing Source.

A few of the “under contract” group will have withdrawn their listing rather than sold it. It is a small share, but write that postcard so it works either way: closer to “planning a move?” than “congratulations on your sale!”

• 6:00am Mountain: the daily run. Leads appear in the Business Bob Account shortly after.
• Nobody is mailed twice inside the re-mail window for their lead type, unless their price changes again, which is a genuine new reason to reach out. Those windows are set near the top of this page and start at 21 days for under contract, 45 for price reduced and just listed, and 90 for backlog. Shortening any of them means more postcards and more postage.
• A home already in the Business Bob Account that later cuts its price is updated, not duplicated. One contact per property.
• County ownership records refresh weekly, so a sale from the last few days may still show the previous owner.
• The account’s search runs a few seconds behind. If a count here looks wrong right after a change, wait a minute and refresh.

The short version: a campaign always runs to completion. The windows only control whether we hand the same property over again.

Our part of the job ends the moment a lead is tagged. That tag hands the contact to Mailbox Power, and from there the campaign is entirely theirs. If a campaign is set to mail twice over 45 days, both pieces go out. We have no way to stop, shorten or pause a campaign that has already started.

So if a home is handed over as “just listed” with a 45 day window, that campaign mails whatever it is designed to mail, and we simply will not hand that property over again for 45 days.

Rule of thumb: keep each window at least as long as the campaign it feeds. If your just-listed campaign runs 60 days, set the just-listed window to 60 or more. Otherwise a home can be handed over again while the previous campaign is still mailing, and one household receives overlapping pieces.

The price change exception. A price cut always sends a postcard, no matter what the window says, because a seller who just dropped their price is genuinely a better lead than they were yesterday. That is deliberate, but it is also the one route to overlap: a home listed on day 1 and reduced on day 20 can be in two campaigns at once. If that becomes expensive, lengthen the price reduced window and it will happen less often.

Two things worth testing once your campaigns are built:

• Does adding the same tag twice run the campaign twice? If a home cuts its price a second time, the contact may already carry that tag, and most triggers only fire on an actual change. Add the same tag twice to a test contact and see whether one piece or two comes out.
• What is each workflow’s re-entry setting? That is a separate gate from ours. Both have to allow it before a second postcard happens.

• Never build a workflow triggered by mp-paused. That tag is on every held lead. A workflow on it would mail all of them the moment you saved it.
• Use “tag added” triggers, not “contact has tag”. The second kind can fire on hundreds of existing contacts as soon as it is switched on.
• Do not rename the tags (mp-*, lead-*) or the Postcard Automation custom value. The system looks them up by name.
• Do not rename the seven custom fields. Same reason.
• Deleting a contact in the Business Bob Account does not bring it back. The system remembers it already sent that property and will skip it.
• If Michelle changes the price floor, the zip codes, or the search criteria, what arrives here changes with it, silently.
• The code repository must stay private. It holds the links to 5 Star’s listing portal.

• No email from us? Then the morning run worked. A failure always sends one, written in plain English.
• No new leads for a day or two? Possible. Quiet days happen in eight zip codes above $715,000. Several days of nothing is worth a look.
• Leads appearing but no postcards? Check the switch above is green, and that a Mailbox Power workflow exists for that tag.
• A wrong or odd owner name? Names come from county records, which are occasionally out of date or oddly formatted. Worth spot-checking a handful before a large mailing.

5 Star is charged postage only, $0.82 per large postcard.

The release section above always shows the count and the total before anything is sent, and asks you to confirm. Nothing goes out from this page without a deliberate click.