Hermes Agent For Real Estate: Build A Lead Desk In 7 Steps

Hermes Agent for real estate works best as a back-office lead desk: it reads enquiries, drafts the replies, checks the diary and builds a morning call list, while a person on your team does the sending.

This is the exact setup I'd build for a small sales or lettings office, using only the gateways, catalog entries and tools that ship with Hermes v0.23.0.

There is no MLS, Zillow, Follow Up Boss, kvCORE, DocuSign or dotloop integration in either Hermes catalog, so the plan works around that gap instead of pretending it isn't there.

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The Build: One Profile, Two Channels, Three Connectors, Two Jobs

Here is the whole desk on one screen before we touch a config file.

One profile just for property work, so client notes never mix with your personal agent.
The email gateway on a dedicated mailbox that only your team can write to.
A team Telegram group where drafts land and scheduled reports arrive.
Calendly plus Attio or Close installed from the Nous-approved MCP catalog.
A listing-style skill holding your office's house rules for descriptions.
Two cron jobs: a weekday follow-up list and a weekly area digest.

Every outbound message stays a draft that a human copies and sends.

That rule matters because Hermes approvals cover risky shell commands and some tool calls, not the messages a gateway sends.

Step 1: Give The Property Desk Its Own Profile

In Bot Mode a Bot is simply a Hermes profile with its own config, memory, skills, credentials and chat history under ~/.hermes/profiles/<name>/.

Create one called propertydesk from the desktop app, then open the same agent from a terminal:

hermes -p propertydesk chat

Its routines show up in hermes cron list, so nothing hides from you.

Gotcha: set the profile up before you connect any mailbox, otherwise the gateway credentials land in your default profile's .env.

Step 2: Point The Email Gateway At A Dedicated Mailbox

The email gateway talks plain IMAP and SMTP, replies in the same thread, and works with Gmail, Outlook, Fastmail or any provider that supports both.

Run the interactive setup inside the profile:

hermes -p propertydesk gateway setup

Then lock the sender list down to your own staff:

EMAIL_ALLOWED_USERS=sarah@youragency.com,tom@youragency.com
EMAIL_AUTHSERV_ID=mx.google.com

With no allowlist, the docs say unknown senders are ignored silently, and they recommend a dedicated inbox for normal operation.

So the pattern I use is simple: a negotiator forwards a buyer's enquiry to the desk address, and Hermes replies to that negotiator in-thread with a draft.

The negotiator reads it, fixes anything wrong and sends it to the buyer from their own mailbox.

Photos attached to a forwarded email are cached for the vision tool, and PDFs such as a brochure or a floor plan become readable files.

Step 3: Add A Team Telegram Group For Drafts And Reports

The Telegram page has a Create with QR button in the dashboard that writes the bot token and your allowed Telegram user into the profile for you.

Add the bot to a private group with your negotiators and keep that group as the place where every draft and every scheduled list lands.

WhatsApp is possible too.

The WhatsApp Business Cloud API guide needs a Meta Business account, a dedicated business number and a public HTTPS URL for the webhook.

Replies sent more than 24 hours after the person's last message need a pre-approved template, which is Meta's rule rather than a Hermes limit.

The docs call the alternative Baileys bridge unofficial and ban-prone, so skip it for an agency number.

SMS through Twilio exists as well, but on any public number the agent answers the person directly.

Until your drafts read right every time, keep buyers and tenants off the agent's own channels.

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Step 4: Install Calendly And Your CRM From The MCP Catalog

Hermes ships a curated MCP catalog that Nous staff has reviewed, and every entry is disabled until you install it.

hermes mcp catalog
hermes mcp install calendly
hermes mcp install close

Each of these is a vendor-hosted remote server using OAuth, so a browser opens to authorise the account, or you run hermes mcp login close, then restart the session so the tools load.

Connector	Where it lives	What its entry says it covers
Calendly	Nous-approved MCP catalog	Scheduling links, events and invitees
Attio	Nous-approved MCP catalog	CRM records, lists and notes
Close	Nous-approved MCP catalog	Leads, opportunities, calls and emails
Twenty CRM	Plugin catalog, community tier	Self-hosted or external Twenty instance via REST and GraphQL

Pick one CRM, not three.

The Close entry excludes its whole voice-agent cluster by default, because one of those tools places real outbound AI phone calls to contacts.

Leave that exclusion in place.

Not in either catalog: HubSpot, Follow Up Boss, kvCORE, Lofty or a Salesforce data connector; the community Salesforce Chatter plugin is a chat surface, not CRM data.

Step 5: Mark The CRM Server Untrusted So Writes Ask First

The MCP config reference has a trust key with two values, full by default or untrusted.

mcp_servers:
  close:
    trust: untrusted

On an untrusted server, every tool call that can write needs your approval first, with Allow Once, Session or Always as the choices.

Read-only lookups still run without a prompt, which is what you want for a morning list.

YOLO mode and approvals.mode: off skip this prompt, so don't switch either on in the property profile.

This gates CRM edits only; it does nothing for messages a gateway sends.

Step 6: Write A Listing-Style Skill With Your House Rules

Skills live in ~/.hermes/skills/ as a folder with a SKILL.md file and a short frontmatter block.

---
name: listing-style
description: Draft property descriptions in our office voice
---
# Listing style
## Procedure
1. Use only facts from the agent's notes, the brochure PDF and the photos.
2. Mark every measurement, tenure detail and feature with [CHECK].
3. Lead with location, then layout, then outside space.
4. Never describe who the home suits; describe the home.
5. Return a long version and a short portal version.

The vision_analyze tool can describe the photos, which helps with room order and features you might forget.

Don't use image generation to change how a property looks.

Gotcha: the agent can edit its own skills, and skills.write_approval is false by default, so set it to true if you want to approve every change to your house rules.

Have your broker check the advertising rules that apply where you sell, then bake them into the skill.

Step 7: Schedule The Weekday Follow-Up List With Cron

Cron jobs accept natural language or cron expressions, can attach skills, and deliver back to the chat they were created in.

Create the job from inside the Telegram group so the results come back there:

/cron add "0 8 * * 1-5" "Using the Close tools, list open leads with no activity in the last three days. For each one, give the name, the last note and a two-line follow-up draft. Draft only: do not send, email or message anyone. Post the list in this chat."

The default cron_mode: deny blocks dangerous commands in scheduled runs, and a scheduled job cannot create new jobs by default.

A second job on Friday mornings can gather area news with sources, which brings us to research.

Area Research: What The Browser Is Good For Here

The browser toolset runs one main tool, browser_exec, which can navigate, read, click, type, scrape and screenshot.

The tools list adds web_search and web_extract for quicker lookups.

Good jobs are public pages: council planning notices, school and transport pages, local news and new developments.

Ask for a source link next to every claim, and respect each site's terms of use.

Reading a public page is not a data feed, and it doesn't replace your MLS or portal login.

The only property-data plugin in the catalog is the community jp-reinfolib, which returns quarterly transaction data for one Japanese city.

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Pick The Model Per Job, Not Per Office

Hermes needs at least one inference provider, and the providers page covers cloud APIs such as OpenRouter and Anthropic as well as self-hosted endpoints like Ollama and vLLM.

A self-hosted model keeps buyer names and viewing notes on hardware you control, which some offices prefer for client data.

Cron jobs can carry their own model pin, set with hermes cron create or hermes cron edit using --model and --provider.

Unpinned jobs fall back to cron.model if you set one, then to the main model from hermes model.

That lets the weekday list run on a fast, inexpensive model while listing drafts use the strongest writer you have.

Lock a job to whatever model you are using right now with --pin, so a later switch of your chat model doesn't quietly change the follow-up list.

What The Desk Must Never Do

Send an offer, a contract or a tenancy agreement to anyone.
Sign, accept terms or confirm a sale on anyone's behalf.
Publish a listing without a person clearing every [CHECK] tag.
Give a client a view on law, tax or finance; route those to your broker or solicitor.

Write these four lines into the profile's instructions and into the listing skill, so they travel with every job.

Six Gotchas To Check Before You Go Live

Noreply mail is dropped. Automated senders and bulk mail are ignored silently, so portal alerts must be forwarded by a person.
Authentication headers matter. Mail without a matching authserv-id on the top Authentication-Results header is dropped with a warning in the gateway log.
One gateway only. Duplicate replies usually mean two gateway instances; check with hermes gateway status.
Close voice tools stay off. Re-enabling them is a deliberate step through hermes mcp configure close.
Microsoft 365 won't load. The community entry needs a Hermes version below 0.22, so it doesn't fit v0.23.
WhatsApp's window. After 24 hours of silence you need an approved template to reply.

How This Differs From The Sales Setup

My Hermes Agent for sales walkthrough is built around prospect lists and outreach pipelines.

The property desk is built around inbound enquiries, viewings and listing copy, with the CRM mostly read rather than written.

If you run both, give each its own profile so the skills and memories stay apart.

The Daily Routine Once The Desk Is Running

At eight on weekdays the follow-up list arrives in Telegram.

A negotiator reads each draft, edits it and sends it from their own inbox or phone.

New enquiries get forwarded to the desk mailbox as they come in, and the draft reply comes back in the same thread.

Viewing requests get a Calendly link pulled from the right event type.

New instructions get a listing draft from the notes, the brochure and the photos, with every [CHECK] tag cleared by a person before it goes anywhere.

On Fridays the area digest lands with its links, ready for your newsletter or a vendor update.

Want to see how other operators run their desks? The AI Profit Boardroom coaching calls cover builds like this every week.

Also On Our Network

FAQ: Hermes Agent For Real Estate

Which CRM should I connect to Hermes for a property office?

Pick one of the CRMs that actually exist in the catalogs: Attio or Close from the Nous-approved MCP catalog, or the community Twenty CRM plugin. HubSpot, Follow Up Boss and kvCORE have no entry.

Why forward enquiries instead of giving buyers the agent address?

With an allowlist the email gateway only answers your own staff, so the draft reply comes back to the negotiator who forwarded it. A person then sends it to the buyer.

Can the follow-up cron job send messages by itself?

A cron job can deliver its output to a chat or platform target, so write "draft only" into the prompt and deliver it to your team group. Hermes approvals do not cover outgoing messages.

Do I need WhatsApp to run this?

No. Email plus a private Telegram group covers the whole desk. WhatsApp Business Cloud API is an option if you have a Meta Business account and a public HTTPS URL for the gateway.

How do I stop the agent changing CRM records?

Set trust: untrusted on the CRM server in your MCP config. Every write-capable call then needs approval, while read-only lookups still run.

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About Julian

I'm Julian Goldie, an SEO entrepreneur, author and founder of the AI Profit Boardroom, which has 3,400+ members.

I help business owners scale with AI agents, automation and SEO.

I've built a 7-figure SEO and link building agency, Goldie Agency, with a team of 70+ SEO experts.
I've grown a YouTube channel to 400,000+ subscribers.
I wrote "Link Building Mastery".
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