Auto-populate property group membership from PMS custom fields

Priority: Medium-High

Problem / context

Property groups are built and maintained by hand today. At scale that breaks down: every newly onboarded unit has to be added to the right groups manually, and every reassignment of a manager, director, or market means finding and updating the affected groups. Operators running large portfolios across multiple PMS instances cannot keep this accurate by hand.

The data already exists. Operators typically maintain these assignments in Guesty as custom fields, since that is where their team structure lives, and then re-enter the same information into Sparrow to build groups. Automating this has been named as one of the biggest missing pieces, because manual maintenance is the only thing standing between the operator and group-level reporting they can trust.

Requested capability

Let a user designate a Guesty custom field as the source for a property group type, and populate group membership from it automatically, so new and reassigned units flow into the correct groups without manual upkeep.

Detail / spec

• User designates which Guesty custom field maps to which property group type (for example, a property manager field drives the PM groups).
• Membership syncs on a schedule so newly onboarded and reassigned units land in the right groups without intervention.
• Must work across multiple Guesty accounts belonging to a single customer, since portfolios built through acquisition commonly run several PMS instances.

The obstacle, verified previously: Guesty exposes custom fields through its API as unlabeled tokenized IDs. The Guesty UI shows a readable name, but the API returns an opaque string with no indication of what the field represents, and those IDs differ per customer, differ across a single customer's multiple Guesty accounts, and in observed cases vary property to property within one account. A fixed field reference will not work. It needs either a per-customer configuration step where the user identifies which token maps to which field, or a discovery layer that infers field identity from its values. Either way this is a custom engine, not a simple mapping.

Acceptance criteria

• A user can designate a Guesty custom field as the source for a property group type.
• Group membership populates from that field and stays current as units are added or reassigned.
• Works across multiple Guesty accounts under one customer.
• No per-property manual mapping required.