How to Get a New Listing Alert by Email

Ways to get a new listing alert by email

1. Saved searches on the site itself: almost every property portal and marketplace has one; the difference is how often it writes. On Zillow you sign in, name the search and pick a frequency: 'Instant' means an email as soon as a matching home is listed, 'Daily' is a digest. Rightmove sends alerts instantly, daily, every 3 days or every 7 days from a free account. On eBay you press 'Save this search' and it emails your registered address when new items match, though it doesn't say how fast. Free and from the source. The catch is an account on every site you watch.
2. An automatic search set up by an agent: in the United States, listings reach the portals from the MLS, and an agent can set up an auto-email for you inside it. It fires on new listings, homes that come back on the market, and price changes, and the agent can look them over first. Redfin is a brokerage that takes that feed directly, and it says most of its listings post within five minutes. It costs you nothing, but it puts you inside an agent's follow-up. Elsewhere the same move is asking a letting agent to write to you before the advert goes up.
3. Alert tools and bots: people who resell for a living buy software for this. eBay alert apps, marketplace monitors, Discord groups that shout the second something is posted. They're the fastest thing there is, and each one is built for one platform. You pay every month, you have to live inside the notifications, and the sites being watched keep trying to shut them out.
4. Something you set up yourself: if a site still publishes a feed, a feed reader can turn it into email. If it doesn't, there's IFTTT, Zapier, or a short script of your own on a timer. It costs nothing but an evening. The catch is that the sites most worth watching are exactly the ones that make it hard.

A new listing alert in one sentence

Write the search the way you'd say it out loud: 'mail me when a two-bedroom flat under £1,500 is listed in E5 or E8', or 'when a used estate car under £6,000 turns up within 30 miles'. If you already have the search open with the filters set, just send that link. A real person sets it up. No account, no app, nothing for you to keep configured.

We read that page on a schedule and write only when something is on it that wasn't there before. The letter carries the listing itself: what it is, the asking price, when it appeared, and the link. So the next thing you open is the listing, not the site. Each listing is sent once. Something relisted, or back with a new price, doesn't arrive again as if it were new, unless you tell us price cuts count too.

Tell us how fast you need to know, because that's the whole game. A rental in a tight city is worth checking every few minutes. A house is fine once a day. A quiet category, twice a day. The first 7 days are free with no payment details; after that it is $5/month for that one search, and it stops by itself if you don't subscribe. Reply once to stop.

Good to know about new listing alerts

Decide what counts as new before the letters start. A price cut, a 'coming soon', something withdrawn in spring and back in September: each of those is either exactly what you were waiting for or just noise, and only you know which.

Sites that need a login are the hard case. We read pages anyone can open. A marketplace that shows nothing until you sign in, like Facebook Marketplace, may be one we can't watch at all. If yours is one of those, the first letter says so and you pay nothing. Then the site's own notifications, or a tool built for that one platform, are the honest answer.

Narrow beats broad. One search per letter, with the filters you would actually act on. 'Anything in London' becomes a letter you stop opening by Wednesday. Three streets and a ceiling price stays worth reading for months.

Try it — hand us this sentence:

Common questions