Tell me when my childhood home is for sale

March 3, 2021 7:43 PM

Is there a website or service that will let you enter a list of addresses and then notify you when they are listed for sale? I'm in the US.
posted by Wild_Eep to Shopping (7 answers total)

You could try setting up a google alert on the full address, which should alert you when it pops up on the web for any reason. Places for sale usually start popping up. google alerts

I have not used this personally however.
posted by TheAdamist at 8:05 PM on March 3, 2021 [2 favorites]

You can use Zillow to draw around an area on a map, search for homes for sale, and sign up for email alerts for new listings in that search area. Not sure how small you can make it, might include a few houses, but that would just mean a few extra emails if any of those are listed.
posted by sillysally at 8:12 PM on March 3, 2021

Actually even easier. “Favorite” (click the heart) your home on Zillow and they will send you email updates on status changes.

see here
posted by sillysally at 8:16 PM on March 3, 2021 [7 favorites]

On Zillow you can (or at least I have in the past) "follow" individual houses and receive emails when they are listed or when other things change. Realtor.com might do that, too. You will need to navigate to each individual house in their interface to add them to your favorites. (Again: Or at least that's how it worked ~5 years ago when I was using it.)
posted by whatnotever at 8:17 PM on March 3, 2021

I think Zillow has a little bit of a time lag behind the MLS, so you might not get an alert promptly. Plus, apparently Zillow is just flat-out offering to buy houses sometimes (which seems like an anti-trust violation to me, but I'm not a lawyer, so whatever).
posted by amtho at 2:02 AM on March 4, 2021 [1 favorite]

I track house sales this way for a local history group, because it's a useful way to get pictures of the inside of the buildings. I have set up an alert with Zillow and a couple of local realtors for the specific ZIP code, so I get emails whenever something is listed for sale there. If the five-letter ZIP you're looking at is too large, you can probably use the full nine-digit too.
posted by Orkney Vole at 2:03 AM on March 4, 2021 [1 favorite]

Realtor.com has the lowest latency, I don't think you can fave off-market properties, but you could draw a circle around the area and create a saved search w/ email alerts.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 6:30 AM on March 4, 2021