Listing Alert and Nurture

Most property buyers are not ready today. They are ready in four months, or nine, or whenever the right place appears. An agency collects hundreds of these people a year through inquiries, showings and open houses, writes their requirements on a notepad or into a free-text notes field, and then does nothing with them until a new instruction comes in - at which point someone tries to remember who was looking for a three-bed with a garden near the station.

So the matching happens by memory, which means it happens badly. The buyers who get called are the ones the agent spoke to most recently, not the ones who best fit. New instructions go to the portal before they go to the agency's own registered buyers, which is backwards: the quiet pre-portal call to a well-matched buyer is the thing that produces a quick sale and a delighted vendor, and it is the thing that gets skipped because nobody has the list to hand.

The compounding loss is the silence in between. A buyer registers, hears nothing for six weeks, and reasonably concludes the agency has forgotten them - so when they do see something on a portal they inquire with whoever listed it rather than coming back. Meanwhile their requirements drift: the budget moves, the area widens, the chain completes, they buy somewhere else entirely, and nobody updates the record. Six months later the agency has a database of hundreds of buyers of whom it cannot say which are still looking. The build below matches new instructions to buyer criteria the moment a listing is created, sends alerts people actually open, keeps a market-update rhythm going in between, and re-qualifies the list on a schedule so it stays worth something.

Pipeline and stages

One pipeline, Registered Buyers, which tracks the buyer relationship rather than a single property:

• Newly Registered - criteria captured, welcome sequence running.
• Actively Matched - receiving alerts and engaging with them.
• Nurture - Long Horizon - genuine but 6 months or more out; market-update rhythm only.
• Re-Engagement - has gone quiet; the ladder is running.
• Showing Booked - an alert converted into an appointment.
• Offer Stage - handed to an agent, out of automated sending.
• Purchased - with us or elsewhere, recorded either way.
• Dormant or Unsubscribed.

A second, lightweight pipeline, Instructions, carries each new listing through Pre-Market, Buyer Alerts Sent, On Portals, so the matching step is visible and auditable instead of implicit.

Calendars

• Property Showing - shared with the speed-to-lead build, same travel buffers, so an alert click lands on real availability.
• Buyer Criteria Review - 15-minute call offered every 90 days to long-horizon buyers. The call exists to update the record, and that is reason enough.
• Open House Slots - capacity-limited blocks promoted to the matched segment first.

Custom fields

The matching criteria, each a structured field rather than free text:

• search_areas - multi-select of ZIP codes, suburbs or named districts. Never free text; free text cannot be matched.
• budget_min and budget_max, plus budget_stretch for the figure they will go to for the right place.
• bedrooms_min, bathrooms_min, property_types (house, flat, bungalow, new build, land), tenure_required.
• must_haves and deal_breakers - multi-select: garden, parking, garage, off-street, ground floor, no through road, chain-free, pet-friendly, no major works.
• buying_timeline, finance_status, has_property_to_sell, chain_position.
• alert_frequency - instant / daily digest / weekly digest. Buyer-chosen, and honouring it is the whole trick.
• last_alert_sent, last_alert_opened, last_alert_clicked, alerts_sent_count, alerts_clicked_count.
• engagement_score - recency and depth of interaction, recalculated weekly.
• criteria_last_confirmed - the date the buyer last verified their own requirements. Criteria older than 90 days are treated as suspect.
• match_count_last_30 - how many matches they have been sent. Zero for a month is a criteria problem, not a stock problem.

Tags

• alert-instant, alert-daily, alert-weekly - mirror alert_frequency for segment building.
• engaged-hot, engaged-warm, engaged-cold - recalculated weekly from engagement_score.
• criteria-stale - criteria_last_confirmed older than 90 days.
• no-matches-30 - nothing matched in a month; triggers a criteria-widening conversation.
• vip-buyer - cash or approved finance with a timeline inside 60 days. These people get the pre-market call, not an email.
• chain-free, investor, first-time-buyer, downsizer, relocating.
• purchased-with-us, purchased-elsewhere - both matter; the second is the one agencies never record.
• nurture-paused - buyer asked for a break. Honor it exactly and resume on the agreed date.

Forms and pages

• Buyer Registration form - the full criteria capture, structured, with multi-selects and sliders rather than text boxes. Ten fields maximum; anything longer gets abandoned.
• Update My Search page - a pre-filled version of the same form, linked from the footer of every single alert. This one link does more for data quality than any internal process.
• Alert Preferences page - frequency, channel, and a pause option with a return date. Giving people a pause button is what stops them unsubscribing.
• Match page - a funnel page per listing, used as the alert destination, with photographs, key facts, the agent's name and an embedded showing calendar. Alerts should land on a page that can be booked from, never on a generic portal search.
• Still Looking page - a one-tap, three-option page for the re-engagement ladder: still looking, bought elsewhere, or stop sending.

BO's role and guardrails

• BO handles replies to alerts, which are mostly short questions about a specific property and requests to book a showing.
• BO may answer anything published on the listing record, book and reschedule showings, widen or narrow search criteria on request, change alert_frequency, and apply nurture-paused with a return date.
• BO asks the criteria-confirmation question conversationally when criteria-stale is present, and writes the answers straight to the fields.
• BO must not discuss offers or negotiation, speculate on what a property will sell for, give mortgage, tax, legal or investment advice, comment on an area's demographics, religion, ethnicity, family makeup, schools or crime, or compare neighbourhoods on those grounds. All of it routes to the assigned agent with needs-human.
• BO never claims a property is still available without checking the listing record, and never states a sold price.
• Any mention of an offer, a attorney, a survey, a complaint or discrimination exits BO immediately and notifies the assigned agent.

Numbers and channels

• Email is the primary alert channel - it carries photographs, which is what sells a match.
• SMS reserved for instant alerts to vip-buyer and engaged-hot segments, and for the re-engagement ladder. Texting every buyer about every listing is the fastest way to lose the list.
• The office's dedicated local number, shared with the speed-to-lead build so every buyer conversation threads in one place.
• An authenticated sending domain with SPF, DKIM and DMARC, and a separate subdomain for bulk alerts so a deliverability problem in marketing never affects transactional showing confirmations.
• Phone, by a human, for the pre-market call to VIP buyers. That call is the point of the whole build and should never be automated.

1. A buyer who inquired about a property three months ago and did not proceed is sitting at Nurture - Long Horizon with criteria captured: two named areas, budget band, three bedrooms minimum, garden a must-have, no major works a deal-breaker, alert_frequency = daily digest.
2. A new instruction is created in the listing system: a three-bedroom semi with a garden, inside her band, in one of her areas. An opportunity opens on Instructions at Pre-Market.
3. The matching workflow runs within minutes of the listing record being saved. It evaluates every buyer with criteria_last_confirmed inside 120 days against area, budget, bedrooms, type, must-haves and deal-breakers, and produces a ranked match list with a score per buyer.
4. Fourteen buyers match. Three carry vip-buyer; those three generate call tasks for the assigned agent, due within two hours, before anything is sent to anyone. The vendor is told their property went to three qualified buyers before it hit a portal - which is the moment an agency earns its fee.
5. The remaining eleven are split by alert_frequency. Two are instant and get an email and an SMS within fifteen minutes. Our buyer is on daily digest, so her match is queued for the 08:00 send.
6. At 08:00 she receives one email with two matched properties, hers at the top, with a match reason stated in plain language: three bedrooms, garden, in her area, inside her budget. The footer carries the Update My Search and Alert Preferences links. last_alert_sent and alerts_sent_count update.
7. She opens it and clicks through to the Match page. last_alert_opened, last_alert_clicked and alerts_clicked_count update, engagement_score jumps, and the opportunity moves from Nurture - Long Horizon to Actively Matched.
8. Because a click on a match is a strong signal, BO follows up within 30 minutes by SMS: a short message naming the property and offering two showing slots.
9. She replies asking whether the garden backs onto the railway. BO answers from the listing record and offers the slots again. She takes Saturday at 11:00.
10. The opportunity moves to Showing Booked, all alert sending pauses for 72 hours so she is not emailed about other properties on the way to this showing, and the confirmation and reminder sequence runs.
11. The listing opportunity moves to Buyer Alerts Sent, then to On Portals once the pre-market window closes - and the vendor gets a report of how many registered buyers were alerted and how many booked.
12. She views, likes it, but wants to see two more before deciding. The agent records that; alert sending resumes with the two closest comparables sent by hand rather than by sequence.
13. Separately, a different buyer has had no-matches-30 applied. BO opens a criteria-widening conversation: the budget band or one area probably needs to move, and BO asks which. The answers write straight to the fields and criteria_last_confirmed is reset.
14. A third buyer has not opened an alert in eight weeks. The re-engagement ladder runs, ending with the Still Looking page. He taps bought elsewhere; purchased-elsewhere is applied, alerts stop immediately, and a single message is scheduled 18 months out. The list stays clean, and the agency keeps a relationship it would otherwise have lost without knowing.

1. Registration and Welcome

Trigger: Buyer Registration form submitted, or a contact is enrolled from the speed-to-lead build after an inquiry closes without a sale.

Conditions: marketing consent is explicitly yes. Without it, no alerts - only transactional replies about the property they asked about.

• Write all criteria fields, stamp criteria_last_confirmed = today, set alert_frequency to the buyer's choice (default daily digest), apply the matching frequency tag, open an opportunity at Newly Registered.
• Within 5 minutes, email: a plain-language summary of exactly what was recorded, the Update My Search link, and the three best current matches from existing stock. Showing them their own criteria read back is the strongest trust signal available.
• Run the matching engine immediately against live stock. If there are fewer than three matches, say so honestly and ask one widening question rather than sending a thin email.
• Wait 2 days. SMS: "Hi {{first_name}}, you're set up for alerts on {{search_area_summary}}. Anything you'd add or change, just reply here - I'll update it."
• Wait 5 days. If alerts_clicked_count is still zero, send one email asking whether the criteria are right, linking Update My Search.
• Wait 7 days. Move to Actively Matched if there has been any engagement, otherwise to Nurture - Long Horizon.

Exit: welcome sequence completes, or STOP received.

2. New Instruction Matching Engine

Trigger: a listing record is created or its status changes to available, pre-market or back on market.

Conditions: evaluate every buyer where the opportunity is at Newly Registered, Actively Matched or Nurture - Long Horizon, consent is yes, nurture-paused is absent, and criteria_last_confirmed is inside 120 days.

• Match logic, scored rather than binary: area in search_areas is required; price at or below budget_max scores 30, between budget_max and budget_stretch scores 15; bedrooms at or above bedrooms_min scores 20; property type in property_types scores 15; each satisfied must-have scores 10; each deal-breaker present disqualifies outright.
• Only send where the score is 60 or above. A loose match destroys trust in every alert that follows, and the cost of a false positive is permanent.
• Write match_count_last_30 for each matched buyer and log the match reason on the opportunity, so the alert can state why in plain words.
• Open the listing opportunity at Pre-Market and branch: buyers tagged vip-buyer go to workflow 3; everyone else goes to workflow 4.
• If zero buyers score 60 or above, notify the listing agent. A new instruction with no matches in the database is worth knowing about on day one, not week three.

Exit: match list produced and handed on.

3. VIP Pre-Market Call

Trigger: a vip-buyer appears on a match list.

Conditions: cash or approved finance, buying_timeline inside 60 days, engagement_score in the warm or hot band.

• Create a call task for the assigned agent, due within 2 hours during working hours, carrying the match reason, the buyer's criteria and their last three interactions.
• Hold all automated sending to this buyer about this property for 4 hours. The human call must land first - that is the entire advantage.
• If the task is not completed in 4 hours, release the automated alert anyway and notify the office manager. A missed call is a problem; a missed property is a lost sale.
• Log the call outcome against the listing opportunity: interested and showing booked, interested but not yet, or not for them with a reason. Write the reason back to criteria where it reveals something.
• Notify the vendor, by the agreed channel, how many qualified buyers were called before the property went public, and what they said. This single report wins and keeps instructions.

Exit: call completed and logged, or 4-hour window elapsed.

4. Alert Delivery by Frequency

Trigger: match list received from workflow 2, split three ways by alert_frequency.

• Instant: send within 15 minutes. Email with photographs, key facts, the match reason and the Match page link. For engaged-hot contacts add an SMS: "{{first_name}}, new on our books and it fits your search: {{property_summary}}. Details and showing times: {{match_page_link}}"
• Daily digest: queue for the next 08:00 local send. One email, up to five properties ranked by match score, each with a one-line reason. If nothing matched, send nothing - an empty digest trains people to ignore the next full one.
• Weekly digest: queue for a fixed day and time, up to eight properties, with a short market line at the top.
• Every alert carries the Update My Search link, the Alert Preferences link, and a one-tap unsubscribe. Update My Search sits above unsubscribe, because most people who want to unsubscribe actually want to change their criteria.
• Update last_alert_sent and increment alerts_sent_count. Enforce a cap of one alert email per buyer per day and four SMS alerts per buyer per month, centrally.
• Suppress all alerts for 72 hours after a showing is booked, and entirely while the opportunity sits at Offer Stage.

Exit: alert sent and logged, or suppressed by a cap or a hold.

5. Alert Click Follow-Up

Trigger: a buyer clicks through to a Match page.

Conditions: no showing already booked for this property; inside 08:00-21:00 local, otherwise queue to 08:00.

• Increment alerts_clicked_count, stamp last_alert_clicked, recalculate engagement_score, move the opportunity to Actively Matched.
• Wait 30 minutes - long enough that it does not feel like surveillance, short enough to catch them while interested. BO sends SMS: "{{first_name}}, saw you had a look at {{property_address}}. I've two slots free: {{slot_one}} or {{slot_two}}. Want either?"
• If no reply after 1 day, email with three further photographs and the floor plan, plus the booking link.
• If no reply after 3 days, stop. One click is interest, not intent; chasing harder than this costs you the next alert's open.
• If the same buyer clicks the same property twice: notify the assigned agent directly for a human call. Two clicks is intent.
• If the buyer replies with a question: hand to BO within guardrails and offer showing slots in the same message.

Exit: showing booked, three days elapsed, or handed to a human.

6. Market Update Rhythm

Trigger: scheduled monthly for every opportunity at Nurture - Long Horizon.

Conditions: consent yes, no nurture-paused, no alert click in the last 30 days.

• Send one email per month. Content is genuinely about their areas: what came to market, what went under offer, average time to sell, and one honest observation about conditions. No invented figures - report only what the agency's own records and published data support.
• Rotate the secondary content across the quarter: a buyer-process guide, a chain and timeline explainer, a note on what sells quickly in their band.
• Every third month, offer a Buyer Criteria Review call and link Update My Search.
• Branch on engagement: two consecutive opens move the buyer to Actively Matched and tighten the alert frequency. Three consecutive non-opens hand them to workflow 8.
• Never include a property in the monthly update that did not pass the match threshold. The whole rhythm depends on relevance.

Exit: moved to Actively Matched, or handed to re-engagement.

7. Criteria Refresh and No-Match Widening

Trigger: daily scan. Two branches: criteria_last_confirmed older than 90 days, or match_count_last_30 = 0.

• Stale criteria branch: apply criteria-stale. Email: "{{first_name}}, is this still what you're after? {{criteria_summary}}" with Update My Search. Wait 4 days; if no response, BO opens an SMS conversation and asks the two questions that matter most - budget and areas - then writes the answers to the fields and resets criteria_last_confirmed.
• If criteria pass 150 days unconfirmed, stop matching that buyer and move them to Re-Engagement. Matching against year-old criteria produces irrelevant alerts, which is worse than none.
• No matches in 30 days branch: apply no-matches-30. BO opens a widening conversation naming the specific constraint: "Nothing's come up in {{search_areas}} under {{budget_max}} with {{must_haves}} this month. Shall I widen the budget a little, add {{adjacent_area}}, or hold as-is?"
• Branch on the answer: widen and rerun matching immediately against live stock; hold as-is and schedule the same question in 30 days; or move to Nurture - Long Horizon with the market rhythm only.
• Reset criteria_last_confirmed on every confirmation, including a hold-as-is - confirming unchanged criteria is still confirmation.

Exit: criteria confirmed or updated, or buyer moved to re-engagement.

8. Re-Engagement Ladder and List Hygiene

Trigger: no open and no click across the last 6 alerts, or 60 days with no engagement of any kind.

• Move to Re-Engagement, apply engaged-cold, and pause all routine alerts so the ladder is the only thing sending.
• Step 1 - email, subject "Still looking?". One question, the Still Looking page link, nothing else.
• Wait 4 days. Step 2 - SMS: "{{first_name}}, are you still house-hunting? Reply 1 still looking, 2 bought elsewhere, 3 stop alerts. Either way it's useful to know." A three-option reply gets answers an open question never will.
• Wait 5 days. Step 3 - final email, plainly stating that alerts will stop unless they tell us otherwise, with a one-tap keep-me-on button.
• Branch on the answer. Still looking: run workflow 7's criteria refresh, reset engagement_score, return to Actively Matched. Bought elsewhere: apply purchased-elsewhere, stop all alerts the same minute, send one genuine congratulations with no pitch, and schedule a single message 18 months out. Stop alerts: move to Unsubscribed, suppress globally.
• No answer at all: move to Dormant, stop sending, and keep the record for a single annual check. Do not keep mailing a silent contact - it is the quiet killer of a sending domain.
• Monthly hygiene run: clear hard bounces and invalid numbers, and report list size against engaged list size. The second number is the only one worth managing.

Exit: re-engaged, closed with a reason, or moved to dormant.

9. Price Change and Back-on-Market Alerts

Trigger: a listing's price is reduced, or its status returns to available after a fall-through.

Conditions: only alert buyers who either previously matched this property or match it now at the new price.

• Price reduction: rerun matching at the new figure. Buyers newly brought inside budget get a standard alert; buyers who previously viewed and declined on price get a personal note from the assigned agent, not an automated email.
• Back on market: alert the matched segment within an hour - a fall-through is time-sensitive and chain-free buyers care most. Prioritize chain-free and vip-buyer, and give the listing agent a call task for the top three.
• Never state or imply why a sale fell through. Keep the message to availability and showing times.
• Cap price-change alerts at one per property per buyer per 30 days, however many times the price moves.

Exit: alerts sent and logged.

Matching stops happening by memory. The moment a listing record is saved, every registered buyer is evaluated against structured criteria and a ranked match list exists before anyone has made a decision. The best-fit buyers get contacted, not the most recently spoken to, and the agency can show a vendor exactly who was alerted and when.

The pre-market window becomes a real asset instead of an aspiration. Three qualified buyers called before a property reaches a portal is a materially different proposition for a vendor at the valuation stage, and it is the kind of claim the agency can now actually substantiate from its own records.

The silence in between disappears. Long-horizon buyers hear from the agency monthly with something genuinely about their areas rather than nothing for two months and then a mass mailshot. Criteria get re-confirmed on a 90-day cycle, so the database stops decaying - and when a buyer has bought elsewhere, that gets recorded rather than discovered a year later. The registered buyer list turns from a pile of names into an asset with a known size and a known engaged proportion.

Metrics to watch

• Engaged list size - buyers who opened or clicked in the last 60 days. Manage this number, not total list size.
• Match precision - the share of alerts that get a click. If it falls, the match threshold is too loose, not the copy too weak.
• Alert-to-viewing rate - matched alerts producing a booked viewing. The core conversion of the build.
• Pre-market conversion - instructions that produce a viewing, or an offer, before reaching a portal. The number you put in a valuation pitch.
• Criteria freshness - the share of active buyers with criteria_last_confirmed inside 90 days. Target the large majority; below half, the matching is working on fiction.
• Buyers with zero matches in 30 days - a stock-versus-criteria mismatch, and a direct prompt for a conversation.
• Re-engagement outcomes split three ways - re-engaged, bought elsewhere, unsubscribed. All three are useful; only the second and third used to be invisible.
• Unsubscribe rate per 1,000 alerts and complaint rate. The guardrail on frequency.
• Days from registration to purchase, by segment, which tells you how long the nurture genuinely needs to run.

Prerequisites

• Structured criteria fields, populated. This is the whole build. If buyer requirements currently live in free-text notes, budget real time for converting them - it is usually a week of someone's attention and it cannot be skipped. Free text cannot be matched against.
• A listing data source that writes a record the moment an instruction is taken, carrying area, price, bedrooms, type, tenure and features as structured values. The matching engine is only as good as this feed, and matching against a hand-typed description will not work.
• An agreed pre-market policy: how long the window is, who gets called, and the vendor's written agreement to it. Do not build a pre-market process the vendor has not sanctioned.
• A decision on the match threshold and the honesty to hold it. The pressure to loosen it when stock is thin is constant, and giving in is what kills the open rate.
• Named owners for the VIP call tasks and for the needs-human queue.
• Real content for the monthly market update. If nobody will write it, run alerts only - a monthly email with nothing in it is worse than silence.

Integrations

• Your property management or agency software, as the source of listing records and status changes, via its API or a connector such as Zapier or Make. A webhook on listing creation and on status or price change is the ideal.
• Google Calendar or Outlook for showing availability, shared with the speed-to-lead build.
• Website or funnel pages for Buyer Registration, Update My Search, Alert Preferences and the per-listing Match pages.
• Your email sending infrastructure, with a dedicated subdomain for bulk alerts kept separate from transactional sending.
• Optionally, published local market data for the monthly update - only from sources the agency can cite.

Numbers and messaging setup

• Use the office's existing dedicated local number, shared with the speed-to-lead build, so a buyer's inquiry, alert replies and showing confirmations all thread together.
• Complete A2P 10DLC brand and campaign registration before launch in the United States, under the correct use case, and register the SMS alert traffic honestly - a recurring alert program is a different campaign type from conversational lead response and may need registering as such. Approval takes days to weeks.
• Outside the US, confirm the destination country's rules on recurring commercial SMS, which are often stricter than for one-off replies.
• Authenticate the sending domain with SPF, DKIM and DMARC, and set up the bulk subdomain before the first alert send. Warm it: this build will increase email volume substantially, and a cold domain sending hundreds of alerts on day one will land in spam folders, invisibly, for weeks.
• Test digest assembly, match reasoning and the Update My Search pre-fill with real records before launch. A digest that lists the wrong property or the wrong price costs more credibility than a month of good sends earns.

Consent, opt-out and quiet hours

• Listing alerts are ongoing marketing, not a reply to an inquiry, and need their own explicit, recorded consent. A property inquiry is not consent to months of alerts. Capture it separately at registration, record the date and source, and keep the record retrievable.
• Make unsubscribe one tap and global - if someone unsubscribes from alerts, every alert, digest and market update must stop, not just the one they clicked. Put Update My Search and Alert Preferences above the unsubscribe link, because most people wanting out actually want different criteria.
• Honor STOP, UNSUBSCRIBE, QUIT, END and CANCEL on SMS, and treat an SMS opt-out as covering SMS alerts specifically while leaving the email preference intact unless they say otherwise.
• Respect alert_frequency absolutely. Sending a daily-digest buyer an instant alert because the property seemed special is the fastest route to an unsubscribe.
• Enforce quiet hours of 08:00-21:00 local for SMS, and run digests at a fixed time so they become expected. Apply a global frequency cap of one alert email per day and four alert SMS per month per buyer, centrally rather than per workflow.
• Pause requests get honoured exactly, including the return date, with nothing sent in between.

Compliance and legal

• Fair housing and anti-discrimination rules apply to which properties you show to whom. An automated matching engine that systematically steers buyers toward or away from areas on any protected basis is a serious exposure, and intention is not a defense. Build matching only on buyer-stated objective criteria - area, price, bedrooms, type, features - never on inferred demographics, names, or anything that could act as a proxy. Document the match logic, review it periodically, and never let BO comment on the makeup of a neighborhood.
• Property and price information in alerts can engage consumer protection and misdescription rules. Alerts should carry only what the listing record states.
• Holding buyer requirement and financial data engages GDPR and UK GDPR, the TCPA, CAN-SPAM, PIPEDA and various state privacy laws, with real obligations on consent, access, correction, retention and deletion. A long-running nurture list makes retention policy a live question rather than a theoretical one.
• Pre-market marketing may be constrained by local agency regulation or portal terms, and in some markets by rules requiring equal access to listings.
• This guide describes a mechanism, not legal advice. Have the client confirm the match logic, consent wording, retention policy and pre-market practice with their own counsel and compliance adviser before launch.

For criteria migration, match-logic design and a build plan for your agency, book a call at bookings.appbo.io.