Most people set up one alert on one portal, pick "daily," and wonder why the good flats are always gone. Alerts that work aren't about a clever filter; they're about seeing everything new, fast, and being ready to act. Here's the setup, step by step.
Step 1 — Define criteria that are broad enough to catch
The most common mistake is over-tight criteria. Set the maximum price a little above your real ceiling, and the minimum beds a little below what you want, because listings are routinely mis-tagged — a flat entered at the wrong bedroom count or £25 over your cap will never reach a narrow alert. You can filter down later; you can't get back the listing an over-strict alert silently hid. Pick your areas generously too: include the neighbouring ones you'd actually consider.
Step 2 — Create the saved searches on every portal
Set the same search on Rightmove, Zoopla, OnTheMarket and OpenRent. Each carries stock the others don't, so one portal is a blind spot — and OpenRent in particular adds landlord-direct lets the agent portals often miss. Use the identical criteria on each so you're comparing like with like. (For why coverage differs between them, see Rightmove vs Zoopla vs OpenRent alerts.)
Step 3 — Choose the fastest alert frequency
This is the single most important setting. Wherever a portal offers an instant or immediate alert, use it instead of a daily digest. In a market where viewing slots for good flats can fill within hours, a once-a-day summary often reaches you after the early movers have already enquired. Frequency is what decides whether an alert is still actionable when it lands.
Step 4 — Route everything to one inbox
Four portals means four streams of email, and if they're scattered through your normal inbox the important ones get buried under everything else. Send them somewhere dedicated — a separate email address, or a folder with a filter — that you check on a deliberate schedule through the day. The goal is that no single portal's alert slips past you, and that you can scan what's new in one place rather than four.
Step 5 — Turn alerts into action
An alert only helps if you can respond before the crowd. Two habits make the difference:
- Have your enquiry ready. Keep a short message and your key details (move date, budget, situation) drafted, so replying to a good listing takes seconds, not minutes.
- Check what's genuinely new, not everything. Learn to skip duplicates and re-lists so your attention goes to flats that actually just appeared — that's where the gettable viewings are.
Making it less work
Done manually, that's four saved searches, four alert streams, and a lot of duplicate emails to triage — right when you're busy and need to move fast. Removing that overhead is exactly why we built FlatSignal (our product): it reads the saved-search alert emails you set up in the steps above, de-duplicates listings of the same flat across portals, scores each one, and groups them by London area, so four inboxes become a single ranked feed of what's new — each item linking straight back to its original portal. It's free to browse. Think of the steps above as the foundation, and the dashboard as the way to stop doing the merging by hand.
Either way, the principle is the same: cover every portal, react fastest, and keep your attention on what's genuinely new. You can see the live dashboard here, or read why London flats disappear in hours for the reason speed matters this much.