Saving, notes and history

Four things keep track of properties for you, and they are easy to confuse because three of them look like bookmarking.

Saving

Saving is your shortlist. It is also the strongest thing you can tell matching short of enquiring: a save counts three times what a view does.

That has a consequence worth stating plainly. Saving is not bookmarking. Saving a property you are curious about but would never buy teaches matching to find you more like it. If you want to come back to something without meaning it, open it again from your history instead.

Saved properties stay saved after they are withdrawn or sold. The listing says so, and the record stays readable, which is deliberate: what happened to a property you were interested in is information, and deleting it would be throwing away the answer.

Notes

Every saved property takes a note. It is private, it is not sent to the agent, and nothing reads it.

Use it for what the listing cannot hold: what the street was like when you walked it, what the neighbour said, what the agent would not answer, what it would cost to fix the bathroom. Six weeks into looking, the properties blur together and the price and floor area are the least of what you have forgotten.

Notes survive a withdrawal, so a note explaining why you passed on something is still there if it comes back on the market.

Dismissing

Dismissing says not this one, and not ones like it.

It is the only way to say no. A profile built only from what you saved knows what you like and nothing about what you rejected, and those are different questions: everything you saved is in the same neighbourhood, so without dismissals there is nothing pulling the picture away from anything.

Dismiss when a property is genuinely wrong rather than merely uninteresting. Dismissing everything you scroll past says nothing, because it is not a preference, it is a browsing session.

History

Your history is what you have opened, most recent first, one entry per property however many times you have looked at it.

It exists for one thing: the listing you looked at last week, cannot find, and cannot remember enough about to search for. That is a genuinely hard search and a trivial lookup.

Views feed matching too, at a third of the weight of a save. They do not on their own trigger a rebuild of your profile, so a long browsing session shows up in matching the next time you save, dismiss or enquire.

Which to use