Rightmove - Tips and tricks needed for searches.

lovehols

During our three year search once I'd found I was up to date with everything on Rightmove I'd just do the whole county, so Cheshire within 24 hours with our maximum price. There actually wasn't that many each day.

That said the house we have made an offer on I found after dropping my tablet on the floor, picking it up and not noticing as I'd picked it up that I'd changed the search criteria to + 1/4 mile outside of Cheshire! Our house we are due to exchange on imminently is literally about 10 metres from the Welcome to Cheshire sign :rotfl:

Tunstallstoven

Thanks one and all for the helpful replies. Some great ideas there

One thing I am not sure... If the price changes on a house, does it then mean it will show up as a new listing? We are doing a full search now, and will then do a search every few days or so in the future. There's the occasional house that we don't save because it is overpriced, but that perhaps we would be interested in if it were to drop substantially. But if we don't save it now, does that mean we will never see it again if all future searches are just "the last 3 days" or what ever?

Cheers

Davesnave

Price reductions are re-listed in the search return email and marked "Reduced" with a green flash, so if one like that pops into your price band, I think you should see it.

panam

There used to be a superb program called Property Bee, which gave a historic record of how a Rightmove listing had appeared previously. So you could see houses that had been marked as 'under offer' or 'sold', and were now re-listed as available,. or track the price changes, or even just where agents had fiddled with the description. You did your normal Rightmove search, and after a moment the additional information would be inserted into the page.

Unfortunately Property Bee was updated less and less often. It only used to work in Firefox, and then the latest Firefox broke it. It can still be installed in the Waterfox browser. But I think people are using it less, which means not all updates are captured.

On a related note, I often find myself wishing that I could still see the details of properties that are no longer listed on Rightmove. Maybe it is relisted with a new agent, and I am unsure whether there has been a price change. I wish there was some sort of Rightmove archive.

lovehols

I think if someone reduced a property it has to be by a certain amount for it to show up on Rightmove. I'm selling mine and I was told it only shows up as reduced when it's a minimum of a £3k reduction. It I'm not sure how true this is.

hazyjo

There's definitely a percentage re showing reductions. I remember when I dropped mine and the EA said it wasn't enough to show in everyone's alerts so hiked it up for 24 hours then dropped it again. That's partly why I wrote the asking prices of anything I was remotely interested in in the notes section.

victoriavictorious

I'm currently selling my house via one of the older-established online agents and they give the seller full access to the ''back end' of Rightmove, so in effect you take care of that yourself and I have control of every aspect of my listing.
When a price is reduced, Rightmove gives the option of either adding the word 'Reduced' as a qualifier, or just changing the price only, and not using it.
So presumably if the qualifier is not used, the property won't appear as a new listing and you will be unaware that it's been reduced unless you have previously bookmarked it or kept a note of it.

victoriavictorious

I found that with the drawn area thingy on Rightmove, it sometimes missed out properties in that same area that did come up in the regular search. That's why I no longer bother with the drawn searches,

Tunstallstoven

Thanks all, that's really helpful stuff....

We are persevering with the drawn map search thing because we are looking to move to pretty much any area in Wales, which makes for a rather large area! And we want something rural so it is very helpful to eliminate as many built up areas as possible.

Which leads me nicely to a problem I've been having...

I set about using Draw A Search to divide the country into four areas (NW, SW, NE, SE), and at the same time to circumnavigate built up areas. I did SW first and that went great. Then I did SE, but when I finished I typed a title into the save window, hit save, but it did not save; a shame, because it took quite a while. Grrr! I was still able to search in that area using the map I'd drawn, so I it wasn't a total waste of time and I went ahead and did that. I was just unable to save it. I then moved onto NW, drew my search map for that area. and it saved no problem.

I've just now tried doing the SE again, and the same thing has happened. Perhaps the map I'm doing is too complex I thought, so i tried a simpler one, but again when I typed in the name and tried to save it it did not save. Strange!

So I wondered if anyone has any ideas as to why this area will not save and what I might be doing wrong? Or more generally, does anyone have any experience or information regarding what factors might potentially stop a drawn search map from being able to save (so that I might be able to work out why this is happening)?

I've tried emailing RM for their advice, and will update the thread for future reference if I hear back from them.

Many thanks

Max