FW Real Estate – Documentation

The Saved Searches add-on lets a visitor save a search — the criteria, not the results — and be e-mailed when a matching property appears, or when the price changes on one that already matches.

Most visitors arrive before the right property exists. Without this add-on, that is a dead end. With it, the visitor tells the site what they want once, and the site tells them when you have it — turning a one-time visit into a standing instruction.

Use Cases

• Nothing matches yet. A visitor looking for something you do not currently list leaves with an alert instead of leaving for good.
• First-mover advantage. Serious buyers want to know on the day a property appears, not on their next visit. The new-match e-mail arrives before they think to check back.
• Price watching. Subscribers are notified when something within their saved criteria gets cheaper.
• Reading demand you cannot supply. Saved searches are a record of what people want and you do not currently have — useful information before deciding what to take on.

What Visitors See

When the add-on is enabled, a Save Search button appears in the search module. The search module also has its own switch for this button in its settings, giving you control over where it shows.

Logged-in visitors can manage their searches through a Saved Searches section in the account area, reached via a User Section menu item. From there they can run or delete any saved search.

Saving a search requires an account. The entire purpose of the feature is to e-mail the person later, so anonymous saving is not supported.

Settings

Settings are found under Configuration → Add-ons → Saved Searches.

• New-match email — e-mail a subscriber when a newly published property matches their saved criteria.
• Price-change email — e-mail them when a property that already matches changes price.
• Price-change threshold — how large a price change must be before it triggers a notification.
• Subject, body, and per-property templates — the content of both outgoing e-mails.

Both e-mails are sent by the site's scheduled job. A batch of new properties produces one e-mail per subscriber, not one e-mail per property.

Notes

• The scheduled job must be running. If it is not, searches are saved but nothing is ever sent. On Joomla, this means the scheduled task must be active. On WordPress, delivery depends on site traffic triggering the job, or a real system cron configured separately.
• A saved search stores criteria, not results. If you edit an existing property so that it now falls within a subscriber's criteria, that subscriber will receive an alert — even though the property was already published.
• Set the price-change threshold deliberately. Alerting on every minor correction trains subscribers to ignore the mail. Because both e-mail types come from the same sender, eroding trust in one erodes trust in both — including the new-match alert.
• Disabling the add-on removes the Save Search button and the account section. Saved searches remain in the database and resume when the add-on is re-enabled.

To install this addon, open the Add-ons panel inside FW Real Estate. See Getting Started → Add-ons for details on free addons, paid addons, and site verification.