FW Real Estate – Documentation

Saved Searches lets a visitor save a search — the criteria, not the results — and be e-mailed when a matching property is published, or when the price changes on one that already matched. Most visitors arrive before the right property exists. This add-on turns that dead end into a standing instruction: they tell you what they want once, and the site tells them when you have it.

Use Cases

• Nothing matches yet. A visitor looking for something you do not currently list leaves with an alert instead of leaving empty-handed.
• First-mover advantage. Serious buyers want to know on the day a property appears, not on their next visit. A new-match e-mail arrives before they think to check back.
• Price watching. Subscribers are notified when something within their saved criteria becomes cheaper.
• Reading demand you cannot yet supply. Saved searches are a record of what the market is asking for. Review them before deciding which properties to take on.

What Visitors See

Once 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, so you can control whether it is shown. Clicking the button saves the current search criteria to the visitor's account.

Visitors manage their saved searches in the Saved Searches section of their account area, reachable on the My Account page or via ?fwre_section=saved_searches. From there they can run a saved search again or delete it.

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

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 their criteria changes price.
• Price-change threshold — how large a price change must be before an alert is sent.
• Subject, body, and per-property templates — the content of both 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.

Important Notes

• The scheduled job must be running. Without it, searches are saved but nothing is ever sent. On WordPress this means either consistent site traffic driving WP-Cron, or a real system cron job. If e-mails are not arriving, check the scheduled job first.
• 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 — not just new listings.
• Set the price-change threshold deliberately. Alerting on every minor correction trains people to ignore the mail. Because both alert types come from the same sender, over-alerting on price undermines the new-match alert as well.
• 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.