How Deal Radar works

A radar needs to know where, roughly what price, and roughly what size. You can set those in a form, or simply describe the search in a sentence, "two and three bed houses in Dudley under 150,000 pounds", and confirm what the system understood before anything is saved. Every place name is resolved against the portal's own location index, and an ambiguous name, there is more than one Newcastle, prompts a choice rather than a guess.

Everything else defaults sensibly and visibly: a radius suited to a town or a postcode district, houses unless you asked for flats, a recency window, and an alert threshold with a one-line explanation. Auction listings are excluded by default, because a guide price is not an asking price and treating it as one distorts every downstream number. All of it can be changed.

Once saved, the radar watches Rightmove continuously against your criteria. New listings that match are picked up as they appear, not at the end of the week, and each radar respects your exclusions: auctions, retirement stock, shared ownership and new builds as configured.

The radar currently scans Rightmove, which carries the large majority of UK residential listings. Pasted-link analysis covers all six supported portals, so anything found elsewhere can still get the full appraisal on demand. We state this plainly because a tool that implies wider scanning than it does is borrowing trust it has not earned.

This is the part that separates a radar from an alert. A portal alert tells you a property exists; the radar runs the complete analysis on every new match, the photographs read, the refurbishment priced room by room, the valuation built from sold comparables, the rent matched, every strategy modelled, before deciding whether to tell you anything at all.

The decision to email you is made on the finished numbers, against the threshold you set: only deals whose modelled return clears your bar arrive in your inbox, already analysed, with the full report attached. The rest are filtered in silence, which is the point. An inbox full of near-misses trains you to ignore the inbox.

Every match the radar analyses consumes one analysis from your monthly allowance, and the setup screen tells you before you save roughly how many matches a week your criteria produce, measured from real scanning activity in that area where we have it. If the criteria would outrun your allowance, it warns you then, not after the allowance is gone, and offers to narrow the search.

When an allowance does run out mid-month, the radar pauses rather than silently billing more, and you are told: what paused, why, and when it resets. A radar that goes quiet without explanation is indistinguishable from a broken one, so it explains itself.

Radar criteria are rarely perfect on day one, and the honest pattern among heavy users is a tuning pass after the first weeks: the data shows which price bands and areas the genuinely good deals came from, and the criteria tighten around them. Reviewing your first fortnight of matches, and telling us about any that should not have matched, sharpens both your radar and the system.