Buy boxes

A buy box is a saved search — price range, beds and baths, square footage, garage spaces, lot size, year built, property types, home features (pool, HOA, solar, and more), and the locations you buy in (or want carved out). Open My Buy Boxes from the top navigation to see yours. The link only appears when your organization has buy boxes enabled and you're signed in.

On most portals a buy box never limits what you can browse: the full catalog stays available in Properties either way. Some organizations choose to match listings to buy boxes instead (see When listings are matched to your buy boxes). A buy box does two things:

• Filters: each row links to the currently listed properties that match it, with the search page's filters (price range, beds, the box's included locations and more) arriving pre-filled from the box. Changing any filter switches to plain filtering.
• Match emails show up to four properties per box and a "See N more matches" button that opens that same page.
• Notifies: it emails you about new matches, on the schedule you choose.

Every buy box is yours

Whether you created a box yourself or your account team assigned you one, it's your own copy: edit anything (locations included), pause, rename, or delete it whenever you like. When the team assigns a box to you or your company, you get your own copy of it — their later edits to price, size, or feature criteria never overwrite yours, and nobody else's box is affected by what you do with yours. The one exception is the market: when your account team changes the locations on the original box, your copy's locations update to match.

A box from your account team may carry a note from them — visible at the top of the edit page, but only they can change it. Your My notes field below it is all yours.

Creating a buy box

Click New buy box on the My Buy Boxes page. Give it a name, set any criteria you care about (blank means "no limit"), add location rules, and pick your notification schedule. Price and square-footage fields format with thousands separators as you type; property types left all unchecked match every type.

Every buy box needs a market: at least one included location. Type "all states" in the location search to cover the whole country in one rule.

Each minimum must be less than (or equal to) its maximum: a price, size or year range the wrong way round would match nothing, so the form says "Minimum must be less than maximum" under that range and won't save it. Year built takes a year between 1800 and next year.

If something needs fixing when you click Create buy box or Save changes, the page scrolls up to the message that says what, and the fields involved are outlined in red until you change them. Saving an existing box asks you to confirm once; the confirm button shows "Saving…" and can't be pressed twice. When it is done you're back on My Buy Boxes with a "Buy box saved" message.

Your first buy box starts with the markets from your profile already added as included locations. Remove any you don't want in this box. Your profile markets never create a buy box on their own.

Email notifications

Every buy box has its own notification settings, right on its row:

• Email switch — on or off per box.
• Frequency — Instant (an email the moment a property matches), Daily (one digest a day, at about the same time each day), or Weekly (one digest each week).

These are always your choice, on every box. Only live listings count: a property the team is still preparing reaches you as a match when it is published. On Instant, a brand-new listing that you already got the new-listing announcement for doesn't send a second email about the same property.

The list at a glance

Each buy box is one compact row: a status dot (green = active, grey = paused), the name, your company, the created and updated dates, every criteria and location chip, the live match count (click it to see the properties), the notification controls, and Edit. The count is the number of properties you will see when you click it: listings your access level doesn't show, and listings you hid, are not counted. A lock icon next to the name means the market on that box is managed by your account team; a Shared badge marks a box you can view but not edit. The list puts your newest boxes first.

Markets and locations

Location rules are yours to edit on boxes you created yourself. On boxes from your account team, the market is usually managed by them (the edit page shows the locations without the add controls and says so; everything else stays yours) unless they unlocked it.

Locations are picked the same way your account team picks them, with the one location search used across the portal:

1. Choose Include or Exclude.
2. Type a state, county, city or ZIP code ("phoe", "maricopa", "850" or "springfield mo") and pick the place from the list. It is added right away as a chip. Adding a place that is already listed switches it between include and exclude.
3. To add many ZIPs inside a county or city, click Pick ZIPs in that place: tick the ZIPs you want (or Select all) and click Add.
4. To paste a list of ZIPs, put them in Paste ZIPs (separated by spaces, commas or new lines) and click Add ZIPs. Any ZIP we don't recognize is listed with the reason and left out.
5. To reuse a set of ZIPs across buy boxes, click ZIP collections next to Paste ZIPs. See ZIP collections.

ZIP collections

A ZIP collection is a named group of ZIP codes you can add to any of your buy boxes in one click, for example "South Florida + 3 others".

• Create one: click ZIP collections, then New collection. Give it a name, paste or type its ZIPs (separated by spaces, commas or new lines), check the list and click Save collection. You can also click Save this box's ZIPs as a collection to turn the ZIPs already on the box into a collection.
• Use one: click Add next to the collection. All of its ZIPs are added to the box you're editing, as included or excluded locations depending on the switch above the location search.
• Edit or delete one: use the pencil or the bin next to it.

Adding a collection copies its ZIPs into the box, so editing or deleting the collection later doesn't change any buy box that already used it. Your collections are private to you, and each holds up to 500 ZIPs. Where listings are matched to your buy boxes, ZIPs outside your assigned markets are skipped when you add a collection, and the box tells you which ones.

A location marked Needs review is one we could not recognize (usually an old entry). It matches nothing until you remove it and pick the place again, and the box can't be saved with a location changed while one is still marked.

The most specific matching rule wins (a ZIP beats a city, a city beats a county, a county beats a state, and any state rule beats a nationwide one), and at equal specificity an exclusion beats an inclusion.

When listings are matched to your buy boxes

Some organizations turn on Buy boxes limit visibility. When they do:

• Properties shows only listings that match at least one of your active buy boxes (as well as your access level). The map, the filters and your saved properties follow the same rule, and so do the new-listing announcements, newsletters and texts you receive.
• You need a buy box from your organization's team. Until they set one up for you, Properties and My Buy Boxes say your buy boxes aren't set up yet and ask you to check in with their support team (with an email button when the portal has a support address). You can't create boxes of your own until then, because there is no market to put them in. If they switch your buy boxes off, Properties says so and asks you to check in with them to turn them back on. Signed-out visitors see a prompt to sign in instead of listings.
• When nothing matches yet, Properties says no listings match your buy boxes and links to them, so you can widen a price range or a location. If your search filters are what rule everything out, it offers Clear filters instead.
• Your own boxes stay inside your assigned markets. The location search only offers places inside the markets of the boxes your account team assigned you (they are listed above the search), and a location outside them can't be saved: the error names it. Every ZIP that reaches into an assigned county or city can be picked; Pick ZIPs in lists them for each assigned market.
• Deleting a box can remove listings from your view, because the properties it matched are no longer matched for you.

Deleting a buy box

Open Edit and choose Delete. Its notifications stop and the box is gone for good. On most portals that never hides any properties, since buy boxes don't limit what you can browse; where listings are matched to your buy boxes, the properties it matched leave your view. A deleted box stays deleted: it won't quietly reappear later, even if it originally came from your account team.

Seeing no matches?

Sold and cancelled listings never count as matches — a box only ever matches active inventory.

If a buy box shows no matching properties, its criteria may simply be narrow — a box only matches properties that pass every criterion it sets. Widen a range or a location rule and save. New listings that match are picked up automatically. Unless your organization matches listings to buy boxes, your Properties page always shows the full catalog regardless of your buy boxes.