House Search Daily & Weekly Digest
Turns noisy listing-alert emails from three sites into a star-rated daily digest, plus a Sunday email with the week's best ten and an interactive board.
For a businessTurns a flood of duplicate listing alerts into a ranked shortlist, so the buyer only looks at homes worth a visit. The same scoring pattern fits leads or inventory.
01 · ContextThe problem
Listing alerts from Zillow, Redfin and Realtor.com arrive as separate, noisy emails: the same house three times, auctions and foreclosures mixed in, and no way to compare homes against what the buyer actually cares about.
02 · PipelineHow it works
- Fetch alert mail
Reads the day's alert emails from a dedicated inbox.
- Parse and filter
Extracts listings from all three sites and blocks auctions and foreclosures with a 15-term filter that logs the phrase behind every drop.
- Deduplicate
Three passes against the ledger: listing ID, then normalized address plus ZIP, then across sources in the same batch. Merged records keep the longer description.
- Score out of 126
13 weighted factors, led by area and safety (32), value per dollar (26) and condition (20), plus lot, size, proximity to family, street setting, parks, HOA, commute, beds, baths and walkability.
- Daily digest
A star-rated email goes out and the ledger is updated. Five stars starts at 65.9% of the maximum.
- Sunday board
The best 10 of the last 7 days, emailed with an interactive board attached.
03 · ChoicesDesign decisions
No LLM on purpose
Scoring homes needs to be cheap, repeatable and explainable, so every point comes from a rule you can read.
Reading the listing text
Weighted condition phrases like "new roof" (+3.0), "updated kitchen" (+2.5), "as-is" (−6.0) and "investor special" (−5.0) scale to a 0–12 updates score. Distances use haversine math.
Missing data is flagged, not punished
Missing fields score at the midpoint and are flagged on the card.
Suspiciously cheap gets a warning
Anything under $112 per square foot gets a "verify not an auction" chip.
04 · EvidenceHow I tested it
Runs daily against real alert mail, with every auction drop logged so the filter can be checked.
05 · Honest notesKnown limits
- Alert emails don't include HOA fees, so the HOA factor is fixed.
- It relies on alert emails rather than scraping, so coverage depends on the saved searches.
Want to see this one run?
I'll screenshare the workflow, the test set and the results, including what didn't work.