Published 2026-07-27 · data as of 2026-07-22 · by Flatscout
Portal alerts, Dwellio, propertyalerts.co and Flatscout compared on coverage, speed, channels and price — with measured latency, WhatsApp/Telegram delivery and week-by-week pricing in the mix.
If you're hunting for a home in a competitive UK market, when you hear about a new listing decides whether your enquiry is first or fiftieth in the agent's inbox. A small ecosystem of alert tools has grown around that problem — from the portals' own saved-search emails to dedicated cross-portal watchers. We build one of them (Flatscout), so this comparison declares its interest upfront and sticks to claims that are either measured by us and published with methodology, or taken from each tool's own public pages. Where a competitor is genuinely a better fit, we say so.
| Tool | Coverage | Speed | Channels | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Portal-native alerts | One portal each | Batched — commonly hours | Email + own-app push | Free |
| propertyalerts.co | Major portals, aggregated | Daily digest (weekly on free) | Free / £2 per month | |
| Dwellio | Multiple portals, deduplicated | 'Within minutes' (self-reported) | Email + push (own app/dashboard) | £9.99 per month only, card-on-file trial |
| Flatscout Free | Rightmove, Zoopla, SpareRoom + 70,000 agents, deduplicated | Twice daily or weekly | WhatsApp, Telegram, email — no new app | Free — no card needed |
| Flatscout Real-time | Rightmove, Zoopla, SpareRoom + 70,000 agents, deduplicated | Measured median 8.6 min from listing | WhatsApp, Telegram, email — no new app | £9.99/week (cancel any week) or £29.99/month |
Rightmove, Zoopla, OnTheMarket, OpenRent and SpareRoom all offer free saved-search alerts, and if you're searching a relaxed market they may be all you need. Their two structural limits don't go away, though: each portal only alerts on its own listings, and the email dispatch is batched — Rightmove's fastest setting is labelled 'Instantly' but users routinely report gaps of hours. App push notifications are usually quicker than the emails, but still single-portal. If you rely on portal alerts alone, set them up on every portal your market uses and expect duplicates.
Dwellio is a dedicated monitoring service that watches several major portals from one dashboard, deduplicates across them and notifies by email or push. It costs £9.99 a month with a 7-day free trial (card required at sign-up). Its own materials say alerts arrive within minutes of a listing going live; it doesn't publish measured latency distributions, so we can't compare speed like-for-like. It's a reasonable product in the same category as Flatscout Real-time, with four practical differences: alerts live in its own dashboard and push notifications rather than in messaging apps you already check; there's no free alert tier and no card-free way to try it; billing is monthly-only, so a three-week search pays for a month; and its speed claims can't be verified against published data.
propertyalerts.co aggregates new listings from the major property websites into email digests — weekly on the free tier, daily on the £2/month plan. If you don't need speed and just want one deduplicated email instead of checking portals, it's the cheapest aggregated option. A daily digest is, by design, hours-to-a-day behind the market, which puts it closer to portal emails than to real-time tools.
Flatscout is a cross-portal property alert service: it aggregates live listings from Rightmove, Zoopla, SpareRoom and 70,000+ UK agents onto one map, deduplicates them, and matches every new listing against your saved searches every 60 seconds. Saved searches can be neighbourhoods, hand-drawn map areas, a radius, or a commute-time zone. The free tier is deliberately generous: twice-daily and weekly alerts across every channel, unlimited saved searches, and no card at any point. Real-time costs £9.99/week or £29.99/month.
Two design choices set it apart from the other paid option. First, there is no Flatscout app to install — deliberately. Alerts arrive directly in WhatsApp or Telegram (or email), the apps already on your phone that you already check within minutes. A new listing reads like a message from a friend, not a push notification from yet another app you'll mute in a week. Second, Real-time is billed weekly, because a property search is a sprint, not a subscription: turn it on for the weeks you're actively hunting, cancel the week you sign a tenancy. A typical four-week search costs about £40 with no monthly commitment — and first-time subscribers get a 7-day full refund on top.
The speed claim is measured, not asserted: across the 22,582 real-time alerts we generated in the 90 days to 22 July 2026, the median gap from a listing first appearing anywhere to the alert being created was 8.6 minutes, with 97.3% inside the hour — methodology published in our alert-latency study. To our knowledge no other UK alert service publishes measured latency at all.
Where a competitor fits better: if you want passive, always-on monitoring for many months rather than an active search, Dwellio's flat £9.99/month undercuts our weekly plan (our £29.99 monthly plan is the comparable option), and if all you want is a cheap daily digest, propertyalerts.co costs £2.
Match the tool to the speed of your market — and to the shape of your search. Our own tracking shows the median UK rental lets in about 28 days, but roughly 1 in 20 is let agreed within a week of listing — and that fast tail is where underpriced stock lives. If you're in that fight (London, Manchester, Bristol, Edinburgh rentals), alert speed and cross-portal coverage both matter, and a real-time service pays for itself in a shorter search — weekly billing means you only pay for the weeks you're actually hunting. If your market clears in weeks, start with a free card-free tier and only upgrade if you keep losing viewings to faster enquirers.
Flatscout figures are measured from our production systems (90 days to 22 July 2026; methodology in the linked studies). Competitor facts — coverage, pricing, trial terms, speed claims — are taken from each service's own public pages as of 27 July 2026 and will drift; check their sites for current terms. We list competitors by name and link them because a comparison that hides the alternatives isn't one.