Netherlands · funda.nl
Funda alerts in a minute, not tomorrow morning
Funda's saved-search email is a batch job that runs once a day. Notifio watches the same search from your own machine and tells you straight away.
One-time payment · No subscription · Runs on your own machine
Funda's alert email is batched, and Funda has said so
This is not a guess about a competitor's product, since Funda's own engineering team wrote it up. In their description of how the saved-search feature works, the email workflow is scheduled to run once a day, reading previously matched houses from a feed. The push notification is different: that workflow is triggered whenever the matcher service reports a new match.
So Funda does have a real-time path, and it goes to the phone app. Email, which is where most people actually keep their housing search, is the daily batch. If you set up a Funda zoekopdracht and are waiting on email, you are on a 24-hour cycle in a market where good listings in Amsterdam and Utrecht are gone the same afternoon.
Notifio watches the search results page rather than subscribing to anything. Every 30 seconds it loads the page, diffs it against the last check, and mails you what is new with a link straight to the object. The comparison is against what Funda is actually showing at that moment, which means you also catch listings that reappear after an agent edits and republishes them.
Sources, so you can check whether Funda has changed this since we wrote it: Funda engineering – how the saved search feature works
Setting up a Funda monitor
Example search URL
https://www.funda.nl/zoeken/huur?selected_area=%5B%22amsterdam%22%5D&price=%22-1750%22&sort=%22date_down%22A Funda rental search for Amsterdam under €1,750, newest first. The filters live in the query string, URL-encoded, so copy it whole.
- 1
Use /zoeken/huur, not the buy tab
Funda's rental and sale searches are separate paths. Make sure the URL you copy starts with /zoeken/huur, or you will spend a week being alerted about houses for sale.
- 2
Set every filter before copying
Area, maximum rent, minimum rooms, floor area, and whether you want listings from every agency or only those accepting new viewings. Funda encodes all of it, which is why the URL looks alarming. That is fine, paste the whole thing.
- 3
Sort by newest
Add sort=date_down so that new stock is at the top. It makes the page Notifio compares more stable, and it makes the click-through from an alert land where you expect.
- 4
Draw a map area if a city is too coarse
Funda lets you draw a search area on the map, and that area ends up in the URL too. For somewhere like Amsterdam, where the difference between two neighbourhoods is 300 euros, this is worth the two minutes.
What to know about monitoring Funda
- Does it need a login?
- No login needed for search results. Funda does show a little more to signed-in users on some object pages, but the search page, the one being monitored, is public.
- How the page loads
- Funda is JavaScript-heavy and does check for automated traffic. Notifio uses a real browser engine and randomised intervals for exactly this reason: what it sends looks like a person with a tab open.
- Auto-reply on this site
- Funda hands you off to the listing agent's own contact form, so auto-reply depends on which agency posted the listing. It works on many of them after you show it the flow once; it is beta and it will not be right everywhere.
Funda alerts: common questions
Does Funda not already send instant alerts?
Its push notifications are triggered on each new match, but those go to the Funda app. The email workflow, by Funda's own account of the system, is scheduled once a day. Notifio is for people who want the speed of the push without living inside the app.
Will monitoring Funda get me blocked?
Notifio loads one page, your search results, at human intervals with randomised gaps, using a real browser. It is not a scraper and it does not crawl the site. We have not seen a monitor at default settings cause a problem.
Can I monitor a map area I drew myself?
Yes. Funda encodes a drawn area into the URL like any other filter, so if you can see it in your browser you can paste it into Notifio.
What about Funda listings that are 'onder optie'?
Notifio reports what the page shows. If your filters include properties under option, you will be alerted about them; exclude them on Funda first if you would rather not hear about them.
Most people watch more than one site
Notifio runs every monitor at once, so Funda does not have to be the only search you are watching. These are the ones people usually pair it with.
Start watching Funda today
One payment, a lifetime licence, and every monitor you can think of. Mac and Windows, updates included, nothing to cancel.