Picture a night most agents know. Your buyer sends you a link at 9 p.m. The house she liked two weeks ago just dropped its price. She found it on a portal, on her phone, on the couch. You didn’t know.
Or it’s a home that went under contract last month. The deal fell apart, and the home is back on the market. Your buyer sees it before you call.
You’re not doing anything wrong. You can’t check every listing in your area all day. (Nobody can.) But your buyer doesn’t see that. Your buyer sees that the portal told them first. And one question stays in their head: what is my agent watching?
This fall, these changes come fast. In September, 19.8% of U.S. sellers with active listings cut their asking price, Redfin reports. Realtor.com counted price cuts on 20.8% of listings, the highest share since October 2022. And Redfin found that 14.5% of the deals that went under contract in September were canceled. Every canceled deal can put a home back on the market.
If your site imports MLS listings, it already gets each change. So how do you hear about the change first, and call before your buyer finds it alone?
Why this fall brings so many changes
More homes are for sale, and fewer buyers are signing. Redfin says the number of homes for sale is at its highest level since March 2020, and the share of sellers cutting prices went up in 43 of the 50 biggest metros. Realtor.com counts 1.16 million active listings, up 5.5% from a year ago, and a median of 61 days on market.
Redfin calls this the strongest buyer’s market on record, so buyers walk away more easily. In Jacksonville, 19.9% of September deals were canceled. Tampa was at 18.8%. In Jacksonville, that means about one deal in five fell apart, and each of those homes can come back on the market. The Consumer Policy Center, using Redfin data, found that cancellations ran above 18% in six metros in August, including San Antonio, Atlanta and Orlando.
Each of those events is a reason to call a buyer. A price cut can bring a home into their budget. A canceled deal can give them a second chance at the house they lost.
Your buyer and the portal don’t see the same thing
Portals copy MLS data, but they don’t all copy it at the same moment. The Consumer Policy Center compared the four big portals and found differences in when they listed, removed and relisted homes. These differences showed up most when a home was taken off the market and came back later, often at a new price.
Days on market can also mislead after a relist. In one case, a home in Volente, Texas, showed 27 hours on market on Redfin and 77 days on the other three portals.
So your buyer sees one portal’s copy of the change. The MLS record is the source, and your site has it. The question is whether anyone tells you.
What the daily alert email shows you
MLS Import 7.2.3 now records every change it imports and puts it on a new Alerts page in wp-admin. The changes are new listings, price drops and increases, status changes, under contract, sold, off market, back on market, and listing agent or office changes. You can search the page by MLS number and filter it by event or import task.
“Sold” means sold. The plugin reports it only when the MLS sends a Closed record. A listing that just leaves the feed shows as off market.
Then the email. You tick the kinds of change you want and add one or more addresses. You switch each MLS on or off and set its filter. The filter covers city, neighborhood, zip, price range, property type and status.
You get one email per MLS per day. It opens with one line, such as “10 price drops and 3 listings under contract.” Below it is a table with the photo, the date, what happened, the listing and the MLS number.
A price change shows as “$450,000 to $429,000 (4.7%).”
The email shows up to 50 rows and then links to the Alerts page. On a day with nothing to report, you get nothing.
Photo and description changes are off by default. And the email only covers changes recorded after you switch it on.
Buyers to contact, first in the email
Before the table, the email shows “Buyers to contact”: buyers whose saved search matches a listing that is new or just changed. For each buyer you get the name, the email address, up to 5 matching listings and a link to the buyer’s search. The email lists up to 20 buyers.
It works with saved searches from MLS Import standalone, WpResidence, Houzez and Real Homes. In standalone mode, only confirmed searches count. A buyer must click the link in the double opt-in email first.
So a home whose deal fell apart doesn’t stay a line in a report. It shows up next to the name of the buyer who searched for that zip and that price.
What to do this week
Update to 7.2.3 from your WordPress dashboard, or get it on WordPress.org. Open MLS Import Settings, then Alerts, then the Notifications section. More about the plugin is on mlsimport.com.
Start with price drops and back on market only. Add more kinds of change once you see how long the daily list gets.
Set the filter to the zips you actually work. Add your own address and your assistant’s.
Be clear about one limit. The email comes once a day. It isn’t a live feed, and a portal can still be faster on some changes. But you get the whole day’s changes in one place, with the buyers to call at the top.
When the first email arrives, call the buyers in that first section before you read the rest. If you don’t have saved searches on your site yet, that’s the next thing to set up.
Which change do your buyers find first, the price drop or the home back on the market? Tell us in the comments.
Also this week
Big portals show mostly the same listings
The Consumer Policy Center compared Zillow, Realtor.com, Redfin and Homes.com in 21 communities near ten big metros in August and September 2026. It looked at 500 properties. 74.3% were on all four portals, and 83.4% were on at least three. The portals agree because most of their data comes from the MLS. But there are gaps. Of the homes priced under $500,000 that a portal missed, Homes.com missed 15 and Redfin missed 10. Only Redfin showed 14 Compass “Early Access” homes. And Realtor.com’s contact button doesn’t make clear that it connects the buyer to a buyer agent. When a client asks about a home, ask which portal they used.
Read more: Consumer Policy Center, “Home Search I” · Full report (PDF)
Pending home sales sink near a 12-year low
Redfin’s October 12 report says pending home sales fell 4% from August to September, seasonally adjusted. That’s the biggest monthly drop in more than three years. Pending sales are now at their lowest level since spring 2014, if you don’t count April 2020. Mortgage rates went above 7% by the end of September, and pending sales fell from a year earlier in all 50 of the biggest metros. Seattle fell the most, down 24.4%. Chen Zhao, Redfin’s head of economic research, tells sellers to price realistically from the start. A rate buydown or covering closing costs can help when buyers are stretched thin. Take that into your next listing appointment.
Read more: Redfin, “U.S. Pending Home Sales Sink Near 12-Year Low”
When AI makes a mistake, the agent pays
In episode 7 of The REAL AI Guy: Inside AI, Kevin Hawkins talks with Summer Goralik. She’s the founder of Expert DRE Compliance and a former investigator with the California Department of Real Estate. Her point: the tech is new, but the license laws aren’t. Agents get in trouble when they trust AI output and don’t review it. AI that gives advice to consumers should raise a red flag. When the AI gets it wrong, the licensee is responsible, not the software. For brokers, a signed AI policy protects no one unless someone enforces it. This week, read your chatbot’s answers the way you’d check a new assistant’s work.
Read more: The REAL AI Guy, episode 7 (YouTube)
