Six weeks into a property search you have forty tabs open, two spreadsheets that disagree, and no memory of which listing had the south-facing terrace and which had the service charge that looked wrong. The listings you saved by leaving the tab open are gone, because the browser restarted. The one you meant to go back to was in Valencia, or possibly Alicante.
This is not a discipline problem. A cross-border search runs for months, spans several markets, and produces more candidates than working memory holds. The tools that fix it are unglamorous: a search you leave running, and a place to put the results. Both are on the free plan, and the second one is where most people stop short.
Here is how to set both up, in the order that makes sense, and what changes on Pro.
A Saved Search Is a Question. A Board Is an Answer.
The two get conflated constantly, so it is worth separating them before the steps.
A saved search stores criteria, not results. You describe what you want once, and it keeps looking. When something new matches, you hear about it. You are bookmarking the question.
A board stores specific listings you chose. Nothing arrives on a board by itself. It is a shortlist you curate and can hand to someone else.
Serious searches run both. The saved search covers the market while you are not looking. The board holds the small number of homes that got past your own filter, in a form you can still read in three weeks.
Step One: Write the Search as a Sentence
Start on the search bar and describe the property rather than assembling it. Three bedrooms in rural Tuscany under 400,000 with a garden works. So does a flat in Lisbon near a metro, two bedrooms, not a ground floor. The search reads the description, so qualitative criteria that no filter grid has a field for are worth including rather than dropping.
Look at what comes back before adjusting anything. If the results are wrong, the fastest fix is usually to rewrite the sentence rather than to reach for a filter, because the sentence is what the engine is reading. Adding one specific constraint at a time also tells you which constraint is the expensive one, which is genuinely useful information about your own brief.
This is also where to be broader than feels comfortable. A saved search that is too tight is a saved search that never fires, and a two-country brief costs you nothing extra to run.
Step Two: Save It, and Turn Alerts On Deliberately
When a query is returning the right kind of thing, save it from the results page. Name it for your future self: Tuscany rural under 400k reads better in a month than Search 1.
Alerts are a separate switch, and they are off until you turn them on. That is deliberate rather than an oversight. A saved search you use to check a hunch should not start emailing you, and the switch is what separates the two intentions.
An alerting saved search re-runs daily and emails you only when it has something. On a search that is producing nothing, that means no email, which is the behaviour you want from something running in the background for three months.
The first email covers matches that appear after you switched alerting on, not the backlog that already existed. That is also deliberate: a first alert containing everything currently on the market would be a listings dump rather than a signal, and you would learn to ignore the next one. The point of an alert is that its arrival means something.
Saved searches are unlimited on the free plan and so are the alerts on them. Running five, one per region you are considering, is the intended use rather than an edge case.
Step Three: Know Where Your Saved Things Live
Everything you save, favourites, saved searches, boards and the pipeline, belongs to a project. A project is the container for one search: one move, one client, one investment thesis. New accounts get a Default project and land in it automatically, so this is invisible until you want a second one.
The free plan includes one project. That is the right shape for the ordinary case, where you are looking for one home, and the reason to want more is when two searches genuinely should not see each other: a personal move and a rental investment, or two different clients.
Step Four: Build the Boards
A board is where a listing goes once you have decided it is worth keeping. Create one from the boards section and name it for what it does. Spain shortlist, Needs a survey, Ruled out but keep for reference, all legitimate. Adding a listing to a board is one action from any result card, and the same listing can sit on more than one board when it belongs in two categories.
The free plan allows up to five custom boards, counted across your account rather than per project. Your favourites are separate and do not count against the five, so five is five real boards rather than four and a bookmark list.
Five is comfortable for two or three markets. It stops being comfortable when the boards start representing stages rather than places, which is the moment worth noticing, because it is the moment your search changed shape.
A listing that leaves the market stays on your board as a record. That is intentional and it is more useful than it sounds: a board with four homes that went in a fortnight and two that have sat since March is a description of the local market you could not have got any other way.
Step Five: Share the Board
Any board can be shared as a link. The person you send it to sees the listings you saved without creating an account, and cannot change anything. That covers the three cases that actually come up: a partner in another city, a family member funding part of it, and an adviser who wants to look at six properties without being sent six URLs across four days.
Shared boards are on the free plan. Sharing is where a collaborative search stops being a thread of forwarded links that nobody can reconstruct afterwards, so it is worth doing early rather than at the decision.
What Pro Adds, Precisely
Four things, and the two that change how this workflow runs are worth naming here. Unlimited boards removes the five-board cap. The lead pipeline is a different object from a board: a board is a list, a pipeline is a list where every property has a current state and a next action, which is what you need once the shortlist turns into six live conversations. Lead activity tracking and agentic search make up the rest, and the pricing page lists all four alongside what the free plan already includes.
One thing worth stating plainly while you are deciding whether any of this is worth paying for: nothing on One Place hides listings behind the price. The whole indexed market is searchable on the free plan, and the upgrade buys tools rather than inventory.
The Part Everyone Skips
Setting this up takes ten minutes. Keeping it useful is the part that decides whether it helps.
Revisit the saved searches every few weeks and rewrite the ones that stopped firing, because a search that returns nothing for a month is usually describing a home that does not exist at that price rather than a market that went quiet. Delete the listings you have genuinely ruled out, so the board stays a shortlist rather than becoming an archive of maybes. And when an alert brings you something that was already under offer by the time you opened the email, the fix is a broader search rather than a faster one: the home was gone on day one, and the only way to be there on day one is to be watching more of the market.
Try a cross-border search
Describe a home in one sentence and One Place searches the full European index at once.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between a saved search and a board?
A saved search stores your criteria and keeps looking, emailing you when something new matches. A board stores specific listings you chose to keep, and nothing arrives on it by itself. Most people running a real search use both: the saved search watches the market, the board holds what survived your own filter.
Are saved searches and alerts included on the free plan?
Yes. The free plan includes unlimited property search, unlimited favourites, unlimited saved searches, and email alerts on those saved searches, plus up to five custom boards and board sharing. Alerts are not a paid feature.
How often do alert emails arrive?
An alerting saved search re-runs daily and emails you only when there is something new, so a quiet search sends nothing rather than sending an empty digest. Alerting is off until you switch it on, and the first email covers matches appearing after that moment rather than the whole existing backlog, so an alert arriving always means something new happened.
How many boards can I have on the free plan?
Five custom boards, counted across your account rather than per project. Your favourites sit separately and do not count against that five. The Pro plan removes the cap.
Can I share a board with someone who has no account?
Yes. A board can be shared as a link, and the recipient sees the saved listings in a read-only view without registering. This works on the free plan.
What happens to a listing on my board when it is sold or withdrawn?
It stays on the board as a record rather than disappearing. That is deliberate, because how quickly the homes on your shortlist leave the market is one of the more honest readings of local competition available to you.
Can one saved search cover more than one country?
Yes, and it is usually the better way to run a cross-border search. Because the search reads a plain-language description rather than a country filter, a brief naming two or three markets and a budget is a single saved search with a single alert on it, rather than one search per country each firing separately. It also makes the comparison you actually want, which is what a given budget buys in each market on the same day, arrive in one email.
The platform can do the watching. It cannot do the deciding, and the point of setting this up properly is that when the deciding moment arrives, the information is already organised instead of scattered across a dozen tabs and a note you cannot find.
