How do you keep track of several homes you're considering bidding on?
By giving every home its own fixed slot — the same fields, in the same order — instead of scattering your notes across text messages, email threads and memory. A house hunt spread over several weeks typically grows to five or ten candidates, and at some point nobody can hold them all in their head at once.
Short answer: set up one fixed place where every home gets its own "page" with the same information: address, area, price, measurements, photos and a status (considering, bid placed, rejected, won). The system matters more than the tool — a spreadsheet, a folder with subfolders, or an app can all solve this, as long as every home has its own slot and you update the status as the house hunt moves along. Without that system, homes blur together after the fourth or fifth viewing, and you end up choosing the home you remembered last, not the one that actually suited you best.
Why a house hunt outgrows memory
The first couple of homes are easy to keep straight. You remember the address, the price, and what puzzled you. But a typical house hunt stretches over weeks, not a single afternoon — and during that stretch, new candidates keep turning up from the listing portal while old ones either fall away or move on to a second viewing. By candidate number six or seven, it is no longer a question of good or bad memory. There are simply too many loose threads for anyone to hold together without somewhere to write them down.
The problem isn't only the number. It's that the homes arrive in different formats: an estate agent link here, a screenshot there, a note in your phone after a viewing, a text with a neighbour's comment. When data about the same home sits in four places, it isn't really stored anywhere — because you won't find it again when you need it.
What every home page should contain
Whether it's a spreadsheet or an app, the same fields are what make a home overview usable:
- Address and a link to the listing. Listings disappear once a home is sold — so save a screenshot or a PDF of the sale listing too, not just the link.
- Area, and which area. Is it the area recorded in the public register, the agent's figure, or your own measurement? The three can differ, and it is worth knowing which figure you are looking at.
- Price and price per square metre — calculated from the same area as the other homes, or you aren't really comparing.
- Viewing date and how many other people were there — that tells you something about how quickly you need to decide.
- Status: considering, bid placed, rejected by seller, withdrawn by you, won. A status field is what turns the overview into a working tool rather than just an archive.
- Your own measurements and photos of whatever decides the purchase — not the stylist's photos, but your own, of whatever puzzled you.
A system with no app at all
The simplest system is a folder per home, named with the address and date, and a spreadsheet with one row per home and the fields listed above. That works fine up to five or six homes. The advantage is that it needs no new tool — just the discipline to update the same place every time.
The weakness shows up once the number grows, or once you need to compare something spatial: is bedroom two in home A big enough for the bed you already own? A spreadsheet can store a number, but it cannot show you a room. As soon as the question is about what can actually fit where, the spreadsheet is missing something only a drawing or a photo can give you.
When a spreadsheet stops being enough
Three situations reveal the limit of a purely text-based system:
- You need to compare rooms, not just homes. "Is the living room in home C bigger than in home A?" is answered better by two floor plans side by side than by two numbers in a column — because an area figure says nothing about a room's shape, and a narrow 20 m² living room can be furnished quite differently from a square one of the same area.
- You want to know whether your furniture fits. That requires the room's actual measurements, not just the total area.
- The number grows past ten. At that point you spend more time keeping the spreadsheet tidy than on the house hunt itself.
How many homes can you actually keep in active view?
In practice, the limit for what one person can hold "in their head" without notes sits at around two or three homes. With a written system — whatever kind — that limit moves to somewhere between five and ten, before it starts to feel like administration rather than house hunting. Past ten, it is rarely the sheer number that's the problem, but that old candidates never get weeded out: a home you have rejected belongs in an archive, not in the active list you look at every day.
A rule of thumb: go through the list once a week, and move anything no longer relevant to "closed". An active list of three to five homes is easy to take in. A list of fifteen, of which ten are effectively dead, is not.
What a free tier in an app typically limits
Most home-measuring and planning apps that offer a free version set the limit at how many homes you can save — not at what you can do with each one. That makes sense from the maker's side: storage and syncing cost money per home, while the features themselves do not. As a user, it means you can try everything on one home for free, and only need to pay once you need several candidates on file at the same time — which typically happens exactly when the house hunt shifts from "browsing" to "serious".
What a system does not solve for you
No matter how well organised the list is, it does not make the decision for you. Nor does it stop you being swayed by a beautifully styled home or good weather on viewing day. A system gives you the same figures for every home, so you can weigh things up on common ground — but the weighting between the figures is still yours. And a system does not update itself: forget to change the status when a bid is rejected, and you keep working from stale data.
What HouseSense does
HouseSense has a front page that shows all your saved homes with area and status in a single screen — the same idea as the spreadsheet, just built to hold a measured floor plan, photos and room-by-room measurements for each home, not just a number. The number of homes you can have on file is what the subscription limits: Free gives you one home, Private gives you five, Estate gives you an unlimited number. It's not the features that are locked — a home on the free tier can be scanned, measured up and exported exactly like a home on Estate. The limit sits purely in how many homes you can keep on file at once.
How to build your system today
- Pick one place, and use only that one. A spreadsheet, a notes app with one page per home, or an app built for the purpose — but only one place, or the data is scattered again within a week.
- Write the same six to eight fields for every home, in the same order, every time — address, area, price, date, status, and whatever puzzled you.
- Add a status field, and update it the moment a home falls away or moves forward — otherwise the list grows unmanageable with homes that are effectively dead.
- Save your own measurements and photos, not just the agent's. They are the ones you can still trust once the home is sold and the listing is gone.
- Tidy up once a week. Move closed homes out of the active list, so you only see the ones still in play.