Is a spreadsheet good enough?

For the numbers, yes. Where a spreadsheet costs you is photos, phone use in the moment, and sharing. If you are searching alone, are comfortable in a spreadsheet and always have a laptop nearby, it will get you there. Most people are not doing all three of those by week five.

What happens when a listing gets taken down?

On the public listing sites a sold or expired listing generally disappears, and your saved link goes with it. Anything you want to keep has to be copied out of the listing rather than linked to. That is the main practical argument for saving the details rather than the URL.

Should my realtor see my notes?

The useful split is that practical notes should be shared and emotional ones should not. Your realtor needs to know you want to ask about the roof. Nobody needs to know you have already decided where the tree goes at Christmas, least of all the other side of a negotiation. Housey keeps private notes separate for exactly this.

How many places should I expect to see?

There is no useful number, and anyone quoting you one is guessing. What you can control is that the places you do see are recorded well enough to compare. Buyers who lose a house to indecision usually could not remember the alternative clearly enough to rank it.

How to keep track of the houses you are seeing

Updated September 9, 2026 · 6 minute read

Somewhere around the fifth viewing the houses stop being distinct. You remember the one with the good kitchen and the one on the busy road, but not which one had the tandem parking, and not what the second one was asking. This is a record keeping problem, and it is worth solving before it costs you the house you actually wanted.

Why tabs and the group chat stop working

The first week of a search feels manageable. Four tabs open, two links sent to your partner, all of it comfortably in your head. The method does not survive contact with a real search, and that has nothing to do with how organised you are.

Tabs close. One browser restart, one phone running out of memory, and the shortlist is gone with no record that it existed.
Links die. Once a listing sells or expires it usually comes off the public sites, and the link you saved lands on a search page. The photos go with it.
Chat is a stream, not a list. A link sent on Tuesday is twenty messages up by Thursday, in between dinner plans.
Screenshots lose their context. A camera roll of kitchens does not tell you which kitchen was in which house, or what that house cost.

There is a second, quieter problem. What you need in week six is not the listing. It is what you thought while you were standing in the room, and no listing site records that for you.

The seven things worth writing down

You do not need a forty column spreadsheet. Nearly every decision late in a search comes back to the same handful of things, and most of them are things only you can record.

The address and the link: The address is the durable identifier, the link is the convenience. Keep both, because the link will eventually stop working and the address will not.
The asking price, and the date you saw it: Asking prices move during a listing's life. A price with no date attached is not something you can compare against anything later.
One thing you liked: As a specific sentence, not a rating. "The back windows get sun until four" is useful in three weeks. "Nice light" is not.
One thing you would have to live with: Every house has one. Writing it down while you are standing in it is the only reliable way to keep it in the comparison later, once the good kitchen has crowded it out of memory.
Roughly what it would cost per month: Price is what you negotiate. The monthly number is what you live with, and it differs a lot between two places at the same asking price.
How long it has been listed: Useful context for your own offer, and the field most likely to mislead you. See the note below.
The next step: Book a second viewing, ask about the water heater, rule it out. A record with no next step turns into a museum.

Where to keep it

There are three honest options and they fail in different places.

A spreadsheet: Genuinely works, and plenty of buyers finish a search with one. It handles numbers well and forces the comparison into columns. It is bad at photos, bad on a phone in a driveway, and it tells your realtor nothing unless you export it.
A notes app: Fast in the moment, which is exactly when you need it. It falls apart as a comparison tool, because five notes about five houses cannot be read side by side, so you scroll instead of deciding.
A shared board: Keeps the listing, the photos and your own notes in one place, and lets the people helping you buy see the same shortlist you are looking at. It is the only one of the three where saving a place takes one click at the moment you find it.

The test is not which is most powerful. It is which one you will still be using in week six, on a phone, outside a house, with ten minutes until the next appointment. Housey is built for that moment, but a spreadsheet you actually maintain beats a board you abandon.

Four habits that keep the record honest

Write the note before you get back in the car. Two sentences in the driveway are worth more than a paragraph that evening, and far more than nothing.
Rule things out loudly. Move a place to a ruled out column with one line saying why, rather than deleting it. In week six you will want to know whether you already saw the semi on that street and what was wrong with it.
Keep one record per search. If you are also idly watching a second neighbourhood or a different price bracket, keep it separate. Two searches in one list make both unreadable.
Date everything. Prices, notes and your own opinion all move over eight weeks, and undated notes quietly become wrong.

How this works in Housey

Housey is a shared board built for this record. The browser extension adds a save button to the listing sites you already browse, so a place goes onto your board with its address, price, photos and details in one click, from the page where you found it. Those details stay on the card after the original listing comes down.

Notes live on the card, next to the listing they belong to
Private notes are yours alone, so the things you would not put in a group chat still get written down
Columns carry the next step, from saved to booked to ruled out
Everyone you invite sees the same shortlist, so nobody is working from a screenshot

Common questions

Is a spreadsheet good enough?: For the numbers, yes. Where a spreadsheet costs you is photos, phone use in the moment, and sharing. If you are searching alone, are comfortable in a spreadsheet and always have a laptop nearby, it will get you there. Most people are not doing all three of those by week five.
What happens when a listing gets taken down?: On the public listing sites a sold or expired listing generally disappears, and your saved link goes with it. Anything you want to keep has to be copied out of the listing rather than linked to. That is the main practical argument for saving the details rather than the URL.
Should my realtor see my notes?: The useful split is that practical notes should be shared and emotional ones should not. Your realtor needs to know you want to ask about the roof. Nobody needs to know you have already decided where the tree goes at Christmas, least of all the other side of a negotiation. Housey keeps private notes separate for exactly this.
How many places should I expect to see?: There is no useful number, and anyone quoting you one is guessing. What you can control is that the places you do see are recorded well enough to compare. Buyers who lose a house to indecision usually could not remember the alternative clearly enough to rank it.