House-hunting in Nairobi takes weeks, not an afternoon. Rentor gives you two ways to keep hold of what you found: favourites for the specific places you like, and saved searches for the hunt itself — with alerts, so new matches come to you.

Favourites — the heart

Tap the ♥ on a card in the search results, or the save button on a video in Discover, and it joins your shortlist. It works on:

• Homes on the rentals marketplace — a whole property, or a specific unit.
• Stays on the short-stay marketplace.
• Service posts in the Discover feed, so a fundi whose work impressed you is easy to find again.

You need to be signed in — tapping the heart while signed out takes you to sign-in and brings you straight back to what you were saving. Tap the heart again to remove it.

Your Saved page

Everything you hearted lives on one page:

• On the website: ♥ Saved in the header (it appears once you're signed in). Tenants also have Saved in their dashboard sidebar, under Explore.
• In the phone app: members have a Saved tab on the bottom bar. Everyone else finds it under More → Saved, or behind the bookmark button at the top of Discover.

Each item shows its photo, its name, and its price — rent per month for a home, per night for a stay, or from KES … for a property with several units still going.

A listing that goes off-market stays on your list, marked. It is not quietly deleted. You saved four flats to compare; if one gets taken you should still be able to see what you were comparing it against, and what it cost.

Any Rentor account can use this — you don't need a role. A plain member with no dashboard has a Saved page just the same.

Saved searches — the hunt, not the house

A good search is work: the county, then the estate, the rent range, three amenities, verified only. Rebuilding it every evening is the tedious part of looking for a home.

Press ☆ Save this search and Rentor keeps the whole thing. You'll find the button on:

• The rentals marketplace, above the results.
• The Stays search.
• The student housing search, where it keeps the campus, the radius, the sharing limit, who the room is for, and your budget — see Finding student housing.
• The Services directory, once you have narrowed it by trade, place or a search word — see Finding a service provider.

In the app the button reads Save search, and it appears as soon as a filter or a search word narrows the list.

Your saved searches sit at the top of the Saved page. On the website each is tagged Rentals, Stays or Services. Tap one and it reopens exactly the filters you had. Members also see their latest four on their home page, under Your saved searches.

Alerts — let the new listings come to you

A saved search can tell you when something new matches it, so you don't have to keep checking.

On the website: the moment you save a search, an Alerts button appears beside it. Tick Email me new matches, Push to my phone, or both, and choose Daily or Weekly. You can change the same settings later on the Saved page, where every saved search has Email and Push boxes and a Daily/Weekly picker.

In the app: open Saved and tap the bell on a saved search. Switch on Email, Push or both, and pick Daily or Weekly. A filled bell means alerts are on; the line under the search reads something like Alerts: email · push · daily.

How alerts behave:

• Rentor checks once a day. A weekly alert arrives on Mondays.
• You only hear from us when something new is listed — never when nothing is. No "0 new homes this week" emails.
• "New" means listed since your last alert (or since you switched alerts on). For Services, that is new catalogue items and newly verified providers.
• Tapping the alert opens the search itself, with everything that matches today.
• Push alerts need notifications turned on in the app — see Notifications & email preferences.

To stop, untick both boxes for that search, or use the unsubscribe link at the bottom of any alert email — it switches off that one search and leaves the rest alone. To pause every alert email at once, switch off Saved-search alerts in your email notification settings.

What a saved search is not

It is not a snapshot of today's results. The results are live, so a search you saved in June and reopen in August shows what is on the market in August — including everything listed since. That is the whole point: save the search once and check back, rather than rebuilding the filters each time.

Rentor names each search from its own filters, so the list reads like Kilimani · 2 bed · up to KES 60,000 rather than a row of "Search 1, Search 2". Saving the same search twice doesn't create a duplicate, and you can Remove any search you're done with. You can keep up to 40.

One account, both devices

Favourites and saved searches belong to your account, not to the device you were using. Heart a place on your laptop at work and it is on your phone on the matatu home; save a search in the app and it is waiting on the website.

What saving does not do

• It does not tell the landlord or host. Saving is private to you — nobody is notified that you're interested, and your details stay private until you book a viewing or make a booking.
• It does not reserve anything. A hearted unit can still be taken by somebody else, so if you're serious about a place, book the viewing.

When something on your list looks right, open it — what you'll find on a listing walks through the page, and Booking a viewing takes it from there.