Guide
A rigid budget filter drops the home a customer would fall in love with — over a mere 200 thousand lira. How does a 10% tolerance close this blind spot, and where should it stop?
Realtiq Team · notes from the field
Last updated · May 14, 2026
A customer says “my budget is 4 million.” You have a 4.2-million home that is exactly what they’re after in location and room count. A rigid filter drops that listing — because 4,000,000 is not ≥ 4,200,000. Yet in the field, that customer is very often open to discussing 200 thousand lira once they see the right home. Budget tolerance exists precisely to close this blind spot.
“4 million” is not a boundary; it’s an anchor. The customer is usually thinking “I could stretch to 4.4” or “for the right home I’d look a bit higher” — but they don’t say that in the first message. They state the number like a hard ceiling while holding a flexible range in their head. If the matching system takes that number literally as a ceiling, it never sees the customer’s real range — and never shows them their best option.
Realtiq applies a default 10% tolerance per customer, adjustable per office. When the customer says 4 million, the system opens the upper bound of the matching search to 4.4 million and brings listings in that range into consideration. The tolerance isn’t an extra screen — it’s a setting that feeds directly into the budget bound of the matching search.
The crucial distinction: tolerance does not mean ignoring the budget. A 4-million customer is never shown a 6-million home; that would be neither respectful nor useful. The tolerance is narrow and deliberate — it exists solely to rescue the right homes that miss by a small margin.
When a listing inside the tolerance range is shown, the price gap is never hidden — it’s stated openly: “This home is about 200 thousand lira above your budget, but the area and room count are exactly what you asked for.” Without that sentence, tolerance feels like a sly “buy the pricier one” push, and it erodes trust. With the sentence, the opposite happens: the customer sees that the system knows their limit and stepped one deliberate, justified step beyond it.
Widening the tolerance is tempting — “make it 20% and we’ll show more homes.” But that’s where the effect reverses: as the range grows, the customer keeps meeting homes far above their budget, feels the system isn’t listening, and trusts the list less. A narrow tolerance that rescues near misses is valuable; a wide one that no longer respects the ceiling makes the filter itself meaningless.
The right setting depends on your office’s customer profile and is fine-tuned together with us. The starting principle is clear: respect the number the customer gives you — but read it as a flexible anchor, not a wall.
6 min read
A buyer who likes a listing almost always makes their first move with a WhatsApp message. What drives this behaviour, and how should it change your office's response flow?
Read the article →5 min read
Most offices already keep their portfolio in a spreadsheet. Make that spreadsheet the single source instead of migrating it, and the pain of double entry and stale listings ends at the root.
Read the article →