Balancing Home Search “False Negatives” vs. “False Positives”
When setting up searches for prospective Buyers, the goal is to find “the Goldilocks” happy medium: 
sufficiently narrow criteria that the resulting list is manageable . . . but not so narrow that the search returns only a handful of listings.
Or none.
In practice, for most Buyers, the right number of initial search hits is usually 10-15 — with an additional 2-3 new listings per week (at least during the active Spring months).
Conveniently for Buyers’ agents, MLS allows agents to automatically email clients any new listings meeting their search criteria.
“The Goldilocks Setting”
Unfortunately, even a well-honed search is never going to be perfect.
The two, reciprocal risks are that: 1) the search is over broad, and returns listings that ultimately aren’t good candidates; or conversely, 2) the search is so narrow that the Buyer misses out on some good candidates.
In statistics, those are known as the risks of a “false positive” and a “false negative,” respectively.
Pre-Screening Candidates
Given how quickly it’s possible for an experienced agent to vet listings online (at least superficially), my druthers is to always err on the over-broad side.
However, if the search results overload the client, a good compromise (vs. narrowing the search) is for the Buyer’s agent to select “Concierge” mode on MLS.
Then, new listings are first sent to the Buyer’s agent, who can screen out any outliers before forwarding the remainder of the list to their client.
