Monitors & saved places
Two Pro features do work while you’re not looking: monitors watch a school or neighborhood for news, and automated place research keeps the details on your saved places current.
Monitors
Open any school or neighborhood page and press Monitorin the hero, beside Save. From then on we check daily for news about it and sort what we find into categories, so a rezoning notice doesn’t get buried under a sports result.
You read it all in one place: the Monitoring panel on your dashboard. On the left is your watchlist, filterable by All / Schools / Neighborhoods; on the right, one shared “What’s new” reader for whichever entry you pick. On a phone you get the watchlist first and tap through to the reader, with a back button to return. Unread items carry a count; you can mark everything read, and sort newest, oldest, or unread first.
A few specifics:
- You can have 3 monitors active at once. Turn one off to make room.
- Turning a monitor off stops future checks but keeps everything it already found readable.
- The watchlist shows saved and monitored entries together, so you can save something without watching it, and watch something without saving it.
- Monitoring lives only on the dashboard now — the old per-page “What’s new” readers on individual school and neighborhood pages are gone. The Monitor button in the hero is how you turn one on.
Automated place research
As you explore a neighborhood you can save places — a pediatrician, a library, a coffee shop, a gym. Turn on Auto-research places and we keep those saved spots researched for you in the background: no selecting rows, no sending a job, no waiting.
The toggle sits at the top of Saved → Places, and again in the Auto-research section of your dashboard. We keep up to 25 of your saved places under standing watch.
What comes back for each place is deliberately narrow:
- Street address
- Phone number
- The place’s own website
- A short summary written for a family
- A flag if it looks permanently closed
No link dumps, no directory pages, no third-party listings — just the details you’d otherwise open five tabs to find. Results appear inline on each place’s card in Saved, and the newest few surface on your dashboard. A “new” badge on the Places tab clears once you’ve looked.
If you used the older version of this: the select-a-few-places-and-send flow and its monthly quota are gone. The toggle replaced them entirely, and it’s more generous.
If you cancel Pro
Both features stop doing new work, but you keep what’s already there — you can still read the news your monitors collected and the research on your saved places, and you can still turn monitors off. See Motley Pro & billing.