The ARE-TEC Blog: All Things IDX, Website, and Techno-geek

This question has been flying around lately.

An IDX is a just way of showing listings online. That’s it. IDX is an Internet Data Exchange – the MLS is exchanging data, over the internet, with others.

Most MLS’s are willing to provide a raw data feed – like a big text file - of the MLS listings to people or companies that can write programs to take all that data and put it into a pretty MLS search. Some MLS’s provide a free version that you can put onto your site, which usually involves copying and pasting some code into the right spot on your site. Some don’t provide a free version, but there are almost always one or more separate companies that can provide that function for you.

Many agents and brokers elect to pay a company for a different IDX solution, so that the MLS search on their websites are different or more useful than other agents in their marketplace. And there are lots of companies out there to choose from.

So how do you pick?

Cost Vs Value

Most IDX providers charge some kind of monthly fee. Since it is usually web based software, there are constant revisions and updates, so you pay monthly and always have the latest version. Plus, MLS’s often make small, but frequent changes to the format of their data, so the IDX provider is constantly adjusting to those changes so that your MLS search can be used uninterrupted.

You’ll have to trade off cost with the value that you get. Not all IDX solutions are created equal, and some deliver great value for the cost and some don’t. Some things to consider:

• Does it have an attractive, easy to use interface?
• Can you put it anywhere, multiple times, on your various websites for the same cost?
• Can you make it bigger or smaller, change colors and fonts, to fit the style of your blog or site?
• Is there a smaller search widget that you can embed on a sidebar so your users constantly have access to your search without having to click around?
• How will it feature your listings? Is there a separate special feature for that?
• Does it load quickly on the page?
• Can you easily change what fields your users can search on?
• Can you decide how much information to show them in the search results?
• Does it give you the option of turning on and off forced registration?
• If users register, where does that information go? Is there a lead management system included?
• Can you brand it to your own site?
• Can users save searches? Easily email listings? Talk to you about them?
• Can you ‘seed’ the search with a specific city or subdivision to use on a specific city niche site or blog?

Consider how well an IDX solution does the basics, and then think about all the extra features and the various ways you can use them. Will they help your business in a tangible way or are they just extra flashy fluff?

A good MLS search can boost your user-to-client conversions, because web site visitors appreciate a good, clean, simple, powerful MLS search. If you can answer that need for them, they’ll love you for it. So choose carefully.

And I might be somewhat biased, as my husband has a company that provides IDX solutions, but there are plenty of good ones out there. Ours is designed around the things that were important to me as a full-time busy agent, working most of my business online, so I think it’s pretty cool. But don’t take my word for it. Think about what’s important to you, and find the best fit for you and your website.

And if you’re having trouble comparing and contrasting, send me an email and we can chat. Sometimes, it’s hard to make sure you’re comparing apples to apples.

What better way to position yourself as the market expert than with constantly up to date graphs of local market conditions? But it can be hard and time consuming to constantly update those statistics.

Not anymore.

With access to your MLS, the ARE-TEC charts can automatically create - and automatically update - your market statistics. And then you can embed these guys anywhere on your website or blog. Maybe you'll have a set configured for your whole city's marketplace so your visitors and clients can gauge market conditions. And you can have another set just for your farm neighborhood or niche site. You could even embed one on a post about a specific neighborhood and show data just for that neighborhood - and you'll never have to go back and update it, because it will constantly update and display the latest data all on its own. So you can continue to be the market expert without spending hours changing and recreating old charts.

Questions? Interested? Send us an email and let's chat.

Have you ever wanted a mini-home search to put in your blog sidebar so that your blog visitors know immediately that they can look for homes on your site? Or how about embedding one in your posts about a neighborhood? It'd be pretty cool to embed a little search for that neighborhood right there, wouldn't it?

Maybe something like this? Go ahead and try it - it's set up to let you search the Tucson MLS.

This quick search widget is a small listing search, a teeny front page to our full-scale IDX solution, that you can embed, well, just about anywhere. It is designed to give your website users a quick and simple interface to your MLS search, but it can do a whole lot more than that. And as always, it is completely customizeable, so that it blends in with the theme and colors of your blog or website, and you're always in complete control of what fields the user can search on and how much information is displayed as a result.

Questions? Interested? Send us an email and let's chat.

We all need a good way to feature our listings and keep our sellers happy. What better way than with a special listing gallery widget that automatically knows which listings are yours and displays them without you having to constantly change it?

That's an example of a listing gallery. Right now, it's just slowly going through the entire Tucson MLS. But I can change that. I could have this little gem of a widget show only my listings, or only my brokerage's listings.

If I wanted to, I could make a whole website that features my listings, and make this widget huge. Or maybe I want to embed it into the sidebar of my blog - I can resize it to fit there too. In fact, this little listings widget is actually pretty powerful. It'll go on just about any website, anywhere.

Questions? Interested? Send us an email and let's chat.

Behold, the Search Cube.

Welcome to the ARE-TEC IDX Solution - created by agents, for agents. Go ahead, play with it a little, get a feel for how it works. This is an example that displays the Tucson MLS.

The whole idea behind this IDX solution is powerful simplicity. There's a lot of capability here, but not a lot of flashing whiz-bang not-sure-what-it-does type of stuff. Just a clean, simple, flexible and highly customizeable IDX search.

Just about everything you see here can be customized: size, colors, the fields that users can search on, the fields that are displayed in the search results. Want to make users register to use your search? No problem. We'll even put their registration information into customer relationship management software, so you can stay in touch with them later.

How about having a special MLS search on a niche site for just a certain area of town? Done.

What if you want to embed an MLS search on your Outside Blog here at ActiveRain? We can do that. Want one on your regular website too? We say go for it. You can put this search on just about any website, size it to fit, and do it all fast and easy.

Questions? Interested? Send us an email and let's chat.