What IDX Can Do for You
MFRMLS
Every day, millions of people search the internet for real estate listings. Wouldn’t you like your web site to give them what they’re looking for? Thanks to a great tech tool that’s provided for you by the Florida Association of Realtors and the Mid-Florida Regional MLS, your web site can offer customized searches of the MLS database to your visitors, bringing them back over and over again until they find what they’re looking for. And by the time they’ve found their perfect home, they will have established a relationship with you - they know that you’re an agent they can trust to show them houses that they want to see. Sounds good to you? Let’s talk about this tool.
IDX, Internet Data Exchange, allows participating brokers to display MLS listings from other participating brokers on their own web sites and to have their listings displayed on other web sites. This gives you some enormous advantages in today’s real estate market.
Equal footing with the big guys - Before IDX, brokers could only list the properties that they personally represented on their web sites. Searchers bypassed the small web sites with fewer listings in favor of big brokers and real estate aggregators like Realtor.com.
IDX puts your web site on equal footing with the big web sites by letting you offer a full inventory of properties to search. More content means more traffic. More traffic means more referrals and sales.
Customer Retention - IDX can be integrated into your web site so that your visitors get everything that they need right there. No need for them to hop from web site to web site to find all the relevant properties – they’re all right on your web site. Other IDX tools like Real Living's MyRealLiving gives visitors the ability to save searches and create email alerts and give your web site visitors a tangible link to your web site and a reason to come back.
Wider exposure for your own properties - Not all of the advantages are for the buyers’ market. One of the major advantages of participating in IDX is that your own listings get wider exposure. When you participate in IDX, your listed properties will appear on all participants’ web sites – unless you choose not to make them available. That gives your sellers wider exposure and more eyes on their property, which can help their homes move faster. It’s just another service that you can offer to the home owners who list their properties with you.
In short, IDX lets you bring the latest listings and information about properties to your web site and make them available to your clients and prospective clients. But it’s a two way street – in return for providing more information and inventory to your visitors, you get more information from your visitors. And more information means that you can do a far better job of making sure that they find exactly what they’re looking for.
So How Do I Get IDX?
First, a little self-promotion. If you're a Real Living Agent you already have it. It's automatically included on all agent websites, see Real Living Home Search.
Now if you're not a Real Living Agent, but you are member of Florida Association of Realtors, there are four IDX options available from FAR so that you can choose and use the one that suits you best.
- I don’t have a web site.
Free company web pages with IDX could be perfect for you. You choose a web page template that you like from the selection offered by FAR. You can customize the templates to suit your marketing goals, and then FAR pulls MFRMLS data to your page every day.
- I have my own domain name or URL.
Free company web page using your URL might be the way for you to go. FAR will host your URL, and you can use the web page templates to set up your page just like above.
- I’ve got my own web site and would just like to add an MLS search page to it.
Free frameable listings could be the ideal solution for you. This is the ideal option for brokerages that have a web site and want to put all of the listings in one place for their visitors to search.
- I’m pretty savvy about web stuff – or I have a well-developed web site and know how to manipulate data. Or – I operate in multiple markets. Free data download is the option that you want. You can download raw MLS data from multiple markets and feed it into your web pages the way that you want it to appear. Here's an example of a custom IDX integrated website.
For more information on these four options contact your local board for those in MFRMLS members check out the IDX links on the Mid-Florida Regional MLS website
If you're a member of GTAR, there is a fifth option available through GTAR. This option is not free, but it does provide a more accurate and up to date feed than currently available from FAR.
- GTAR offers real time data downloads from the MFRMLS for your web site. The free FAR feeds are a great service, but by the time the information is received at the FAR office, processed, uploaded and made available to individual brokerages it can be as much as 72 hours old. The GTAR data download option is pulled directly from MFRMLS and sent to you without the intermediate steps. The information is accurate and up to date as of the time that you pull it down. And since it doesn’t have to be aggregated with all the other regions in the state, the data tends to be more complete. The cost for the MFRMLS data feed is $50 a month, but if up to date, accurate information is important to you, it’s more than worth the cost. For more information on this option contact Jennifer Ellerman at GTAR.
Answers to Your Questions
Why should I participate in IDX? When you display the entire MLS inventory on your site, you give your customers a good reason to come back to your site again and again. Why would they go elsewhere when they can see the same houses on your web site?
What if I decide not to participate? Will MLS refuse to carry my listings? Participating in IDX is a business decision. MLS will not penalize those who decide not to participate by refusing to list their properties, or by refusing to transfer your listings to Realtor.com or another aggregator site. In short, MLS cannot require you to participate in IDX.
What data is displayed by IDX? FAR has included a large number of data fields that may be displayed via IDX, but ultimately, you decide what is actually shared. And confidential information such as access codes and other broker-only information will not ever be displayed.
Date: Monday, October, 15th 2007 @ 08:08:16 PM Views: 385
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