Walk Score helps people find walkable places to live. Walk Score calculates the walkability of an address by locating nearby stores, restaurants, schools, parks, etc. Walk Score measures how easy it is to live a car-lite lifestyle—not how pretty the area is for walking.

As an admiring fan of their Walk Score idea and their motto (“Software for Civic Live”), we knew that it was our responsibility to bring this greatness to our dsSearchAgent product, so that’s what we did. You can see the functionality on our demo IDX site. Starting today, all of our IDX clients can easily flip a switch in their control panel area to enable that great Walk Score functionality. Specifically, we’ve implemented it in the following four places on our IDX:

1. Search by Walk Score. Now this is cool. We love being able to put in an address Walk Score, but it makes it SO much better when you don’t have to constantly look up the Walk Score for each address for each property you’re interested in buying / leasing.
2. Sort by Walk Score. If you can search by Walk Score, you should be able to sort by Walk Score too. Just click in the “sort by” box at the top of the results and choose “Walk Score, Highest First” to order the search results from highest to lowest Walk Score.
3. View the Walk Score in both the search results and property details. Even if our clients choose not to show the “Search by Walk Score” search panel, they can still enable the functionality to allow their visitors to see the Walk Score for each listing in both the search results and property details. Check it out here; just look for the little walking guy icon at the top-right of each search result and in the top-right corner of the property details area.
4. View the Walk Score tile. When you click on the “Walk Score” link at the top-right of the property details area, you’ll see the Walk Score tile that shows all of the amenities that are factored into the score.

In case you missed the link above, check out the demo. We hope you’ll enjoy using it as much as we enjoyed building it into our system. We’re really excited to say that we’re the first national IDX provider that enables this type of functionality. We spent quite some time on the UI for this feature in order to make everyone happy. We also did our homework to make sure that the implementation appeased the compliance departments at the MLS’s who mandate their percentage of employed anal-retentive individuals to be greater than 80%.

Anyway, we’d love to hear what you think!

Update 3/31/09 8:47 AM: Just to be clear, if you have dsSearchAgent and you want the Walk Score functionality for your own IDX, you need to enable this in your control panel. There are two places you can enable the functionality, and they’re both in the “Options” section. First, you can drag over the “Walk Score” panel under the “Search Tab” tab. Second, under the “Result Tab”, you can put a tick in the “Show Walk Score in results” checkbox. The sort-by option for Walk Score will automatically show up as soon as you enable the search functionality.

Mike is a veteran real estate technology and marketing expert with over 12 years of experience serving the industry. In his most recent role as the president of MLBroadcast Mike has established a a firm foothold as a well respected member of the re.net and social media space.

His blog, Mike’s Corner has become a “go-to” guide for real estate marketing advice and opinion. Price is a frequent speaker and of the organizers of the REBarcamp concept, an industry event platform that has spread to cities across the country.

Diverse Solutions provides a wide range of Real Estate development services to produced inspired, attention-grabbing, easy to use products. Our decision to create Mike’s role was to extend our customer service experience while engaging clients and prospects of DS within the social media channels, extend the Diverse Solutions brand and offer general assistance with development and IDX questions.

You can follow Diverse Solutions and Mike on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/diversesolution. You can also join us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Diverse-Solutions/43077687863 and Active Rain at http://www.activerain.com/diversesolutions.

Join us in welcoming Mike to the Diverse Solutions team!

For those that didn’t have a chance to make it out to the tech fair VisitMyLuxuryHome.com put together a series of video interviews with each of the ARMLS approved vendors in attendance. Of course I was chosen to speak on the behalf of DS. How did I do?

Candace Robinson who hosts the AZ Real Estate Blogging Network also did a follow up post about her experience at the ARMLS Tech Fair. She was also gracious enough to capture a few shots through the day and add the to her Flikr account. You can view those photos HERE!

So, to get to the new admin, simply navigate your browser to http://controlpanel.diversesolutions.com and you will login with the same username and password you already use in our other admins. Additionally we’ve also put a big yellow notice on the dashboard of each of the affected admins, announcing the change and providing a link to auto-login.

Now, being this is a soft-release we’re allowing you to continue to use the old administration areas just in case, but only for a week. So on April 10th if you attempt to go to your old admin area, you will be forwarded to the new dsControlPanel. And the “Old Admin” link will be removed from the dsControlPanel navigation.

I’m sure many of you are going to say “how the heck do I use this thing?!”, so instead of calling, emailing, or quitting, we’ve provided you with demo videos. From anywhere in the admin you can click on the icon to get a popup of all our help videos. Additionally, each section that has a video will also have a icon directly to the left of the icon. We’re hoping these videos answer most of your questions. Let us know if you can’t find help for something.

We’re really proud of dsControlPanel and we hope you enjoy the new functionality and usability. Thanks everyone, and please, tell us what you think.

We have been hard at work improving the backend for both our mapping mls idx-solution, dsSearchAgent, and our contact & lead-management solution, dsAgentReach, for some time, and today we wanted to introduce to you some of the overall changes & additions to these programs, as well as announce our beta program.

Before we get started, for those of you who just want the bottom line, here is the short-list of what you’re going to see with in our new control panel:

• Streamlined Interface
• Improved integration & consolidation between dsAgentReach & dsSearchAgent
• New applications (Form-Creator and Lead-Pipelines)
• Complete re-tooling of incoming lead integration

Our main goal for this release was to fully integrate dsSearchAgent with our dsAgentReach & Lead Management products. This alone was the number one request from many of our customers, and by far one of the most useful.

Our second goal was to streamline the user interface of all our dsAgentReach applications. We decided to start from square one and take the user interface in a completely different direction. We think this new system will really help you to better organize and utilize your Leads & Contacts.

Third, we decided to change how we handle incoming-email leads, in addition to providing more avenues for lead aggregation. We feel that our new method and avenues will help streamline the lead-distribution process.

Beta Information

We also wanted to let you guys know that we’re starting a limited-beta program to help work the kinks out and ready the new control panel for wide release. If you would like to participate, you must already have our dsSearchAgent product. To request to be included in the beta, email your Customer Support Representative, or our general support line: support@diversesolutions.com. For those of you we’ve contacted to be in the beta, remember that you can post your thoughts and bugs in our forum.

That’s it for our overview. Again I’ll be detailing all this information in individual posts, describing our changes, and how each feature will work.

Here are a few notes on this release

• Better cross-platform support (Including support for Windows Vista)
• Audio and task/dock-bar chat notifications
• Cleaner Buttons, and small usability tweaks
• MUCH faster initial load (In most cases)

Also, I wanted to thank all of our customers that have been sending in their feedback and bugs with this program, it has been extremely helpful in finding our cross-platform issues, keep up the good work!

After months of procrastinating over starting a company blog, we are finally here. I didn’t just want to put a blog up and post on it once or twice a month. If we were going to do it, we wanted to do it right. The biggest hurdle we had with this project was determining who was going to write all the posts. I certainly didn’t have time to write numerous posts a week, so I did what all good CEO’s do – I delegated. I selected individuals from each department that I felt had a lot to share, and from today on, you’ll see them posting articles within their areas of expertise.

You’ll see me posting from time to time about company updates and product ideas that we’d like to get some feedback on. In addition, we plan on discussing everything from website marketing tips to our thoughts on recent real estate news. Finally, we’ll also share some ideas on how to get the most out of our products and services.

We hope that this blog will help us better connect with our customers and with the real estate industry in general. If you have any requests on what you would like to see us talk about, just let us know through a comment.