As part of our commitment to innovation, this IDX update is included for both new and existing dsSearchAgent Pro users.  Additionally, all v3.3 features are now included as part of our free IDX trial accounts, so even those still on the fence about our solutions can take our latest features out for a spin.

Read below to learn how the latest advances in property search technology are being used to improve the MLS search experience for your clients in this release.

Find nearby IDX listings

Now website IDX visitors can use our new Radius Search panel to find homes near a given location, just like they can on your mobile IDX.  Home buyers simply use the built-in Use my browser’s location option or type in an exact street address, then specify the distance from that spot they want included in their search.

This new search panel is available for all accounts and can be enabled from the Search Tab of your IDX Options.

Create custom polygon links

Added by popular demand, you now can create custom search links using polygon map areas.  Custom IDX links make it easy to pre-filter listings on your real estate web site, and this new polygon option provides even more control over your search.

You’ll find the new Custom Polygon editor in the custom Links area of your IDX admin.  Zoom and pan the map around, then switch to our Draw a shape tool and outline the area(s) to include in your search.  Polygons are great for filtering for listings near light rail stations, along the waterfront, or even on specific islands – - simply draw your search area!

Driving directions to any listing

We’ve also added one-click access to driving directions on all IDX listings. Located under the Maps tab of each listing, our new Get Directions button prompts users for their starting location, then provides step-by-step directions to the listing using Google Maps data. The Driving Directions option is automatically enabled for all accounts already using the Map features on their listings.  You can edit these settings on the Details Tab of your IDX Options.

Both our Radius Search and new Driving Direction features use a combination of Wi-Fi hot spots and IP addresses from Google’s mapping API to determine location for each IDX visitor.  This data tends to be pretty accurate, but we also provide users the option to manually enter a starting address for their search.

More ways to capture IDX leads

v3.3 adds new ways to convert your visitors and capture new leads with your mapping IDX.

A new Ask a Question button makes it easier than ever for home buyers to get in touch with you.  Located below the photos section on each IDX listing, this button prompts users to fill out a quick contact form at any time during their search.  The Ask a Question button can be enabled through the Details Tab tab of your IDX Options.

Additionally, we’ve added new instant message opportunities throughout the mapping IDX interface with new chat buttons below the contact form on the left side of all listings and below the Schedule a Showing and Ask a Question forms.  All chat features send instant messages to your desktop or your mobile phone via SMS, and our new buttons make it even easier for buyers to take advantage of these features.

The new chat buttons have been added to all accounts that already had our existing chat features enabled.  You can enable all dsAgentChat features for your account on the dsAgentChat tab of your IDX Options.

Known in the real estate technology industry for our regular product updates and attention to customer input, this is just a first of many IDX updates for 2012.  We encourage your feedback on this release as well as input on what you’d like to see in our future IDX releases!

• How to get your new mapping MLS IDX solution on your site,
• How to customize the look and feel of your new mapping solution,
• How to manage your visitors/registrations,
• How to create custom searches,
• How to direct IDX traffic back to your site,
• How to get started in using and managing your new contact management system,
• How to create and save custom email newsletters (create drip campaigns, etc.),
• How to manage the leads that have registered for your IDX account,
• How to get started with multi-user lead management (for Pro-Broker dsAgentReach users),

…and more.

To register, just log into your Control Panel and click on “Help via Webinar”. Simply select from the list of available times and follow the basic registration instructions and you’re set to go!

There will be time allotted for Q&A after each scheduled webinar. In the meantime, if you have any questions about dsSearchAgent or dsAgentReach, feel free to drop them in the comments below, we’re always happy to help!

If you have any issues with this new version, please contact our support team immediately and we’ll do our best to work it out.

Thank you for liking what we made.

If you haven’t read our previous blog post on all the functionality contained in dsIDXpress, you may want to check it out right now. We now have our dsIDXpress “microsite” up and running as well. We have tons of details on the functionality on that site already, so rather than rehash all of that here, we encourage you to click through to the dsIDXpress site.

The reason we developed dsIDXpress was because we hear loud and clear how agents and brokers without tens-of-thousands of dollars to spend wanted to compete in search engines with the likes of Realtor.com, Redfin, Trulia, Homes.com, and other large brokerages. dsIDXpress provides all the tools and functionality to do just that at a tiny fraction of the cost. While we can’t guarantee — nor can anyone – that you’ll instantly rank #1 on Google for every address or MLS number in the MLS, dsIDXpress certainly gives you all the tools you need to do so. In fact, we already have seen a number of our trusted beta testers rank better than ALL of the aforementioned sites for given addresses in just the few short weeks they’ve been using dsIDXpress. Between our Live Listings(sm) shortcode functionality, our numerous widgets, and our listings and listing detail virtual pages, dsIDXpress will have you ranking well in search engines in no time at all.

I know that most of you have just been skimming this blog post up until this now with just one question in mind. “What’s the price?” you ask. Well, we’re happy to tell you that we’re offering limited time introductory pricing for this product at the ridiculously low price of just $29.95 per month per domain with NO CONTRACT! If you’re not already a proud owner of our dsSearchAgent Pro IDX solution, you’ll also need to pay a $99.95 setup fee. For those of you who already have dsSearchAgent Pro, or if you purchase dsSearchAgent Pro when you sign up, we’re not even going to charge a setup fee!

All that said, dsIDXpress is NOT meant to completely replace your IDX solution. On the one side, our new dsIDXpress product is meant to make it easy for you to add live MLS content to your blog as well as boost your long-tail search engine traffic. On the other side, our existing dsSearchAgent product is meant to be an interactive interface into your MLS’s data for your website visitors. dsIDXpress and dsSearchAgent are two different products for two different needs, but they’re certainly a great compliment to each other!

Again, we’re extremely excited to announce this product, and we can’t wait to see how our clients use it! You can read more about on the dsIDXpress site, you can request a free trial for your own blog, you can see it in the WordPress Plugin Directory, or you can simply contact our sales department to talk with someone about the product. Enjoy!

WORDPRESS PLUGIN

Built to run on top of the best blogging platforms out there. One that, if you’re not already using, we know you’ll love.

NO IFRAMES

All of the content is placed on the blog from a web service. The content is carefully constructed to be fully compliant with all current and future MLS rules since the web service controls the HTML.

SUPER EASY CONFIGURATION

All the blog owner needs to do after installing the module is add their activation key and click activate. That’s all! No PHP or WordPress guru needed.

SEMANTIC MARKUP

All of the HTML that the web service puts out is semantically appropriate. The benefit of semantic markup is that there’s less HTML bloat and more content for your visitors for search engines to see.

WIDGETS AND SHORTCODES

Widgets and shortcodes give the blogger more ways to interact with the data.

DEMO IT

We’ve set up a basic WordPress Blog with dsIDXpress installed and configured, check it out: http://wp.idx.diversesolutions.com

BETA TEST IT

If you are interested in Beta testing, please sign up here: http://www.diversesolutions.com/beta-signup.aspx We do not have an ETA on a wide-release, but if we need testers in your area, we will contact you.

Our elves have been hard at work here at Diverse Solutions working on something special for you this holiday season. Over the last year or so we have been receiving requests for search engine index-able listings and rightfully so. It is a great way to generate some additional traffic to your website for that long tail segment. Some of you more tech savvy people have found a work around using our current dsSearchAgent Pro product but it’s not easy.   We’re going to change that.  Since WordPress is open source, has the ability to allow custom plug-ins and has become the platform of choice for a lot of websites/blogs these days we figured there isn’t a better choice to roll out our new IDX product on. We have created dsIDXpress.  It is a plug-in for WordPress that allows not only your clients to search the IDX natively via WordPress but more importantly it allows the search engines to index these listings too.

We are seeing some incredible results so far. One of our beta testers, who shall remain nameless, added the “property list” widget to his footer for his listings(14) and now the address for each one of those properties shows up #1 in Google with a link to the details page for that listing. In one week! I know talk is cheap but as we get more testers we’ll start showing some good hard evidence on how this thing kicks ass.

This is just a quick overview of what the plug-in can do at this time. We have many more ideas that are in the works that will be included in the plug in upon final release. Currently we are in the beta testing stage with this product and it is not available to the general public just yet. Product pricing and a final release date have not been set. If you are a current dsSearchAgent Pro client and would like to help us beta test this, or have comments, we’d love to hear from you.

Screenshots

Feature List

Widgets

• Search
  • Visitors can search for properties via a simple, pre-built WordPress search widget. The widget’s search criteria include the property type, city, min and max prices, min beds, min baths and square feet.
  • Each search widget can be customized with a title and a list of cities by the blog owner.
  • The search form is built in such a way that it can be submitted by any search engine that supports forms (of which Google is one).
• Area List
  • Visitors can see a simple list of links for the cities, communities, tracts, and zip codes that the blog owner has configured for each area list widget. All links created in these widgets are easily crawl-able by search engines.
• Property List
  • Visitors can see a configurable list of properties presented in three different modes. All of the HTML for the three modes is placed directly on the page containing the widget when the page is loaded; the modes are toggled via JavaScript. Search engines see all of the content for these widgets.
    • A list mode shows the properties as a simple list of links. These links are good for a simple, short, non-flashy display of the properties. These links are crawl-able by search engines
    • A map mode shows the properties on a map. On hover, a small property thumbnail photo is shown along with some relevant details.
    • A detailed mode shows the essential details of each property as well as a single 100px wide photo of each property. The different properties shown in the detailed mode can be navigated with “previous” and “next” buttons.
  • This widget can be configured to show a user-defined number of properties from four different sources.
    • It can show properties from a specific city, community, tract, or zip with a user-defined order (ex. top 10 properties in Laguna Beach order by highest price first).
    • It can show only the agent’s properties.
    • It can show only the office’s properties.
    • It can show properties from a link created in the control panel if you have our dsSearchAgent Pro IDX product. This allows for a great deal of flexibility.

Results

• The matching property results for the search criteria are displayed 25 per page with paging links at the top and bottom of the results.
• The search architecture is designed from the ground-up to be extremely fast. In many cases, we’ve found it to actually be faster than bringing up a WordPress post within the blog.
• Each listing in the results displays a 250px wide photo, the address, city, price, and other important information.
• Default sort order is to show newest listings first. This ensures a constant churn of properties in the first few pages of results for any search query.
• The title for the fake blog post (since we’re essentially displaying all of the results in a blog post) corresponds to the name of the area searched. The title is automatically placed in the area where the post title would go (usually in an H2 tag or something) and in the TITLE tag of the page.
  • Las Flores community searched => “Real estate in the Las Flores community”
  • Laguna Beach city searched => “Real estate in the city of Laguna beach”
  • Melinda Heights tract searched => “Real estate in the Melinda Heights area”
  • 92688 zip searched => “Real estate in the 92688 zip code”
• Link structure:
  • yourblog.com/idx/city/laguna-beach/ loads the 25 newest properties in Laguna Beach with links to the older results

Details

• Example for the title of the blog post and in the HTML TITLE tag: 2665 Riviera Dr, Laguna Beach, CA 92651 (MLS # L29755)
• Property details includes photo slideshow, all of the basic property info, the property description, many other fields and features, and a Google map showing the location of the property.
• Photo slideshow is loaded via JavaScript and Flash. Visitors without Flash / JavaScript, including search engines, will see the primary photo for the listing along with an appropriate ALT attribute for the photo.
• Link structure:
  • Simple example for loading property details for MLS #L29755: yourblog.com/idx/mls-l29755-2665_riviera_dr_laguna_beach_ca_92651

Shortcodes

• Shortcodes are small bits of text that can be embedded in blog pages or posts by the blogger. When the page or post is loaded, the shortcode text itself is replaced with other data. In the case of dsIDXpress, the IDX shortcodes are replaced with live data from the MLS so that whether the post / page is viewed the day it’s saved or 3 weeks after, the data will be up to date.
  • idx-listing: Will show property details when given an MLS number. Example: [idx-listing mlsnumber="U8000471"]
  • idx-listings: One example use of this shortcode would be when an agent wants to create a page for a particular city or community and wants to list the top 20 most-recently-listed properties in that area. Example: [idx-listings city="Laguna Beach"]

Through a mesh of ingenuity, and a bit of alchemy, our wizards (legit mad ones) have cooked up some magic for our IDX embedding code that automatically resizes the frame containing your IDX, to prevent the scrollbars from appearing. How cool is that?! And you don’t have to do anything to get this new functionality, it’s already enabled! That’s right, no additional fees, no additional configuration, it’s enabled and it just works.

One note however, you must be using our <script> tag, not a standard <iframe>. If you are using an <iframe> all you need to do is head to the dsSearchAgent Dashboard in your Control Panel and replace that old-and-moldy <iframe> with the nice and shiny <script> located in the “Add IDX To Your Site” section of the Dashboard page.

Let us know what you think!

Here’s an example of the lack of scroll bars in action: http://www.southorangecountyliving.com/Home_Search.htm

Overall, we were able to make a number of changes that decreased the initial size of our IDX by nearly 30%!! We made all of our images much, much leaner, we further combined our JavaScript and CSS into fewer files, and we removed some preloading where it just didn’t make sense anymore.

Additionally, we moved nearly all of our JavaScript, CSS, and images / icons to the same global network infrastructure that twitter, SmugMug, WordPress.com, Amazon, and other multi-million/billion dollar companies are using! The advantages we gained by making that move is that the majority of our IDX is now served from 14 locations around the world depending on the visitor’s location instead of just a single location. In other words, a dsSearchAgent visitor located in Boston will no longer have to wait for a myriad of image, JavaScript, and CSS requests to be served up from a data center 2,600 miles away in Los Angeles; instead, that visitor will pull all of that data from a dedicated cache location in Newark, NJ.

Speed matters. Google found that their traffic to Google maps increased by 25% after they shaved 20-30% off the initial size of the Google maps home page.  Amazon found (PowerPoint presentation) that for every 100 millisecond delay that they introduced in testing scenarios, they experienced a 1% drop in revenue. That’s huge!! Now that we’re leaner and closer to our visitors, we’re really excited to see what this does for our own traffic.

Anyway, give it a whirl. Drop us a comment and let us know what you think!

So without further ado, please visit our launch site to learn more and try it out yourself: http://dslistingexpress.diversesolutions.com

We know you’ll like it.

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.