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.

New Options

• You can now set Acres as the default measure of Lot Size. This affects the “Lot Size” Criteria in the Search Tab.
• You can now turn off the pre-built Header in your Welcome and Listing Update emails.
• Additionally you can customize the Welcome Email subject line
• Now that we added Price Drops to the Property Details, we recognized that some of you may not want to see this on your IDX, so we’ve added an option to turn off Price Drops.
• If you need to limit your IDX search results to a specific state, you now can. Just add the state abbreviation to this new option in Control Panel.
• In your Welcome and Listing Update emails you can use mail-merge fields. These fields are [[Contact.<Field Name>]] and [[Agent.<Field Name>]]. You can get the <Field Name>s for Contacts from the title of each field when you edit a Contact in Control Panel. Here are some examples:
  • [[Contact.First Name]]
  • [[Contact.Last Name]]
  • [[Agent.First Name]]
  • [[Agent.Last Name]]
• Finally you can now customize all of the links to your IDX (from emails, rss, etc.) to link to the page you frame dsSearchAgent on your own website.

Custom Links

Custom Links now, by default, do not “lock” the Visitor into the result set the Custom Link defines. So effectively Custom Links only give the Visitor a “starting point” for searching. This removes the confusion and frustration for the Visitor, when visiting Custom Links. If you wish, you can go in and “lock” these results when you edit the Link in Control Panel, this will cause the Custom Link to behave as before.

Quick Search Module

We’ve added a new Quick Search Module for you to use. Quick Search Modules allow you to put a simple form on your site that allows the Visitor to choose some basic criteria, then are brought to your IDX Search and shown the results based on the criteria they chose.

Syndication

We recognize that many of you are very interested in syndicating your own listings to not only your own blogs, but also popular websites (like Trulia, Zillow, etc.). You’ve been always able to pull RSS feeds off of your Custom Links (limited to 25 results), but now we offer an RSS and “Trulia Feed Format”, or TFF feed, for your own listing, with no limit to the number of items in the feed. This effectively allows you to export your own listings to any site accepting the Trulia Feed Format, or RSS.

As far as the Feeds themselves go we’ve added a few things to  keep them fresh:

• Price change is shown in RSS feeds (where available)
• Community and Tract is now shown in RSS (where available)
• Links from RSS (and Emails) now consume the “Framed Page” option in your dsSearchAgent Options. Keeping visitors coming back to your site, instead of just dsSearchAgent.

Well last July Zillow released “Co-Branding” and in our update this November we integrated it, now I’m here to tell you how to set it up (yay). Check out how swanky it looks in our state of the art screenshot:

(hint: it’s that grey-banner at the top of the page.)

So, you want to set this up? The first thing you need is a Zillow Account (make one here). Once you’ve setup your Account, go to your Profile page and grab the “Screen Name” (see right). Save that for later in Notepad (windows) or Textedit (mac), as you’ll need it real soon.

Next, go into your dsSearchAgent Options in your Control Panel. Once in Options, go to the Agent Info Tab (it’s the first one) and on the bottom right you’ll see the “Zillow Screen Name” text box. Paste your screen name you saved from the first step here.

That’s it. Now all of the links to Zillow will show your mug and the pertinent information to get ahold of you (horrah).

Visitor Registration Experience

One of our major updates is a significant overhaul of the Visitor Registration process. The first thing we improved here were the “calls to action” prompting Visitors to register. What we’ve done is not only added relevant links, but also improved the language to lead the Visitor to register more organically. Instead of saying plain old “Register” our links say “Get listing updates, Save Favorites, and More!”. We’ve also added more and moved around the existing links to receive Email or RSS alerts to make these abilities more prominent.

Moving along with Visitor Registration, lets talk about the Login and Register forms themselves. To help conversion, we “prettied” up the Login and Registration forms. You can see in our screenshots that we tried to make sure the Visitor wasn’t ever lost when working with either task.  With Registration we went a little farther, and we’re now giving the Visitor reasons, with screenshot examples, on why making an account is a good idea.

Additionally, with the Registration Form, you now have the ability to set it up as “two-stage”. What that means is we ask for only the most important fields in the “first” stage, then when the Visitor clicks [Continue] they are asked for more information. In this “two-stage” format, you also have the option to require filling in the second stage or not.

A few additional notes on Registration:

• We now save the Referring URL when a visitor registers
• You can remove all fields from Registration except Name, Email, Password
• You can choose between a single “Name” field or “First Name” and “Last Name” fields.

Visitor Profile

Also included in our mix of front-end features is a redesign of the Visitor’s Profile Section. The Profile is now situated on it’s very own page to improve usability. We spcifically improved the list for the Visitor’s Favorites, Viewed, and Noted Listings. In the Saved/Unsaved Searches section, we now allow the Visitor to edit the search criteria, and turn off email updates for specific Searches.

Map Markers

We had two obstacles to overcome on our map. The first was that we needed a good way to allow the Visitor to not only see, but also interact with listings “mapped” to the same location. The second obstacle was that it became clear a distinction between a Detached and Attached home was necessary.

When more than one listing is mapped to the same location we now do a few things. First we make the icon a little bit bigger, then we add a (+) to the top right of the marker. We do this to help visually explain to the Visitor that this marker is A. different, and B. more than one listing. Additionally, once you’ve hovered over one of these “multi-listing-markers” you’ll notice a slightly different experience than normal. We list the properties in a condensed, and scrolled format so the Visitor can locate any available listing on that location. As for Attached vs. Detached, you can see that we’ve added a new icon type for Attached homes.

Miscellaneous Changes

A couple very useful changes we’ve also made to the front-end experience are:

• Sort listing results by % Price Drop
• Baths are now split into Full and Half Baths (where available)
• Cookieless Browsing is now supported

Sorting by % Price Drop can be very useful when trying to find great deals on the MLS. And of course having Full+Half Baths makes finding the perfect home easier.

Cookieless Browsing actually serves to correct two separate issues. The first being simply that some people have turned off Cookies (don’t know what cookies are? check this out).

Cookies allow us to know who you are when your browser asks us for things like what listings to show and what colors to display. So when we don’t know who you are, we don’t know what to show you. So we’ve implemented additional ways for us to track what we should be showing you, thus removing the necessity of Cookies. The second issue is that most of you “frame” our idx in an <iframe> and in some browsers (notably Safari) the default option is to only give access to Cookies to “visited” sites. Well when a site is in an <iframe> it is not considered “visited”, therefore we don’t get Cookies. But now we don’t need Cookies anymore, so this issue is effectively fixed (yay!).

That’s it for this update. More to come. I promise.

We’ve been working behind the scenes nearly nonstop for the past few months, and today is the day that we finally get to pull back the curtain and reveal what we’ve done. We made an infinity-plus-one number of changes to our dsSearchAgent Pro IDX solution, and we think you’re going to love what we have to show you right now (unless you’re one of ours competitors!).

We’ve actually have so much to share with you that we’re going to break all of this up into a number of blog posts over the next couple of days. In this post, I’m going to cover the changes to our search panel and some other minor changes.

If you want to follow along with me as I discuss the first group of changes, here is our standard demo link so you can see all of the pretty new features. Also, if you’re a client of ours and you want to participate in a webinar to discuss the new changes, we’ve set up a special one tomorrow at 10 AM PST – you can register for it in your control panel. If you’re not a client of ours, what the heck are you waiting for?? Hop into our sales webinar tomorrow at 2 PM PST and, after you’ve stopped drooling over everything we have to offer, buy! Ok, here we go….

We’ve 100% re-engineered our search panel!

Our old search panel was great, but our new one completely trounces the old one.

Our first order of business was to move each search criteria item into its own expandable search box. We felt that the old search panel layout didn’t properly accommodate all of the unique needs of our customers and the different areas they serviced. We also felt that it would be better to show ALL of the available search options at first, even if you can’t adjust them until you click on them, rather than hide a bunch of them until the user expanded an “advanced search” area.

With this release, our clients can remove, add, and rearrange the search boxes however they see fit and expand any or all of them by default when the page first loads. The boxes can be removed and rearranged for each account by default, and they can also be removed and rearranged for each link that the our clients in our control panel area.

We have also changed the way the sliders and text boxes work. After going back and forth on this for weeks and trying out a number of different ideas on our focus groups (drop downs, drop down / text box hybrids, hidden text boxes, etc), we ultimately decided to go with simple text boxes that are tied to the sliders, and vice versa. We found that this allows for the best balance between people who like to quickly explore using the sliders and people who like to be precise with the textboxes.

We’ve added new search options!

The new search panel gave us the breathing room to implement a few more of our most highly requested search features.

The first option we added is something I’m especially proud of. You can now search for pre-foreclosures and bank owned listings in EVERY SINGLE MARKET WE SERVICE! We can do this by looking at two sets of data, both of which are provided by the MLS. First, we look at all of the features that are provided by the MLS for each property. If there’s a feature that denotes that the property is a short sale, is in pre-foreclosure, has had a notice of default filed against the owner, etc, then we mark it as a pre-foreclosure. If there’s a feature that says that the property has been foreclosed upon, is a lender / bank owned listing, is an REO, etc, then we mark it as bank owned.

If the MLS doesn’t provide features that say whether or not a property is distress, or if the agent just forgot to say that it’s in distress, we do something super special. We spent a very long time developing a proprietary algorithm to analyze the descriptions of each property, and for each of the literally millions of active listings in our database, we’ve run the descriptions through our algorithm to find out if it’s a pre-foreclosure or bank owned listing. We’ve run extensive tests, and our positive rate for matching these descriptions is near 99.5%! We toss out properties where the listing agent says things like “this house is not a preforeclosure” or “this house is better than a bank-owned listing.” The result is something we’re really proud of, and it’s something that we can confidently say that no one else has.

We know that there are still going to be small issues with this though, so we set up an email address that you can send property descriptions to so that our system will get better. That’s right – it’s ALIIIIVE! We will be continually training and refining our algorithm, so the more listings you send in that it either should have matched but didn’t or shouldn’t have matched but did, the better our system will get! We will manually review and classify each submission that comes through to ensure that our pre-foreclosure / foreclosure description analyzer is the very best there is! Anyway, if you do find a property description that should be classified as a (pre-)foreclosure or one that shouldn’t have been classified as a (pre-)foreclosure that was, send the description and perhaps a link to the property to foreclosure-descriptions@diversesolutions.com.

We’ve also added the ability to search by price drops. This isn’t just any ol’ price drop search though – you can customize EXACTLY what you’re looking for. It’s pretty self explanatory we think, so go ahead and try it out. We’ve found some listings in our area (SoCal) that have legitimately had price drops of > 60%…. Incidentally, you can now also sort by the price drop percentage (largest drops first) once you get to the search results tab.

You can now search by school districts too! We’ve had a lot of requests for that one. Note that some MLS’s let agents type in the school in free-form, so if a visitor in one of those areas is looking for listings in an individual school area or overall school district, they may have to type in a couple of different schools and / or districts to get what they’re looking for. Don’t worry though – all of our text boxes magically try to complete the visitors thoughts so they will always know exactly what’s available.

Additionally, you can now search for FSBO listings and Make Me Move properties that are on Zillow.com. We know this may be controversial to some, but at the same time we’ve had a lot of requests for it, so we made the decision to implement it for those that want to use it. The value offered here is that visitors may be able to find FSBO listings and properties that may be for sale (Zillow’s Make Me Move listings) that they might not otherwise be able to find in the MLS search. Please note that this option is disabled by default – it can be easily enabled in our clients’ control panel area.

Finally, we’ve added the option for agents to remove property types from the search that they don’t deal with. This was another popular request, and the super-slick interface for it is now available in the control panel.

We’ve focused even more on speed!

We made significant enhancements to our infrastructure and used advanced loading techniques in our front-end code to really get things moving! Both subjectively and objectively, this latest release loads wayyyyy quicker than our old version and is much more responsive to all interactions. Try it out and see!

… and so much more!

There is so much more to share, but again, we’re instead going to break out our changes into smaller blog posts over the next couple of days. Stay tuned!

P.S. Incidentally, and quite humorously, our friends in Seattle, Redfin, had their own big news to share with the world today. Although they took a slightly different approach than us, a nice handful of their new features ended up being the same as ours. We swear we didn’t plan that out! Anyway, kudos to Redfin!!

Justin LaJoie – CEO
Diverse Solutions