What consumers don’t see in an IDX home search

So you have a website with an IDX home search …

… or you may possibly have a VOW compliant website (we explain the difference here)

You have paid good money to have an IDX or VOW real estate search embedded in your blog/website and you pay a monthly subscription to allow consumers to search for homes, you even send your existing clients there to search – so you don't have to

BUT, do you know how many homes are excluded from your consumers property searches?

The answer may completely shock you, I know it did me …

Using the San Diego MLS as an example:

For those of you that don't know Peter was a Director of Sandicor (The San Diego County MLS provider) for 2007 and 2008. He is still active on various committes related to new technologies and services.

After one of those recent meetings Peter asked one of the staff members how many homes were excluded from consumer searches. When she came back with the answer just a couple of minutes later Peter nearly fell over.

Here is what she told him:

Total active MLS listings:    13,927

Tagged with No VOW:          1,075

Net listing for consumers:  12,853

In San Diego that means there were over 1,000 listings that were unavailable to consumers on real estate agents websites – including all the agregators and other services like ListingBook, a company that interestingly enough was at one time claiming to be a VOW or at least "VOW compliant" (it's feed from San Diego is actually IDX).

Here is a screenshot of the relevant part of the San Diego MLS listings input sheet:

If the agent checks the No box for VOW the property does not appear anywhere on the internet – period.

If a real estate agent entering their listing checks Yes for VOW but No for Internet syndication then the property appears in a VOW search but not in an IDX one – confused yet?

So if you have an agent determined to keep the listing off the internet, what can we as an industry do about it. The consumer thinks they are searching all the listings after all and it's an embarrasment.

It's my experience that when you are working with some buyers they think you might not be showing them all the available homes that might suit them – and it's this sort of dancing around the rules that just plays right into that suspicion.

Of course, it begs the question as to why so many agents have excluded their listings, but that's a subject we will return to later …

We would be fascinated to learn the figures from your MLS provider, maybe yours won't be so bad, but then again it could be worse. You probably owe it to the industry to find out – please share the results here!