Simplifying Online Listings Searches
Posted on May 17th, 2007 by Jonathan Dalton
After a mere two months of procrastinating, I’ve finally discovered the ins and outs of the IDX listings filters I purchased earlier this year. The result so far is a pair of dedicated searches on my two community sites, Westbrook Village Real Estate.com and Arrowhead Ranch Living.com.
The Westbrook Village search includes all of the listings of Westbrook Village homes for sale. Arrowhead Ranch’s search, for the moment, is tied solely to the condo market in the area as I’ve had quite a few requests about Arrowhead Ranch condos of late.
I’ve got several other filters at my disposal and am debating what else I should do … ought I create separate searches for multiple cities in the Phoenix area, say one page for Peoria homes for sale and another for Glendale real estate? Do I create searches for some other individual subdivisions? What would create the most value to visitors?
Even with the filtering, my main site includes a pair of full Phoenix real estate searches, both without registration. But would there be more interest if someone could simply click on the Glendale search and see what’s available without having to create their own filter, or is there more value in the full search where multiple criteria can be entered to narrow the search from the start?
The lack of ability to filter further the filtered search may be the deciding factor and push me toward individual subdivisions, but I’m still debating between the “large area” and “small niche” Internet farming method.
As a side note, if I go the route of the individual city searches, I’d almost rather tie them into the blog in some fashion. However, I can’t seem to get the <iframe> command that powers the IDX to work on a Wordpress page. If someone has a way of pulling that off, I’ll be incredibly grateful.
Technorati Tags: Phoenix real estate, MLS, real estate marketing
Popularity: 2% [?]
I haven’t done much with my KillerIDX filters either. THe few I did set up didn’t seem to pull up as many listings as a direct ARMLS search. KillerIDX had no clue why not…
I set up an IDX search on a page on TPREG. Is this what you’re looking for?
http://www.phoenixrealestateguy.com/search_phoenix_mls/
Let me know, and if I can remember how I did it, I’ll help… it was *painful* getting rid of the sidebars.
I see it in your source but the stupid WP code page kept kicking out the code.
I like the way it looks on Westbrook and on Arrowhead. Bringing the listings here would be another way of replacing my primary site with the blog over time.
I used the “page view” plug in ( http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/pageview/ ) and edited the CSS on some file (I can’t remember which) to get rid of the sidebars.