Michael Wurzer FBS is pleased to announce that we’ve released today the first iteration of a new mobile flexmls® site for beta testing by our FBS-hosted MLS customers. Flexmls users can access the beta site by either going to http://m.flexmls.com and clicking the beta link or going directly to http://m.beta.flexmls.com. This first iteration is for MLS users only and so you will need to enter your MLS login and password.
I highlighted first iteration and beta in the previous paragraph to emphasize that this is just the beginning of our new mobile site. The functionality is focused on basic search and listing display friendly to touch-enabled phones and other mobile devices. The search is limited in this first iteration to some basic fields such as price, bedrooms, bathrooms, square feet, property type, sub-type, city, zip, sudbivision, MLS area, and a few other location-type fields.
The listing display includes summary, detail and photo views, with the detail view showing all all the data fields with the exception of rooms, which we’ll be adding shortly.
The next iteration we’re working on now will extend this basic search to our IDX and portal customers, and we’ll then be adding capabilities to view searches and carts from the flexmls Web system on mobile as well a new note-taking feature for you and your customers. Eventually, we expect to replace all the functionality of the current mobile site with this new one, and, until that time, the new mobile site will remain in beta.
One of the more geeky aspects of this new mobile site that we’re excited about is that it has been built using our new flexmls API (application programming interface). Our intent is to make the API available to other software developers who can then create even more cool products for our customers, such as new IDX applications, iPhone and iPad native applications, and many others. Building the mobile site on this new API made the first iteration take a little longer, but we believe it will have many long-term benefits. In addition to enabling innovation on the flexmls platform by third-party developers, the new API is standardized for purposes of searching across all of our 110+ MLS customers and so also will be a great encouragement to increase data standards among our customers. This new API is the future of development for FBS and we’re excited about the innovation it will bring to our customers.
I’d like to close by thanking our development team of Brandon Hornseth and Brandon Medenwald and our API team of Joshua Murray, Wade McEwen, and James Ridley, as well as our QA team of Kelly Prichard and Steve Eli (with my apologies to those I undoubtedly missed).