Michael Wurzer For some time, FBS has had a report in our flexmls Web system called the Listing Activity Report. This report provides listing agents and their sellers information on how often their listing is being viewed:
- By agents inside the flexmls system,
- By customers receiving email links from agents through flexmls Web;
- By consumers visiting agent sites using our flexmls IDX system; and
- By consumers using the flexmls Portal provided to them by their agent.
The report also shows:
- How often the listing is being marked as a favorite, possibility or reject by those viewing the listing;
- How often more information or a showing is requested; and
- How often the listing is shared to Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Dwellicious or other social networks.
This is all great information but a big gap on the report has been information about where and how often the listing is being viewed outside the flexmls ecosystem.
Spurred on by a suggestion on the John Hall Blog (check out this post for a good overview of the Listing Activity Report), James Ridley and David Kerzman from FBS set up a listing tracking API (application programming interface) to allow third parties to submit data from their system to the Listing Activity Report. Once James had the API working, we contacted Justin LaJoie, CEO of Diverse Solutions, which provides an IDX system to several of our clients, to see if he’d be interested in submitting hit data from their system to the Listing Activity Report. Justin was gracious to respond to the request and put a developer on the project, which took just a few hours, and so our Listing Activity Report is now showing view activity data from the Diverse Solutions IDX system as shown in the report sample below (note that the activity data for Diverse is lower just because they just started sending in the data).
Though Justin and Diverse Solutions are a competitor of ours in the IDX world, we believe the listing agents and sellers will benefit from having this data available to them directly through the MLS system. We’re also hopeful other companies will provide hit data so they, too, can be included on this report. We think it will benefit them to be on the report and, most importantly, it will benefit the listing agents and sellers, because they’ll have more information about how their listing is faring on the web.
We’ll be contacting other companies to see if they’re interested in participating but please let us know if you’re interested in getting your listing view information on the listing activity report, and we’ll get you set up!
Lastly, if you’re an MLS, we encourage you to ask any of vendors receiving your listing data to participate in this program so that your members have easy access to the listing activity data right through the MLS system.