Question

[mrealty]

How do you know who a good IDX provider is? Are there certain criteria to look for?

[Mike Taylor]

Until you can afford a custom IDX that is fully integrated into your site, I think the biggest thing you look for is how user friendly it is. This is where 90% of the people on your website are going to end up, so you need a good idx that people want to use.

[portland real estate]

Look at what other agents are using and see which one you like the best. Or ask friends to try different systems and see what they say. There are many different solutions out there.

[allnightit]

I wanted to go a little more in depth here becuase I've seen clients of mine really get burned before.

I am pulling the IDX feed in for 5 areas and can speak from experience about all of what is involved...it's a lot.

1) PRICE: the first programmer we used charged us $6,500 and we never got it to testing phase, wasted money completely. The second programmer charged us $2,000 and we ended up spending another $2,000 customizing his code and fixing bugs. That system has been further customized to introduce many other aspects as we tested out various techniques. The third and currently live site has an estimated cost of $3,500 and is still being developed with a final project estimate of $5,000. Now that I have it written I can go into any market for less than $1,000 and be on google in 30 - 45 days. Not number one mind you, but index and caching pages from that databse!

2) PROVE IT - Don't hire a company that does not already have a solid IDX solution in place that you can SEE on google. Linkurealty is a prime example of a company that has plenty of bells and whistles but you won't find very many of them on google by their own methods.

3) Timeline is important - if the company you are looking at wants 60 days to do it, BAIL! I can setup a new IDX feed for a new city / area in less than a day, and that's if I have lots of trouble mapping our fields or their ftp server only runs at night (in some cases you CAN'T download the IDX feed during daylight hours becuase they don't have another server to send those out.).

4) Location - YOu want somebody in your area. Don't hire a California company for a New York IDX. Most likely there are geographic differences that are obvious to locally owned companies. Plus, these are more expensive than normal websits so you'll want to keep them in check, in case it gets out of hand (and it can in a hurry).

5) Servers and Facility - you should inquire as to whether or not your potential IDX vendor has their own server(s) or if they use dedicated hosting, or heaven forbid "shared" hosting. You want a company with thier own servers, backed up, in a secure collocation facility with load balanced Internet providers so you will never miss the IDX feed or Google when they come to see you. Either one of those doesn't see your site one night and you're gonna hear about it.

[liz2sell]

allnightit -

Thanks for putting those points in for all to see. I have been looking for a solution to inserting IDX into a site and now that I have read your post, I may have to reevaluate my thinking a little. Thanks for the heads up on what should have been more obvious to me.

[bigmax]

I wanted to go a little more in depth here becuase I've seen clients of mine really get burned before.

I am pulling the IDX feed in for 5 areas and can speak from experience about all of what is involved...it's a lot.

1) PRICE: the first programmer we used charged us $6,500 and we never got it to testing phase, wasted money completely. The second programmer charged us $2,000 and we ended up spending another $2,000 customizing his code and fixing bugs. That system has been further customized to introduce many other aspects as we tested out various techniques. The third and currently live site has an estimated cost of $3,500 and is still being developed with a final project estimate of $5,000. Now that I have it written I can go into any market for less than $1,000 and be on google in 30 - 45 days. Not number one mind you, but index and caching pages from that databse!


Wow. That is plain ridiculous for a simple albeit customized IDX feeds' script even including webdesign from scratch.

[joelrunner]

Check with your local MLS. Most of them provide free framed solutions for IDX. Tracking of leads is a bit more limited that way, but you could certainly get that going on the cheap.

RealEstateWebmasters will put together a very nice templated site for under $1000, and they have a proven track record. They also have paid IDX solutions. You can weigh whether you should use your free MLS version, or theirs.

[allnightit]

Wow. That is plain ridiculous for a simple albeit customized IDX feeds' script even including webdesign from scratch.

You obviously have no idea what is involved in putting together an IDX solution that isn't a piece of crap. If you have something to criticize let's hear it, otherwise what's your point?

[joelrunner]

Let's face it:

Building a website (or an IDX feed) from scratch is simply overkill unless you/your office are/is doing at least $50 million a year in sales. Keep shopping around and cut your teeth with a template site.

After you know more about what you want, THEN go and pay $5K or $10K for a site. (But even then - it better be backed with a guarantee on first page placement on Google for a competitive term.)