Subscribe to MLS Feed for Real Estate Site

Whether you have an MLS feed or plan to join one, making sure it's properly setup by a professional may increase potential opportunities for your business. Before we mention the proper setups, let's first define what a MLS feed is.  MLS (Multiple Listing Service) feeds are a suite of services that offer real estate agents and brokers membership to a database of real estate listings. The feeds provide deliveries of data for direct and instant postings on websites based on user-friendly criteria. They also gather information to be published in the feed to enable appraisals as well as encourage the cooperation of brokers with one another to establish contractual offers of compensation. No matter if you're a small real estate company or a large one, joining a MLS feed grants you access to listings outside of what you offer. Say for instance you are a small real estate broker that has about 50 properties showing on your website, if you are a part of a MLS feed with a large real estate company with about 15,000 property listings, you can share their listings through your site and vice versa, which can ultimately get more leads to your site from consumers.

Setting up an MLS Feed
Setting up an MLS feed may seem a bit complicated but there's always help from web development professionals that have the ability to properly set up an MLS feed through your website. To integrate an MLS feed the provider of that feed should support IDX (Internet Data Exchange), FTP (File Transfer Protocol) or RETS (Real Estate Transaction Standard). Each of these standard methods for transferring MLS data from the feed to your website allow for a userfriendly display of properties. RPL (Realtyna Property Listing) is a system that is fully compatible with any standard MLS provider. Remember that not all IDX/RETS integrations are the same, some customization may be needed, make sure the proper setup of the systems are provided for the website.

Ways to Integrate:

IDX only displays the MLS listings on the given website in which specific properties are listed through iFrame technology. No real data is transferred from the MLS to the real estate agent which is not optimal for ranking in search engines.  The content still lives on the original site via the iFrame thus not giving your site any value. This way to integrate is recommended more for the small real estate company that is at the beginning stages of building their company website. Once the website grows to a medium or high profiled site, it is recommended to use more advanced integration methods such as FTP or RETS.

FTP transfers MLS data to the real estate website. It works more directly with the site than that of the IDX integration. It synchronizes the real estate site with the database of the MLS at any given time and you have the ability to set up updates like with RETS but not as frequently. This helps property listings get crawled and indexed in search engines, thus allowing them to be seen more frequently since the data is actually on the site. Since this integration is a bit more advanced and time consuming that the other integration methods it isn't always utilized, but is recommended over IDX.  The benefits and rewards show up over time as traffic is generated towards the property listings via search engines.

RETS is the more popular of the three ways to integrate. It typically costs a bit less and offers the biggest bang for the buck. RETS technology allows property listings from MLS feeds to be updated hourly on your site. With listings being updated more frequently, search results can update properly and more efficiently resulting in higher rankings in search engines.  Its abilities to effectively update and inform real estate companies on any updated listings or changes also helps with the overall usability of the site.  Users receive near real-time information.

MLS Feed Benefits
The benefit from subscribing to a MLS feed comes when brokers begins viewing and retrieving all information about properties from other brokers in the system. The broker gains more information about the property than that of the website, which gives a limited amount of information about the property listing. Information provided on the MLS feed is determined by real estate professionals who have experience and a vast knowledge of the real estate marketplace. A real estate agent or broker participating in an MLS feed can also generate more leads back to their website and properties if they agree for another real estate agent or broker to show their properties on their site. More leads equals more potential sales of properties, that's the common goal, right?