General FAQ

IDX stands for Internet Data eXchange. It’s a marketing tool that enables you to legally display all the MLS listings of your fellow agents and brokers in order to attract consumers to your website. Once visitors come to your website you can promote your own listings to them, or engage them as potential buyers of other listings in the MLS.

Our automated IDX licensing system will send you any necessary paperwork when you request an account. When completed and returned to us, we will manage your licensing paperwork through the MLS approval process.

Please refer to our current list of supported MLSs and REALTOR® Associations.

Yes, if you belong to more than one MLS, you can request service for additional MLSs at an additional cost when you sign up for an account. You can also add additional MLSs at any time.

While some MLSs and Associations offer inexpensive or free IDX search programs, these solutions are not designed for effective marketing or lead capture. In all cases the name and contact information of the listing agent is featured prominently with each listing, resulting in consumers being driven to contact the listing agent rather than yourself. There are no built-in lead capture tools, such as automated daily email alerts and showing request forms. And, the appearance and usability of these solutions are typically poor, making you look unprofessional to potential clients.

iHomefinder focuses on making your brand stand out, bringing leads directly to you, and giving your visitors an excellent property search experience. We’re certain you’ll find our features, reliability and support will be a great return on investment, and offer many benefits over the IDX search programs offered by your MLS or Association.

No! Our standard terms are monthly billing, and you can change your product or cancel at any time. You can also save money by signing up for an annual plan.

A non-refundable set up fee is charged when we first create your account. Your monthly billing will not begin until your IDX license has been approved. Monthly account fees are charged on the first business day of each month for the upcoming month. Your first monthly invoice includes a proration for any preceding partial month of service plus the upcoming monthly of service.

Your account can be cancelled at any time without cancellation fees. If you cancel, you’ll continue to receive service through the end of the month for which you’ve already paid.

Happy buyers are future sellers – especially when you use iHomefinder to send them periodic emails about current home prices in their neighborhood. iHomefinder cultivates potential sellers by making it easy for them to monitor the market until they’re ready to begin marketing their home.

Our “Supplemental Listings” page also makes it easy to upload and display any listings that are not included in the MLS data.

Yes, our agreements with the various MLS systems require that we only provide our IDX-based service to members of a given MLS. You can refer to our list of supported MLS’s to see if we offer service for your MLS.

We are committed to providing 99.9% uptime. Our dedicated servers are managed and monitored 24 hours a day, 7 days a week by a national hosting company with a 99.999% Network Uptime Guarantee. We have connectivity with multiple tier 1 providers (including AT&T, Level 3, Qwest, UUNET, and Verio) using OC48 – 192 backbones. If you don’t understand that stuff, you can rest assured our service is rock solid!

If you are using Optima IDX, it is technically possible to “frame” our account pages on more than one website using framesets (iframes) and this requires approval from your MLS. If approved by your MLS, we charge an additional monthly fee of $10 for each additional framed URL.

Our listing data is updated every 2 hours for most MLS’s, and as frequently as every 15 minutes for some MLSs.

Yes! We make it very easy to add information and additional pictures to your own listings to supplement the listing information provided by your MLS.

We never display links or contact information for listing agents or listing offices. Your MLS will require that we display some minimal amount of information about the listing agent or office and all IDX services must comply with this requirement. Any information that your MLS requires us to display will be displayed in the most inconspicuous location possible.

Yes! We don’t offer domain registration, but here are the options available for Optima IDX and iSite accounts. There are no additional fees for enabling these options.

Optima IDX – Once you have a domain registered, you have the option of using your registered domain and your chosen subdomain on your account pages. You can choose anything for a subdomain such as search.(yourdomain).com or idx.(yourdomain).com. This is what will appear on your account pages instead of our default domain which is idxre.com.

Why is a subdomain required? MLS licensing requires that we provide our IDX account pages from our own servers. We are only providing some of the pages that appear on your site – the rest of your website pages come from your own server. When you use a subdomain, you are telling your domain host that anything on the subdomain will come from our servers and not yours. This is a much better scenario than the alternative which is seeing our default domain “idxre.com” on your account pages.

iSites – Once you have a domain registered, you have the option of using your registered domain for your iSite website pages. No subdomain is required as it is with Optima IDX accounts. There is no additional charge for this option.

Our “Variable Lead Capture” feature lets you set up your visitor registration exactly the way you want. The form can appear immediately, never, or after a certain number of searches or page views. You can also make it optional to complete the form if it does appear. Name and email are always required and phone number can be set to optional or required.

When your website visitors select “Request More Info”, “Save This Property” or “Schedule a Showing”, they will be required to provide their information. These three lead capture features are prominently displayed with each listing.

We provide detailed reporting that shows what your leads have been searching for on your website. You can see this information for site visitors who has provided their information through any of our various lead capture features. Once a visitor’s information has been provided, their search history since their first site visit is provided.

All of our account features are accessed in a control panel which is very easy to use and requires no technical skills. An extensive Help system explains each feature and what the various settings do. Our friendly support staff is also here to help you if you have any questions. Unlimited support is included with all of our accounts.

If you are integrating iSearch IDX features on your existing website and not using one of our iSite website accounts, you will need a professional website developer to integrate our features on your website.

Email Alerts automatically send emails with your personalized branding to your subscribers daily or at an interval your subscribers choose. It also provides reports on when your subscribers receive listings and what listings they view. This feature does not provide any additional campaign options.

We make it very easy to export your subscribers to an Excel spreadsheet and import them into a full-featured contact management system or email drip campaign system. You can also segment your subscribers by search criteria in order to export your chosen segments for more targeted campaigns that can be managed in other systems.

Featured listings syndication is an add-on service provided by iHomefinder. With this service, your featured listings can be sent to third party websites that specialize in Real Estate search. In doing so, syndication helps further expose your listings to the market and drive traffic back to your website. Explicit permission from your MLS is required before syndication can be enabled.

Syndication destinations we currently support include:

Trulia
Oodle
Zillow
Yahoo – Syndication to Yahoo must go through Zillow. We can set up syndication with Zillow and Zillow is able to set up the syndication to Yahoo.

Typically the benefit of syndication is not worth the cost unless you have many listings. As an alternative, we recommend you contact your broker to find out if they already syndicate your listings.