How Does IDX Broker Work

You may be new to IDX Broker or an existing client in blissful ignorance for years about the workings of IDX Broker. Here's a glimpse behind the curtain.

IDX Broker is a third party servicer for MLS data. We take the raw data from each MLS and package that into a search-friendly format made available to real estate websites. When Real Estate agents get ready to sell a property, they gather all of the information about the property and send this listing information to their governing board or MLS. Each MLS stores this data, allowing IDX vendors to access this on behalf of the MLS members.

To provide the best search functionality and ensure compliance with MLS rules, we keep the bulk of the data on our servers.

Search, results, and auxiliary pages are automatically created for each IDX Broker account and can be found by navigating to Designs–>Pages within the IDX Broker control panel.

Wrapper

Naturally, you don't want sterile, generic pages for all of your IDX searches, so IDX Broker has built in functionality to provide what we call wrappers. Wrappers clone the look of the rest of your website and apply this styling to the IDX Broker pages. When an account is first set up, our support team will create this initial global wrapper so that there is a seamless visual experience for your website visitors. This won't move your content from our servers, but does match our pages to your site.

Obviously, your website will continue to grow and change. To accommodate this, you can create and enable a dynamic wrapper that will stay up to date with the changes on your site. Or we are happy to provide updates to your static wrapper complimentary twice a year.

Saved Links

Now that you have the search pages and the associated results pages that match your site, you can link to these pages from your site navigation. This will provide a good workflow, allowing visitors to find the properties for which they are searching. You can even guide them by creating predefined search results, which we call Saved Links. These are great for SEO and take the guess work away from a visitor who just wants to see all the homes in a specific neighborhood.

Widgets

These links are great to allow your visitors to find properties from the MLS, but there's more. IDX Broker knows that you may want to add a splash of IDX content on your other webpages. To that end, we have widgets that you can place on any webpage.

Widgets display a taste of IDX content in different formats to fit your site needs. You can place a quick search on your homepage or a showcase of properties on a community page. Some people even insert slideshow widgets or carousels into their blog posts.

We provide you the tools and data that you need to sell people the right property.