Blogs

It’s been a number of months since my last post, due to the fact that we have been putting a lot of focus on expanding. We never imagined that Dynamic IDX would have grown so fast and in so many areas the first year but here I am telling you that Dynamic IDX is now in more than 20 MLS boards in more than 10 States! As most of you know, we made our product public December 15, 2008 even though we had been working on the product for two years prior to our launch date. In less than a year we have exceeded our expectations every month and continue to grow even today in a trying economy. We can tell you that the economy of America is not failing but picking up momentum. Clients, in this new eco...

Top Producer is the leading Real Estate CRM solution available with tons of useful features to convert your leads to sales. Recently, Top Producer rolled out a new batch for their Top Producer 8i product, which includes support for real time lead importing from the Dynamic IDX system.

Our integration method is fairly smart, as well. New leads to your website will be imported to Top Producer automatically - and if that same lead makes an additional inquiry, they will not be imported again.

There is NO EXTRA charges for Top Producer 8i users to have this turned on - We will walk you through the setup, or do it for you at no charge.

During the past few months I have had a number of REALTORS® tell me I should write to everyone and inform them of my beliefs when it comes to their website. This being such a passionate topic for me, I found myself writing countless pages and finally making myself stop in order to post a reasonable sized blog rather than a novel. I am sure this post is far overdue, but late or not, it is a vital read for any REALTOR® who wishes to understand the importance of his/her website.

“My website is a small part of my business.” I hear this all the time and I can tell you that your website is not a small part of your business in any way, but rather a vital part of your business. I would even go a...

We are in desperate need to fill (1) position in assisting us with expanding our template arsenal and doing some user interface improvements to our product.

1. Are you local? (Myrtle Beach, Surfside, Murrells Inlet..)
2. Are you fluent in CSS?
3. Are you a Photoshop guru? (creating your friends little "sigs" does not count)
4. Do you have a strong understanding of web UI patterns?
5. Do you stay up to date with all the new trends and techniques used on the web?

Basically, if you answer no to any of the above, or if you build your websites in Frontpage, you are probably the wrong person for this position.

Thumbs up if you know the following as well:

• OOP in PHP using CakePHP.
• Understand of ...

As long as your Association of Realtors has some form of IDX, RETS or HTML feed, yes we can and there is no extra cost to you for us to setup a new area. Just about every Association of Realtors has their own feed along with their own set of rules. Dynamic IDX was built with this in mind and we are able to setup most feeds within a few days. Let’s review the process to get a data feed setup and working.

If you have had a website before I am sure the acronym RETS (Real Estate Transaction Standard) is something you are familiar with. The keyword here is standard and though it sounds nice, this standard is far from a standard when it comes to vendors. Each and every Association has the righ...

As a realtor, you are commonly faced with the decision of what is the right web solution? Though there are a number of providers, there are only a select few methods. Some Associations even have a website and or frame solution that they will provide to their agents for a very small fee compared to most vendors. But do these solutions really help you get the traffic and quality leads you are looking for? In order to answer these questions, lets first understand what a framed solution is.

When it comes to framed solutions, for most agents, it seems like a very good fit. You have low upfront cost and very low monthly cost to boot. But with framed solutions, you still have to purchase a web ...

As with any complete IDX solution, there are MLS data feeds for each and every Association of Realtors and when property data is involved, the inevitable questions are always asked. How often do you update your feed? Will changes to the feed cost more?

When it comes to MLS data feeds, we work very hard to make sure your property data is updated daily. For the majority of Associations, this is not a problem at all but there is always maintenance with each and every MLS data feed and we have to keep a close eye on each and every one of them..

Some Association of Realtors provide us with what is called an Incremental MLS data feed (We receive only new and updated properties). Incremental M...

Before I kick off this topic let me first introduce myself. My name is Mark Fitzgerald aka “Fitz”. I have been around Real Estate most of my life and have written a number of tools over the years to help realtors in their day to day business. For 9 years I was the VIP for development for a company in RTP called Random Games. We contracted out a number of game titles from Scrabble, Hasbro’s version(s), to War hammer Chaos gate 40k. During this time, I was also working with realtors to help them with their software needs. After 2002 I moved into Real Estate Web Development full time and stepped out of the game industry for good. One thing about working in the game industry is you lose your ...

We've just rolled out a new update to our core codebase today which includes some requested features, and some more SEO optimization techniques.

• Added Schools to search criteria (where available)
• Added the ability to sort your own Cities/Areas now with "Move Up" and "Move Down" buttons. Your cities and areas will now appear in the order you place them on the search forms.
• Added ability to add content above and below your Agents & Staff.
• Improvements to blog comment administration in the backend.
• Improvements to the Lead Lottery logging system. (Gives better details about the person you update/add/remove and who performed the action).

And.. of course, a bunch of bug fixes, design...

Early this morning, we rolled out a global update to our IDX/CMS product. This was a huge update that included new features, updates to existing features and misc bug fixes.

[General IDX]

• Added Ability to sort frontend search tabs via drag/drop backend control
• Added controls for selecting layouts on a per search page basis. Basically, your search by subdivision page, or search by map page can now have completely different layouts. This could be useful in circumstances where you want a wider search page and want to eliminate a sidebar navigation.
• Added "Class Type" multi-select to search criteria
• Added Search By Area to search criteria (If enabled, and if your board has areas)
• Adde...

Our first Real Estate IDX website for the Charleston, SC area has gone live -- MarshallWalker.com

Marshall Walker, of MarshallWalker.com has been a true champ to us this past week by submitting quality bug reports and many product improvement ideas while we built his site. The process from start to finish took roughly a week and involved a complete conversion of his old site's table layout to CSS, creating a custom RETS parser, geocoder, and a ton of other stuff. It would of went alot smoother had we had the ftp data feed, but since CTAR is moving to RETS only in January, we figured we would get a headstart and dive right in.

The major goal for marshallwalker.com was to have features that...

With the launch of the Dynamic IDX Real Estate IDX/CMS just days away, we wanted to talk a little bit about what to expect in terms of product updates and the addition of new features after the initial product launch.

Our initial goal after the main rollout of the Real Estate IDX portion, is to finish up fixing any code issues that our testers worked hard to find. Keep in mind also, that with this type of product, and the amount of code we're talking about - you're never going to smash every single code problem. This product is built to scale rapidly and so far has been performing exceptionally well under heavy loads.

So with that said, here's what we're working on that will follow our ...

Well, after months of long days, entirely too many sleepless nights and consuming more caffeine than any rational human being ever should, we have arrived.

For those of you who are meeting us for the first time, we are known as Dynamic IDX . Resistance is futile. Just kidding. (Or are we...)

But in all seriousness, Dynamic IDX is a highly skilled and qualified team made up of some of the hardest working and most talented professionals in the industry. It is their hard work and relentless pursuit of perfection that has created an industry-best product at prices much lower than the so-called "industry leaders."

At Dynamic IDX, we also want our clients to know that we care about their exp...