Just a quick note that we were just doing some updates to the content on our plugin page on wordpress.org. In order to update that page, we have to do a plugin update. So, this one doesn't change anything from 3.0.38 in terms of application code.

Enjoy your Labor Day Weekend!

We've been listening to the feedback, and we're making some changes!

You'll notice that the majority of MLS feeds will now display FULL BATHS and PARTIAL BATHS on the listing detail pages, while search results will show TOTAL BATHS (full + partial). This will allow your users to search for the number of total bathrooms they want, while providing a detailed breakdown of Full and Partial baths for a given property.

This change was made possible by the valuable feedback from our agents in multiple markets, and is one of many data improvements we'll be rolling out over the next few weeks.

See any problems or bugs with the new system? Reach out to us at help@showcaseidx.com and we'll take a look!

This easy to follow video will show you how easy it is to update your IDX to the new Streamlined Search.

People looking for homes want a simple search experience. One that gives them what they're looking for fast and without having to think too much. Now with Streamlined Search, you can provide your website visitors with a home search experience that rivals the large portals like no other IDX solution can. With Streamlined Search, we have solved some of the biggest IDX issues facing agents on their own websites: standardized data, mobile usability, and user experience.

Standardized Data

Streamlined Search uses a new proprietary set of MLS fields within Showcase IDX that standardizes feature fields from across all of our MLS partners, and makes it so these fields can be easily and accurately searched across multiple MLS's. This data project is the foundation of our new search capabilities, allowing for complex searches to be performed quickly across MLS that until now have had different data formats that made searching across them tedious and prone to error.

Mobile Usability

Streamlined Search now puts all of the power and convenience of a desktop search, into the mobile experience. Our approach makes the entire website search experience work seamlessly with each other regardless if you're using whether desktop, phone, tablet, or VR device. In designing the mobile Streamlined Search experience, we looked at ways to simplify the interactions with the search that makes sense when you're using the search in your hand.

Gone are long drop-down menus for adding a price range, replaced with a numeric keyboard to quickly add the price. We've also added the ability on other range fields to simply tap the + and - buttons on to increase and decrease the values to quickly set the values without having to type in a number (but you can do that too if you like).

User Experience

Based on a year's worth of user behavior analysis, customer feedback and iteration since the launch of our 3.0 version in 2017, Streamlined Search gives agents and teams a powerful search that anyone who has searched on the large search portals (Zillow, Redfin, etc) will find familiar, along with a few new useful twists and surprises. The design of the search shows how much thought was put into having a search experience that delivers across all devices and just makes sense.

Less is More... More Search Options

Instead of our existing search's Advanced Search menu, we now have a more prominent More button. Clicking this opens up a series of options, with property, listing, and amenity feature tabs, that give the user the ability to perform detailed and very specific searches across multiple MLS's. These tabs have the search options that we found that are used over 95% of the time. For those other searches, we've added the ability to search for multiple keywords or key-phrases within a listing.

Must Haves

One way we're making it easier for consumers to find the right home for them is through our must have filters. These filters use our standardized MLS data to provide accurate results combined across all of our MLS's.

Speed

Streamlined Search is fast. Real fast... even on a mobile device.

A Choice Of Searches

Showcase IDX customers will be able to choose which search they have on the front-end of their websites. Streamlined Search is opt-in, which means customers will have to go into their Search Settings and choose which search they want their visitors to use for it to show up on their website. To upgrade to the new search, just go to the Showcase IDX Admin, select the website you want to switch to Streamlined Search and go to Settings>Search and you'll see the option at the top.

A Powerful Back End Combination

Even though there will be only one search on the front-end of the website for visitors to use, agents will be able to choose on a case-by-case basis which style of search they want to use on the back-end for creating hotsheets and recommended searches. This means that if you want to use our very detailed advanced search filters to set up a hotsheet or recommended search, you can still do this. it's entirely your choice which style of search you use. All of your current saved searches and hotsheets will not be affected by the new Streamlined Search.

We've been looking at it for a while... and we have made some key improvements and simplifications today to our sign-up (and sign-in) form today that should positively impact lead registrations. These changes were based on a lot of customer feedback and end-user behavioral data that we've been analyzing for a while now since launching our 3.0 version last year.

There are two things that aren't readily obvious... we've made sure that if you want to hide the google sign in or email account form, you can do this easily with CSS. We have some customers who only want the facebook button option, so this is now very easy to make happen.

Please let us know how these new changes work for you... we'll be continuing to track the effectiveness of this change and overall lead conversion on our end.

We're super busy over here improving the quality of your MLS data everyday. We have some great news about OPEN HOUSE support for a number of MLS':

• Knoxville, Outer Banks, Triangle, Bright, Sandicor - All these feeds now have complete Open House support! We cleared a major hurdle in supporting OpenHouse systems with multiple classes, and will be rolling out support for all of our applicable MLS' over the next few weeks!

• NNEREN - The first test of our new Listing Agent and Office displays are rolled out for NNEREN and should be available for all MLS' today. This will add the Listing Agent and Listing Office to the description displays on Listing Detail Pages and List Views. This concludes the NNEREN Compliance audit.

• REColorado - We added the "Additional Information" field to REColorado's advanced features per an agent's request. This field should be searchable by EOB today.

• CRMLS - We added the "Special Listing Conditions" field to the General Advanced Features for CRMLS. This field should be searchable by EOB today as well.

We'll have even more changes and updates coming over the next few weeks as we prepare to launch several new features, including a BRAND NEW SEARCH INTERFACE you're going to love! As always, please reach out to us with questions and concerns at help@showcaseidx.com

We have made a change to how we handle the sending of recommended searches. previously, each and every agent-created recommended search had to be implicitly opted-into by the recipient. While this was following the letter of the law, this was causing a lot of hassles. We have relaxed these rules and now will send recommended search subscription emails to your signed up leads with no opt-in required.

We are considering the lead sign-up as an agreement to receive and have updated our terms of use accordingly. If the recipient is not a current lead, they will still have to respond to the opt-in email.

We are also working on a more comprehensive solution that will give agents more control over how these emails get sent out. If agents choose to spam recipients they will be hurting their own domain's email spam reputation (not ours). This project involves making it so agents on our premium plan can send emails from the relevant website's domain, complete with return-path support. We're hoping to get this project completed in the next few weeks.

We've been super busy over the last month improving feeds and preparing more new features as we grow Showcase IDX 3.0! Here's a few of the changes and improvements we've been rolling out the past month:

• Sandicor has a brand new feed, rebuilt from the ground up based off the latest Paragon mapper. This will deprecate the old Paragon system that Sandicor self-hosted and was rife with issues. The new mapper shouldn't disrupt much, and most hotsheets should survive the transition, but Sandicor customers are advised to review your websites and contact us if you see any major issues. We'll be continuing testing throughout the month.
• NTREIS - The "Stories" field now properly displays as part of the General information of relevant listings. You can also filter these through the GENERAL section of the advanced features drop down on the search interface.
• FMLS - As FMLS moves towards a new system, we have been following along and updating the mapper. This recent round of changes saw the removal of the "Amenities" field, as well as the addition of "Security Features" to the COMMUNITY section of the advanced filters.
• NNEREN - Updated the disclaimer as first step in compliance audit. More changes to come!
• Bright MLS - Bright is now up and running! We will begin the process of transitioning all Trend and MRIS clients to the Bright feed once we have finished internal testing and optimization. If you'd like to be one of the first people on Bright MLS, and you already have a signed agreement with TREND or MRIS on file, just reach out to us at help@showcaseidx.com and we will switch you over so you can test the feed and help make improvements!
• Golden Isles - We've rolled out a brand new mapper, built from the ground up, for the Golden Isles MLS. This mapper uses the latest Matrix system, and is super fast, with updates every 10 minutes.
• MARIS - Added support for "School District" searches
• CRMLS - We continue to work on improvements to the CRMLS system. We added some more catches to the property type mapper to better filter properties to their appropriate property type.
• Realtracs - The "Stories" field is fixed...sorry about that. We also added a catch for New Construction as a listing type, so you can now properly build hotsheets using "New Construction" properties only.
• "Furnished Description" field was added to Naples, Bonita Springs and Ft Myers and show be searchable by EOB tomorrow across all listings.
• Broad improvments were made to the Open House system, resulting in better quality control over the data we get from the MLS. Customers of REALCOMP should notice an immediate improvement in the display of Open House times over the next few days. We have even more improvements to this system on the way, including expansion to many more MLS'.

As always, if you have any questions or concerns, reach out to us at help@showcaseidx.com and we'll be sure to assist!

A lot of fixes went live over the past 2 weeks. Here's the rundown of some improvements and fixes made to several MLS feeds:

• CRMLS - We decided to push a brand new mapper of CRMLS as part of ongoing efforts to get this feed updating properly and with better regularity. Several unused fields were stripped out, and we changed a few things about how we were mapping Bathrooms, Lot Size/Acres, and property type to provide more uniform filtering of key fields and take into account more edge cases.

• FMLS - Updated the mapper to better read "Zip Code"s on a listing since Google seems to be slower than the city at recognizing new neighborhoods.

• MRIS - We added a property type category "Co-Op" which should now display all Co-Ops and Timeshares available from the MLS (This support will be available on the BRIGHT feed as well)

• NNEREN - (New England) Added some catches for Farmhouse and New Englander property types to get them classified in the correct place, as well as adding catches for Multi-Level properties. Also added the "Lot Description" field and renamed "More Interior Features" and "More Exterior Features" to avoid confusion with the advanced filters.

We have a lot of exciting improvements coming to the search fields in the next few weeks, so stay tuned to the Facebook page and the Showcase blog for more information on those when the time comes. As always, please feel free to contact us with any questions, suggestions, or concerns at help@showcaseidx.com and we'll get back to you as quickly as possible!

Over the past week, we've been working on a backend project to dramatically increase our ability to scale on-demand our Google Cloud Platform application environment (fancy way of saying where we host the Showcase IDX software application).

We completed this project today... yay. The whole point of this necessary work is so that people don't notice anything as we continue to scale our application as we continue to add a lot of new customers. While executing the final piece of this project this morning, we did cause a very brief unintended outage this morning (just 3 minutes). Our bad, we're sorry. We're not going to do that again. 🤦

This being said, on other server or cloud platforms it could have meant significant downtime to switch up environments and move terabytes of live data, so we'll take 3 minutes. Happiness is reliable infrastructure.