Seems that everywhere I look nowadays most Agents/Brokers are developing their own in-house IDX Solutions. Previously there were only a few custom IDX providers, however now I’ve noticed Realtors/Brokers starting to create their own products in many markets.
I assume there are many upsides to creating your own real estate IDX solutions, such as:
1. you own the product
2. making changes/updates & hosting fees will be at cost
3. **your competition won’t have your exact IDX
4. you can fix or access your product in a moments notice
Some downsides to creating your own IDX maybe:
1. Upfront Cost to develop a good IDX solution
2. Finding good programmers and designers
3. Having to reinvent the wheel
As I see it, if you have a good real estate IDX provider why reinvent the wheel. While there are significant advantages in creating your own IDX, for the overwhelming majority of Realtors creating their own IDX is not realistic.
We’ve been very pleased with REW’s IDX solution, which also has a great CMS system. Only issue we’ve really faced is the load time for our sites, which seem to be extremly slow currently. However, REW is always quick to addresses our issues and is quick to resolve them.
We’ll be testing out some new IDX solutions in the coming year and we’ll update the products when we’ve had a chance to test them out 
I’m also hoping to hear from the Realtors that have developed their own solutions.
Update: Looks like We’ll be testing a new IDX sooner than I thought. REW’s new Iframe IDX is ready to launch in January 2010. The new IDX looks like it will have some awesome features too, actually looks better than my custom one.
Check out Morgan’s post here
Tags: custom IDX, IDX, Real Estate IDX
Having a Custom IDX will be expensive but in my opinion it is worth. I have REW’s and love it.
I am also very interested in hearing how brokers/agents are implementing this. It seems it would cost more to do it on your own, but I really don’t know the costs involved. I hope you get someone that has done it with their sites, I am very interested to look at what people can come up with.
@ Paul – Very True, REW’s IDX is great! How is the market in SD? I’d love to move there
Also why not put San Diego real estate as your H1
@CVH – I’ve seen another IDX that is Very Good too, however it’s also with another IDX provider. The Realtor’s IDXs are still a work in progress I believe, however they look pretty good too. btw I like your IDX too, who designed it? Much better than my diversolutions iframe I use on blogs.
I am with a company called Market Leader, I pay $99 a month for the site, and my hands are tied with what I can do. I can’t add any content to the site, edit meta tags, title tags, or anything like that. But it does convert new visitors at 8-10% so it is effective. Although I would like a map search which I don’t have, and I think Diverse Solutions is the best there is when it comes to map search.
That stinks, you thing market leader would have added a CMS. However, sounds like a good site to run PPC ads on.
The market in San Diego is pretty crazy. The inventory is really low so there multiple offers everywhere. I have buyers offering 30k-50k above the asking price and losing. I am hoping the holidays will slow down the demand so my buyers can get their home.
Wow, that’s Great Paul. Guess you need to control the listings. I recall when it was best to have a buyer, since the listings where just sitting.
What you need are young people to enter the Real Estate market and build stuff using new methods. Theres a lot of people in Real Estate that have been doing RE a long time and unfortunatly old habits never die. IFrames are bad, no one outside of RE has used them since the death of IE4
Having used IFramed IDX plugins in the past, having a REW website and integrated IDX for a couple of years, and now a Joomla 1.5 CMS based website with a different vendor’s integrated IDX (WordPress is also supported) that I can now totally manage and control myself, an integrated custom IDX is the only way to go these days, especially for the more technically capable and web-savvy agents.
The REW site and IDX I had was great, as far as it went in our market. But primarily because of local MLS rules and IDX restrictions (I was not a managing broker at the time), as well as my very limited budget, I couldn’t afford the cost of customizations required to get the full functionality I wanted for my clients. REW was also limited in what they could or would do for local clients who are not managing brokers, and are therefore required by our MLS to use a standardized “vendor template” IDX solution, even for an integrated IDX.
My current vendor’s IDX product does have its limitations: no Google map search (but coming), support for only a limited number of MLS markets, hosting still needs to be on their servers for a totally integrated environment, and high level of technical expertise required to get the most out of the product. But being very technical myself, I was able to handle it OK. In the end, the increased flexibility and control has been great, as well as support for Joomla and WordPress open source platforms. So (IMO) my IDX functionality is now among the best in my market, and it continues to improve month by month as I continue to tweak the IDX and my website. Now I get complements on the IDX and website all the time from my buyer clients.
The biggest down side, if you can call it that, is that I am getting lots more user registrations from buyers who are already using another agent, and their agent’s site (or the agent’s broker’s) is not as good as mine!
Wow !!! Thats Great.Thanks for letting me know about this! Nice post, I am pretty much pleased with your good work.
The idea of having to build your own IDX solution is great, but I would rather be a Realtor and let someone else handle the technological side. I’ve been with REW for about 18 months and I couldn’t be happier with their custom IDX.
I wonder how the new iFrame version is going to work out. So far it looks pretty good.