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