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

Should you upgrade to a custom real estate IDX ? Yes!!!

Since we upgraded to a custom REW IDX our leads have increased significantly. The search engine friendly pages are spiderable and have increased long tail traffic to our website.

Previously the only company who provided custom IDX solutions was REW, however there are some new players emerging.

There are only a few custom IDX providers, below are the only three that I’m aware of.

1. REW Custom IDX ( we use this product and recommend it )

2. Real Geeks Custom IDX ( never used this product, but seems strong and will launch in a few months )

3. AMPS211 ( never used this product, but Mike is a great guy and is very honest and ethical . I’m sure once it’s 100% complete it will rock )

We have new sites in the process of going some major redesigns and we’ll most likely incorporate one of the new IDX vendors to test them out Nothing like playing with a new toy.

I’ll update and compare the major differences between the products soon. If you know of any other custom IDXs please comment below and I’ll update the list.