UPDATE: The plugin is out of beta and is now available! See the FlexIDX WordPress Plugin site for details.
For the last week, I’ve been beta testing a new WordPress plugin that our MLS provider, Flexmls, will be launching soon.
The plugin offers several cool features such as ways to generate and “widgetize” market statistics, a listing photos, searches and contact forms.
You can see some of what it does on this Phoenix Real Estate Listings and Market Stats page, or this Gilbert Homes for Sale page. These pages by no means have every feature of the plugin implemented, but they will give you a good idea of the power and flexibility the plugin offers.
More information and demos can be found on the website Flexmls is developing for the plugin.
If Flexmls is your MLS provider, and you use their IDX solution (which is very good by the way. It’s on this site as our “Advanced Phoenix Home Search”) then you may want to keep your eye out for the release of this plugin ”“ assuming of course you’re running a WordPress site.
There is a ton of potential in something like this. We’ll be exploring it further. If you want to follow along I’ll be putting new pages under the “Beta Stuff” menu up in the nav bar. Flex has been *super* swift to respond to feedback and bug fixes, so I suspect it won’t be long before this is released for consumption soon. I’m not sure what exactly the pricing will be, but it wouldn’t surprise me if someone from FLexmls doesn’t stop by and chime in with release and pricing info.
The plugin widgets are as easy as dragging and dropping into your sidebar, and there is a short code generator that’s very easy to use to build pages like I linked to above.
Highly recommended!
We recently added the beta version of Diverse Solutions upcoming revamped IDX search and now this beta of the Flexmls IDX plugin. Hopefully we don’t have a beta blog blowup (ooh alliteration!) happening soon. But hey, if you don’t try new stuff and push the envelope you’ll fall behind swiftly!
The Phoenix Real Estate Guy was started by Jay Thompson, and I have a little blogging problem... he liked to say...
LOVE IT!!
Thanks for the post, Jay, and for all your help with the testing! We’re currently targeting January 31 for release of the plugin. The pricing is $240 per year, and, as you mentioned, you already need to be a flexmls IDX customer.
Are they going to charge the $240 they already charge to be an IDX user PLUS another $240 for the Plug-in?
Wow! This is huge for those of us in smaller markets that don’t have other *great* options.
For the FBS folks- Curious about pricing also, is this an add-on for current IDX customers or a separate product?
@sheri – that’s my understanding. $240 for IDX, plus $240 for the plugin.
I love my Flexmls IDX. Is the better organized thumbnails, charts and graphs worth the additional $240? Thank you for the beta work and review.
Max has been working w/Mike on it for one of our sites since last week. It’s actually pretty cool. As far as the money goes, it’s only $20 a month when you break it down. And yes, it is in addition to your regular annual fee.
Jay, I love the large, real-time listing counter in the “advanced search”! Is this part of the Flex’s plugin? Very cool. I guess the only thing in the “advanced search” that has left me feeling a little empty is that the right side of the page (where the counter is) seems a little empty or barren. Maybe a picture of a house or a fixed map of the Phoenix metro area would add some aesthetic appeal… Great work!
Anything you see on the advanced search page is *just* the FlexIDX product, not the plugin. The plugin doesn’t change anything on the search product itself
I could change that right side to open in a map based search or a list of properties. But I like the listing counter. Good point on it looking a little bare though.
No doubt…the listing counter is really cool! If my IDX had that ability, I would be keeping the listing counter…but I think it would provide more confidence to an inexperienced user if there was some sort of real estate cosmetic on the advance search. Maybe even a page wrapper to dress it up a bit? Just my 2 cents… =)
I think it will going to be good feature.
Thanks again for keeping us up to date on what is coming. I think the graphs in the widget are worth the money all by themselves. Seems like a pretty good deal for those of us that have Market Trends on our websites and have to continually update them. It is very time consuming to do that regularly. If the widget will automatically update the market trends graphs I will be their first customer.
Carmen – market stats are a pain for sure. Automating them with something like this is well worth it to me. Otherwise, it just won’t get done.
Can you tell from your traffic which plugin is a better performer?
Not yet. I haven’t done anything to optimize the Flex plugin. And it’s probably not really even fair to compare the Flex and the Diverse solutions plugins. They really do two different things.
Hi Jay i met you at wordcamp in Phoenix Arizona, I was the video recorder “the volunteer” in the real estate class. So tell me, what is the difference between flex and diverse solutions. I just got a little closer to what i was hoping my site would look like and im at the point where i want to either invest in the Flex IDX or the diverse solutions plugin, what can you suggest for me to move forward, hope all is well!!!
Cool.
My MLS, FMLS in Atlanta, and DiverseSolutions are still hammering out something so I can’t use the new version of DS Search on my site yet.
BTW, who is the provider of your “advanced” search engine?
Thanks!
“BTW, who is the provider of your “advanced” search engine?”
FlexMLS — our MLS provider. And the creator of this beta plug in.
Not bad at all for a MLS provider “product.”
Thanks for the info. I am new to wordpress and looking forward to trying it on my site.
I’m a big fan of IDX Broker… integrates well with WP if available in your area.
If you’ve been following along here, be advised the Flexmls IDX plugin for WordPress is now out of beta and available for download. See the link at the top of the post for details!
Jay,
I am using Flexmls in Jacksonville on my old site and IDXbroker on my New WP Supersite… I hope its the same Flexmls… Thanks for the Information.