Open House data from the REBGV MLS® Now Flowing

We are proud to announce a major new functionality that will improve the quality of real estate data on our clients’ websites. With the help from the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver, we now have an additional data feed enabled that fetches upcoming open house times from the MLS® Reciprocity system.

This feature was tested over the weekend and now is in full force for all Vancouver & surrounding region clients. Some sample screenshots below:

Downtown Vancouver Condo Listings With Upcoming Open Houses

Condo Leo displaying open house dates for Vancouver Condo Listings, courtesy of the MLS®.

Better Display Mechanism

Our open house data function is unique in the sense that we display it in more human-friendly ways, and here’s how:

The typical open house dates are entered by each date. So if there’s a weekend open house on Saturday & Sunday, this is what the data looks like:

2014-03-22 2pm ~ 4pm
2014-03-23 2pm ~ 4pm

With our system, we’ve gathered the data for a better display, so it will show “Open House Mar 22~23 2-4pm”. This not only is more natural to the human speech, but also saves a massive amount of space when displaying it beside the listing photos.

Key factors to remember with our new mechanism
  1. Because it clusters open house dates that are consecutive and with same dates, not all future dates are shown right away. For example, if an agent has entered open house dates for this coming weekend as well as the next weekend, only the upcoming weekend’s data will show up. This is done to save space on the display side, as well as to create a sense of urgency. A sale that expires is more of a hot commodity than an ongoing one. Same principles apply here.
  2. This feature is currently limited to our clients in Vancouver and the Lower Mainland of BC region. Additional board integrations will follow upon request. If you want this in your own board, please email our support desk and create a request. While the availability and data scheme is different for each board, we will do our best to sort it out for as many regions as possible.

Other Applications Now Available

With this new function enabled, we can set up pre-determined listing pages that only display listings with upcoming open houses. You could email such URL generated from your website to your clients, so they can pick out some listings they’d like to see on the weekend.