Our System Evolves With The Real Estate Market

This round of upgrades showcase major focus on helping buyers’ find suitable listings easier on our clients’ websites. Software upgrades are more than just functionality – it’s about being mindful of what our clients’ needs are as they shift.

Our last major upgrade to finalize our move to the AWS cloud has springboarded us for even more enhancements to the Brixwork system, and version 4.45 packs some amazing new features to help our real estate pros gain more business.

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More Buyers’ Activity, especially in Vancouver & GVRD

2018 – Over the summer, and into September, we’ve observed that the number of transactions plunged by roughly 40% across Metro Vancouver compared to previous years. While market conditions are out of our control (as well as our top-notch real estate agents), how we respond to such changes is what defines the winners and losers in the changing real estate market.

The most critical upgrades in version 4.45 revolve around catering to buyers’ ease of search.

Open House Search Module Added with Share-Friendly URLs

You can narrow your MLS® search results to listings with open houses coming up! This has been added to the Fairview template, and the Main Street template is next. Better yet, the URL is modified so that sharing the live search results on social media or by email is simple and easy for all parties, and Google can pick up the …/openhouse/city-… portion in the URL along with the city & neighbourhoods for better search engine performance.

This sample page of Kerrisdale listings with an open house this coming weekend (November 3 & 4) demonstrates this new functionality. Try sharing this page on Facebook, and see how well the title & preview image of a sample home in Kerrisdale show up!

Open House Search Module Added with Share-Friendly URLs

You can narrow your MLS® search results to listings with open houses coming up! This has been added to the Fairview template, and the Main Street template is next. Better yet, the URL is modified so that sharing the live search results on social media or by email is simple and easy for all parties, and Google can pick up the …/openhouse/city-… portion in the URL along with the city & neighbourhoods for better search engine performance.

This sample page of Kerrisdale listings with an open house this coming weekend (November 3 & 4) demonstrates this new functionality. Try sharing this page on Facebook, and see how well the title & preview image of a sample home in Kerrisdale show up!

This sample page of Kerrisdale listings with an open house this coming weekend (November 3 & 4) demonstrates this new functionality. Try sharing this page on Facebook, and see how well the title & preview image of a sample home in Kerrisdale show up!

Faster & More Agile Presales & Buildings Search Module

The deep-level engineering upgrades on our presales & buildings Google Maps™ Search module is quite incredible – we’ll save you the nerdy talk and summarize the new features:

  • Faster loading time when switching pages, or zooming in/out.

  • Better cluster handling where the results are dense – this happens often in dense city cores such as Vancouver West and Downtown Presale Searches

  • Better mobile search form with slide-out function
  • Improved scrolling and tapping functions on mobile devices

Sharing MLS Searches on Facebook Never Looked Better

When sharing MLS® search results of all varieties, the main image used to share can make or break the # of clicks that you induce. We fixed some bugs that made this behaviour inconsistent (would fall back to the logo occasionally) and also upgraded the system to look for 2nd and 3rd listing’s photos if the 1st listing doesn’t have a photo yet (which is often the case when brand new MLS® search results are shared).

Other Technical Updates In The Core (inside the Matrix)

Working with Paragon & REBGV IDX feed issues & upgrades

A recent change in metadata from the Paragon MLS® IDX system caused issues not only for Brixwork’s integration but with several other providers. Our coding team worked with the real estate board technicians to help iron this issue out not just for us, but for the entire system.

Other User Interface & Social Media Display Upgrades

During these troubleshooting steps we took measures to perform some more upgrades:

  • Improved open house integration for quicker updates of dates & times – essential for more accurate and up-to-date data for our new MLS® search form upgrades to include open house filters

  • Homes list (on the Admin section) update to easily show which listings have video tours, or PDF feature sheets/floorplans attached

  • Better default image & title for MLS® search result page open graph tags for image feed – if the first MLS® result does not show a picture yet, it falls back to listing #2 or #3 on the list to make the Facebook share results look better & detailed.

Upcoming Upgrade Plans For Brixwork In Winter of 2018

More frequent MLS® Listings Sync

On our new and improved hardware (AWS Cloud) and software (better & faster mechanisms) we are starting to roll out more frequent MLS sync for select regions, starting with Vancouver.

  • Customers can see more new listings faster – increase frequency of visit.

  • Google will crawl your new listing pages even more frequently.

  • Improves your overall chances of showing up for new listing address/street/neighbourhood searches

  • Improves your existing social media URL share or SEO campaigns

  • To leverage these benefits, please read our DIY SEO tutorials for real estate agents part 2!

Further Vimeo integrations

On our newly built templates, we are improving our handling of videos from the core. While we still recommend Youtube videos for listing tour videos for SEO reasons, Vimeo offers better visual display as far as background videos or other decorative elements go, and aligns with our principle of “Looking good matters.”

Want to make the most of your MLS® Listings?

Our SEO campaigns have brought in measurable & significant results! Our team can make great use of your upgraded search modules, along with other existing functionalities that the Brixwork platform has to offer. Please check out our SEO services for real estate websites to learn more about how we can bring more leads for you.