WOW! Robbie’s new super duper Zearch site is very, very COOL! But let’s put it to the test. I checked my listing in Duvall and I didn’t have a light blue dot. Seems to me a single family home for $350,000 should have a light blue dot, no? Now I’ll do a post on it and see if the post link shows.
[photopress:1.jpg,thumb,alignright] First error is that the photo that shows in Zearch is not the photo that shows in the mls as the main photo. This is a glitch in the mls system and not in Robbie’s search tool, so I have to go into the mls and erase all of the photos and reload them to correct it. Even though when I pull up the mls, I see the photo shown here of the actual house, downloads, including Robbie’s, pick up the OLD photo number one. The only way I know to fix this is to empty the entire photo cue and start from scratch. Let’s see if that works.
[photopress:2.jpg,thumb,alignleft] One of the problems with all of the available public sites is that people who are looking for reasonably priced single family homes think they do not exist. If you are not familiar with Duvall, for example, and do not realize that it is within “target range” of Microsoft and other densely populated areas, they might never search Duvall. All search engines should allow you to put in a radius of where you WORK!
[photopress:3.jpg,thumb,alignright] Here’s a question. I took this great photo of the flowering plum tree on the front lawn before I listed the property. A couple of weeks later when I put it on the market, the flowers were gone. Early spring flowering trees sometimes only bloom for a few weeks. But I love this tree in bloom! Do I have to go take a picture of the way it looks now with all reddish leaves and no flowers?
[photopress:4.jpg,thumb,alignleft] Also, I took a lot of the photos before it became vacant and before I listed the property. Do photos need to show the way it looks today, without that table and chairs?
[photopress:7.jpg,thumb,alignright] This was my “original” photo number 1, which is the view FROM the house, not a picture OF the house. I have since changed that some time ago to photo number 7 or so. But the dowloads, including Robbie’s, show it as photo number 1 as if the mls has some kind of memory bank that doesn’t update when I change the order of the photos in the mls, and only remembers that this is photo number one when doing a download.
When agents pull up this listing they see a completely different photo (the first one above) than the public sites. Again, I think this is a Rappatoni glitch, and not a Zearch glitch. I also think I know how to fix it.
Woohoo…I feel like a techie fixing download problems! Not bad for a “Granny”!
The reason why the light blue dot doesn’t appear is because this listing is drawn on top of it because it’s next door. If you zoom in, the light blue dot will appear, as the distance on screen between your listing and this one increases. But yeah, I agree that when I put dots on the map, I need make the light blue one stand out from it’s neighbors.
We do have a map based radius search, but I still need to add a find address feature and tie the map zoom level to the search radius. But if you can get over the less than optimal UI, it works fine.
As for the photo order, the NWMLS process for downloading photos for applications is rather ineffiecient. The NWMLS feed I’m using just tells me there’s some # of photos for this listing, you can get the files from our ftp server, and good luck getting any off our overloaded ftp server. The concept of primary photo doesn’t exist, so sites like mine use the first photo they download as the primary. Now the NWMLS provides different feeds to different brokers and it’s possible that those other feeds provided that information. But the feed I’m using does not.
Well so much for my Woohoo! I deleted all of the photos and reentered them, to no avail. the download you tap into still shows the original photo #1. You would think that if the download keeps up with price changes and remarks changes, that it would also keep up with photo switches.
Going back to my “not qualified to be a geek” status…and deservedly so. The photo did change on the broker sites though. Odd.
The hyperlink is dead but it sounded like a good idea.