Some MLS boards require a working integration of IDX Broker they can test before they’ll approve your access to the listings within their feed—here’s some tips and different ways you could go about doing this to satisfy the MLS’s requirements.
Setting up a Wrapper
As a first step, you’ll want to setup a wrapper for your IDX Broker account. A wrapper is a page on your site that is used as a template for your IDX Broker search pages and listing display, which is an important requirement for some MLS boards.
There are a few different ways of setting up this wrapper:
- If you have a GoDaddy account and are using their web builder, we recommend you consult the video and instructions we have here.
- For a WordPress site that has our IMPress plugin installed, the plugin can try to setup a wrapper for you. Follow the instructions we have on our “Automatically Create WordPress Dynamic Wrapper” page to create a wrapper with the IMPress plugin.
- Otherwise, you’ll want to setup a wrapper yourself on a template page of your site by including two specific lines of HTML where our content should appear when your IDX pages are created. We have some great instructions on how to do this in our “Dynamic Wrapper Setup” article.
Our Technical Support team can also help with and try setting up a wrapper for you. Feel free to reach out to us for assistance and we’ll be happy to help where we can!
Adding the IDX Broker integration to your site
After you’ve setup the wrapper for your account, you’re ready to start adding an integration to IDX Broker to show the MLS board your site is functioning as expected. We have a “Getting Started” guide here that goes over the different ways of integrating IDX Broker, but you’ll find a few quick tips below.
- An easy way to do this for any site would be to add a link to your navigation that links to one of the search pages provided by your IDX Broker account. Many clients link to the “Advanced Search” page as it provides the most search criteria options to your users—you can find a list of the pages that are provided by your IDX Broker account by logging into your account and then navigating to Design > Website > Page Templates.
- If you’re using WordPress with our IMPress plugin, another option would be to place the Omnibar search widget on one of your pages or on the frontpage of your site.
- If you’re making use of the GoDaddy site builder, search functionality is provided when you enter your API key into the MLS/IDX section of your site. You’ll find more detailed instruction on how this is done on this page of GoDaddy’s support center.
- You could also consider embedding the quick search script somewhere on your site. Take a look at our “Widget - Quick Search” article for steps on this.
Once you’ve added an integration via one of the above methods, remember to let our MLS team know by sending a reply to the email you received concerning approval for your MLS for next steps! And as always, if you have any technical questions or are having some difficulties with doing the above, reach out to our Technical Support team.