MLS Property Search Layouts
Real Estate Associations often include property searches on their websites. With sites like Zillow and realtor.com to compete with, there is a real need for beautiful user interfaces that sync with their MLS system and match the website branding.
My roles
Information Architecture
UX Design
UI Design
User Flows and Wireframing
There are 3 primary layouts needed for most real estate associations regarding the MLS property feed:
Homepage Search Widget
Advanced Search Form
Search Results
Property Detail View
The main challenge in this project was creating wireframes that could fit the mold for any real estate customer with and MLS feed. If you are familiar with MLS feeds, you are aware that every implementation is different. Does the feed contain rental properties? Are agents and offices included? Do lots and land listings have enough information to also be included in the search, or should they be separated out into a separate search page? All of these questions had to be taken into consideration when defining the wireframes.
Prototyping
search widget
This widget can be placed on a website’s homepage or landing page. The tabs across the top allow the user to select which subset of the feed to search. Depending on the customer, these tabs may include other options such as land or commercial properties.
Search results
Once a search query is submitted, the resulting page layout should include all the relevant items from the MLS feed. Including options such as List/Map view and various sorting options really allows the user to narrow down their searching criteria.
List View
Map View
Property Details
The final layout is reserved for the property details. User research shows that viewers looking at homes prefer images over all else. Including the photo carousel at the top of the listing info asserts prominence and adds visual appeal. It is important when browsing for homes that it’s easy to return back to the search results, so a button is included toward the top of the page. All other remaining information is displayed below the image carousel, and given hierarchical placement in order to organize a lot of data.
Retrospective & Analysis
Since creating these MLS listing layouts, they have been adopted as a standard for the Real Estate Association that build websites with Accrisoft Corporation. These layouts have been applied to over 15 individual websites, and are currently being added into a theme design that will be applied many times over.
Real Estate customers who have this feature included in their website have noted a great improvement in feedback from their members (agents), and have noticed lower bounce rates.
Greater Syracuse Association of Realtors
Retrospective
These layouts have been very useful for the average Real Estate Association I have worked with. By creating these and adding the components to our global library, it saves a lot of time in design and development for these types of websites. The main issue we have observed is that many of the MLS feeds have “bad data”, such as misspellings, bad photos etc. Unfortunately our development team does not have control over the bad information that agents add to their MLS system.