Do you support Commercial data?

  • Updated

Yes, we do! But not in every market. It often entirely depends on the data from the MLS and/or vendor and if they include it in an IDX feed.

Our IDX search is geared toward residential search. Features and search filters you will find in the search are based around searching for residential property types such as waterfront, single-story only, pets allowed, association fees, beds, baths, etc.

Generally speaking, any RESO WebAPI feeds that support commercial data will pull in that data. 

For RETS feeds, however, it is a much more difficult process to pull in commercial data. Often, the data is stored in a separate table, and can take weeks to get it working. Since MLSs are continuing to deprecate their RETS feeds for WebAPI, we've made a decision to not add commercial data for any RETS feeds and only support them where available in WebAPI. We do have commercial data for a small set of RETS feeds today that we onboarded a long time ago and these are an exception.

What commercial types are there?

Showcase IDX specifically has a Commercial property type that a search can be filtered by. Commercial data could also be displayed as Land, Farm, Business Opportunity, and Multi-family depending on your strategy! 

Screen_Shot_2021-10-28_at_11.37.39_AM.png

There may be other property types or subtypes as well, such as Medical, Industrial, Retail, Office, Bed/Breakfast, etc. These MLS-specific unique types will display as one of the RESO property types.

How do these listings display?

Listings will display as "Commercial For Sale" or "Commercial For Rent", both on the full listing detail page and the listing preview. 

Screen

Screen_Shot_2021-10-28_at_11.56.48_AM.pngScreen_Shot_2021-10-28_at_11.57.33_AM.png

Why are some fields showing N/A?

Due to the nature of the residential search functionality, and the fact that commercial types do not support specific data fields, you will find that some feature displays do not have all the listing data provided. This would be fields such as beds and baths (total, full, and partial) and HOA fees specifically. These may appear as blank, 0, or display N/A. In some cases, you can use CSS to hide specific fields but you cannot target this based on property type. Think of it as "all or nothing".

How should I use commercial data?

Commercial Websites

If you specialize in commercial real estate, you may decide to create a website that only displays commercial data. There are some agents using Showcase IDX who have found great success using our search to power their commercial websites which co-mingle commercial, land, acreage & farm, and multi-family property types. 

If you're taking this route, you can navigate to the Search settings, and then scroll to the search restrictions area. Here, you can uncheck the residential property types to remove them from the website entirely, as shown below.

Screen_Shot_2021-11-03_at_4.36.17_PM.png

As always, you could set up individual hotsheets for each of the property types you will be showing and embed these on pages on your website. Hotsheets could be created for properties within different price ranges, for sale or for lease, or with different amenities. It would work very similar to how a residential website would set up hotsheets.

Residential Websites

If your main focus is residential, and occasionally sell commercial or work with referrals for commercial, then you may opt for a dedicated commercial page on your residential website for those interested in such properties.

If you're taking this route, you would simply only use hotsheets. Filter them by the property type, and any other additional filters and create a page or section on your website to display these.

Of course, the data would need to be available in order to create such advertising. You can check the MLS coverage page for your MLS to see if Commercial data is currently available.