Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Josh Hernandez and today’s class is going to be on custom quick search templates and also favorite searches. They do something similar but very different also. So we’ll cover that today. Let’s begin with today’s topics. First, we’re going to answer the question, what is a quick search template? And then we’re going to go on and look at how do we create a quick search template?
How do we set that template as the default when you begin a search? And third, how can we reorder the fields on the template? And that one will make a little more sense when we get there. Also, if you’d like to share that template with somebody else in the MLS or within your office, I’ll show you how to do that. And then finally, we will conclude with how to create a favorite search, and this differs from a quick search template.
We’ll talk about that once we get there. First, let’s begin with the quick search template. So with the quick search template, what is it? It’s the default fields available when you start a quick search. So when you start a quick search and go to the upper left corner and select the property type that you want to use, and I’ll actually do this on screen in a moment. The template will load underneath it.
And those are just the most commonly used fields in your MLS that many people use when searching that property type.
So why would we want to create a custom quick search template? I’m going to come and just exit my full screen here, and we’ll jump into Flexmls. So I’m going to begin with a quick search.
And, again, by selecting the property type in the upper left corner.
Now my property types may look slightly different than what yours are, but you select a property type and that just loads those preset available fields that are there when you start a search.
So in this example, we’ll say when I start a search, I often search on not just total bathrooms, but full bathrooms and half bathrooms on a lot of searches that I do. So I don’t see that on my template. So if I were to do a search, I would have to click add a field to the search, type in the word full, and then I’m going to see whoops. Let me type in the word bath.
There we go. Bathroom is full. So I would have to add that to the search. Same thing if I’m looking for bath, maybe half.
And maybe I find myself doing this every time I start a search. And so it takes me that extra click to bring up the add a field, another search here to find the field, another click to add that, and then I can start applying that to my search. So if there’s a field or fields that you use frequently and want them on the template by default, that’s what we’re going to cover right now.
So I’m just going to start this whole process from the very beginning. I’m just starting on the search page, and I’ll actually change and just show you the slide here. So from the quick search screen, what we’re about to do, we’re going to add the fields that we want, and then we’re going to save and save the quick search template. So it’s reusable with those fields already there. So let’s take a look at that.
As I’m looking at this, again, we would come down, add our fields. So I’m not putting in any search criteria to the fields yet.
There’s our baths full. I’m gonna add that in and just gonna change my search. Baths half. Add that in. So now I’m just using the baths as an example, but you could put any fields that you use frequently onto the template. Now instead of filling out the search, what I’m going to do now is I’m going to save this template so it’s available for me to use again and again and again with those fields already there for me to use.
So I’m going to go to my actions at the top of the quick search screen and click on Save and Save Quick Search Template. Now I need to give the template a name. I’m just gonna put a zero in front of it, so it’s at the top of my list. I’m gonna call it my residential search template.
And once I name it, I’ll click on save and you’ll see that now in my search templates, it’s here and it’s available for me to use. So I select that and now I could begin building my search. So if I was looking for something with four full baths and maybe in my postal city, we’ll go on West Fargo, and I could begin building my search that way.
So the next time I want to set this or start a search, the number one question is, can I set this as a default? And I’m just gonna bring up this slide. So how we’ll set that as a default? All we need to do, we leave the search screen, we come back later, we start a search and select that template that we want to be the default template. And congratulations. You’re done.
That’s all you need to do. Whenever you start a quick search and select a template, the next time you start a search, that becomes the default for this for the search. So what that looks like from here, when I leave, I’m just going to click on my logo in the upper left corner, and I could come back later today. I could come back on Monday.
I could come back a month from now, and it remembers what I used last time. I click on quick search. You’ll see it’s already loading that template for us, and I’ve got those fields there ready to use. So that’s how you set the default. The next thing we’re going to talk about is these are at the bottom and I’d like them in a different order.
Oops. I’d like them in a different order. Maybe I’d like them up by the total baths here. So if you’re like me, I always like things nice, neat, orderly. If you would like to rearrange the fields, once I’ve created my own custom template, we wanna change the order of the fields. So what we’re about to do, we’ll go to the menu, select our quick search templates.
I’ll look at adding fields and rearranging the order, and then we’ll save the template to actually apply those changes. So when we use it in the future, they’re in the order that I like as well. So I am going to go to my menu, and I can scroll down.
It is going to be under my section called preferences and quick search templates. You could also just when you open the menu and see that search bar underneath the menu, you can type in the word quick search and there’s preferences quick search templates. So I’ll come here to my templates. Now you’ll notice this is the one that we just created. All the other ones say inherited.
Those are the defaults created by the MLS. I can never actually get rid of those ones that were created previously and given to me by the MLS just so I can’t not search. Those will always be there. They’ll always be in their current form. But what I did is I basically saved the residential as our own custom template.
It does not say inherited, which means when I select it, now at the bottom of the screen, I can click on the word edit and edit the template. Now here, I don’t really need to do anything on this page. Here’s the name of our template. I could rename it if I’d like. It’s looking for the property types, and we started with residential. That’s what we’ll keep for now.
And the view, those are the columns of information that you see on the search results screen when you go to the list. So I’ll just keep the default residential view already for this. So really nothing for me to do when I come to that first page. I just scroll to the bottom and click next.
And now I see all of the available fields on the left and all of the fields that are currently on my search template over on the right. And you’ll see there are some large groups like basement. There’s a lot of options here. I’m gonna show you a couple of ways to have some shortcuts when we’re rearranging things.
So first, I want to find full bathrooms and half bathrooms on my template, and they were just at the bottom.
I wanted to move those all the way up to where total baths was. And I can select one or more items and use move up or move down right beneath that. But since I have all of these fields that I want to move underneath, I’m just going to actually come up to the top, and I’m going to find our total bath field. I’m going to select the field right underneath that.
I’m going to hold my shift key, and when I hold my shift key in, it’ll select my first item in the list. And then while holding my shift key, I go to the last item. Now all of those are selected. And then I’m just going to move all of that down once and down again. And so now you’ll see right up at the top total baths, full baths, half baths.
If there was something else that I would like to have on my search template that’s not there, I could always find it along the left hand side of the screen. So maybe I wanna put in quarter baths. If you’re looking for a particular field, you’ll notice there is no search here. So you can do this in pretty much any of the major browsers, Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Microsoft Edge.
You can just use a control f to find, and then I can type in the word in my browser’s just searching for that word. So if I type in the word bath, you’ll see it get highlighted over here. So I could maybe add half baths or quarter baths. I select both of those. If I click underneath to add them, again, they get added at the very bottom here.
I’m actually going to go in, remove that, and just keep that the way we have. So once I’ve set the order the way I want it, I click on the word save at the bottom of the screen. And now when I go to quick search, it’ll start us on the default, the search template we used last, our custom template.
And here bedrooms, total bathrooms, full baths, half baths, right in the order that we wanted that. So that’s how you rearrange things. Very last thing we’ll do as far as frequently asked questions when people are creating these is maybe somebody sees your search template and says, how come mine doesn’t look like that? Or you see somebody else’s.
You can always ask them to share it with you or you can share it with somebody else. So how do we share a search template? If you want to go and share it, you can share it with anybody in the MLS. I’m going to go again to where we just were menu, quick search templates. We’ll select the template that we want to share, and then we’ll click the option to give to someone.
So what that looks like again menu, I’m going to go under preferences quick search templates. I select the one that I want to share. And then after selecting it, I go to the bottom and click give to someone. Once I select that, I can select any of the offices in the MLS.
When I select the office, I can say give to someone in that office, and then I could select that actual person and give to that selected member. Now I won’t share that with this person actually today because they’re in a live MLS, but I just wanted to show you how to do that. Once I do share that with somebody, they own their own copy now.
So when they go to Quick Search, they will have that template available for them to use in their search templates. But if they change it in the future or if I change my copy in the future, they don’t sync back and forth. They own their own copy. They can change it. It doesn’t affect you and vice versa. If you change your copy, it doesn’t affect the copy that you shared with them. So once you share it, they own that copy.
So that is the quick search template. Again, nice time saving feature. If there’s something that you personally search on frequently, but it’s not on the template, just save that template and you are ready to save time in the future so you don’t have to go down and do all of those extra clicks to add a field. Now our last five minutes, I’m going to move on to creating a favorite search.
So this is a little bit different, but in the same vein of what we were talking about.
So with my favorite search, this is when I want pre selected search criteria like location. I see this a lot in very large, geographically large MLS’s, where somebody doesn’t do a business in one part of the MLS, but they like to start their searches in a specific location that’s a much smaller location than is covered by the MLS as a whole. So I’m going to do that today. I’m going to select, to start my search in maybe Fargo and West Fargo.
They belong in an association MLS, that covers a wide geographic area besides just their local association.
So we’re going to create the search and set the preselected search criteria. So we’ll actually fill some things out on our search template. We’ll save and save the search, and I’ll show you we’ll mark it as a favorite and save that. And then I’ll show you how to use it. So what this looks like. When I want to start a search and right now this MLS has eighteen thousand active listings.
But for this example, we’ll say I do most of my searching in Fargo and West Fargo. So I am going to go in and select Postal City. In this case, I could do counties, I could do states, whatever it is, but I’m just using this as an example. And I’m going to say start typing in the word Fargo, and it’ll also include West Fargo. So this is what I would like.
Whenever I start a search, I just want those two cities already selected because this is where I’m doing most of my searching. I could always change it by clicking and changing things, but I want the search to be defaulted here. I may also say, let’s change the statuses. I like looking at active listings.
This MLS uses a coming soon status as well, so I’ll select that. So I held down my control key, selected coming soon.
And what I’m going to do is I’m going to save this actual search with the pre selected location and the pre selected statuses. So I can start this search with one click and then these are already there and I can build on it from here. So I am going to go up to the top of the page right now and I’ll click on save. And this time, we’re actually going to click just on the first option, save the search. I click to save the search.
I’m going to save it as a new search, and I’m going to going to call this Fargo and West Fargo. And maybe I’ll put in residential. Now before I actually save, right at the top right of the screen, mark as favorite. I’ll click on that. So this will be a favorite search now. And now I’ll just save it so I can reuse this again and again and again in the future.
So I’ve clicked on saved. Now where can I find that favorite search? I’m going to show you two places where you can find it.
I’m going to show you how we can edit that and save as and show you the process for that. So first, I’m just going to show you where can we find that to open it up and use it again in the future. Again, I’ll click on my logo here. So two places that I can find it. Number one, if I go to my menu, under my search section, there’s a section called Saved Searches at the very bottom.
When I go here, I can see my favorite searches. So you can see all searches, favorites, draft searches, searches that you ran but didn’t save. And now I see here’s that search. So that’s one place we can get to it. I can click and start using it from here. But that’s a couple of clicks to get there.
That’s going to save searches, clicking over to favorites, clicking that specific search. What I like to do is on my dashboard, there is a gadget you can add called saved searches. If you do not see a saved searches gadget on your dashboard, you can click customize in the upper right corner, click add gadgets, and add a saved search gadget. And you can drag and drop those gadgets around when you add them.
Now this has all of my searches on it. What I’m going to do is click on those three dots in the upper right corner.
Click on settings and then I’m going to come down here and say, have this gadget show only my favorites and I’ll click on save. So now I’ve got one click access to any of my saved searches that are marked as favorites. So from here, I can just click I can click to view new listings and that’ll show me new listings in the past month.
Or more likely, maybe I’m working with a prospect right now or one of my contacts, and I want to build a search for them. And so I could click and say, let’s edit this search. I know I want to start in Fargo and West Fargo, and then I can start putting in the search criteria. So I can just click on the search itself, and it starts me on the search results page.
It says list, and this is going to have about six hundred listings, six hundred and forty six listings. But now we’ll say I’m working with Megan. Megan is telling me what she’s looking for. I can always just begin modifying this search. It’s already in the locations that I want. But now if I know she’s looking in a specific price range, I can say up to six hundred thousand.
I could say square footage at least three thousand. Whatever the search criteria is that Megan happens to be looking for.
And I am going to say four bedrooms and at least let’s go with three full baths since we added that. And now I’m down to twelve results. So if I want to save this search for Megan, I could even turn on a subscription so it sends her automatic updates. First, of course, I can look at the search results.
But since I started this, you can see at the top, this is my favorite search. What I want to do is re save this. I don’t want to change my favorite search. I’m just going to save this as a non favorite search for Megan. So what I will do after I edit this search for a specific contact and I want to save it, I’ll click on save. And we’re going to check and uncheck a few things.
We’ll sit there’s a save type, and I’m going to select new. And then I’m going to uncheck mark as a favorite because I don’t want this search for Meghan to be my favorite. I want my original one that just looks at those locations as my favorite. So when I click to save this, I’ll say let’s save the search for Meghan. Click on Save. Click Save Search. And now at the top, this would be rewriting over my favorite search.
It’s on my existing search. So actually, I’ll just click to the left. Save type. Now it’s new. And so I’m gonna call this Megan Fargo and West Fargo Residential. And then at the top, I don’t want this to be a favorite in the future. This will just be on Megan’s record, so I’ll uncheck that box. We still have my favorite saved. This is a brand new one.
And so now I could save the search. It’s on Megan’s record available in her portal. Or if I wanted to turn on the subscription, I could click save, add subscription, and go through that whole process.
Now I’m not going to go into detail on the subscription, the automatic listing updates, but just to show you what that would look like, as far as that process of actually saving it is concerned. So I’ll click on save.
And now when I go to contact management and I go to Megan’s record, I’m going to be able to see there’s the search that we just created for Megan, Megan Fargo, and West Fargo. I turned on the updates, the subscription for her. It’s here. I can find that again in my saved searches. It’s just a saved search. It’s not a favorite search. We still have our original favorite search right here.
And so tomorrow, when I want to start a new search in Fargo and West Fargo for residential, I can just come to my saved searches gadget and click on that and begin that search anew, edit it, resave it for somebody else, using those steps. Now that was a lot of information that we just covered in about twenty minutes. So we have recorded this. We’ll send you that recording automatically.
Also, you do have availability for help options, guided help. I mentioned subscriptions and portals today. If you want to find out more about those, you can always go to Guided Help and look for those subscriptions and portals tutorials. You can always go to Help in the upper right corner and go to the Flexmls Academy.
You can register for upcoming trainings or go to the recorded upcoming trainings here or go to the recorded trainings here and select what you’re looking for. Maybe you wanna know more about those subscriptions that I showed so briefly.
You can always attend one of those prerecorded classes here as well. With that, I want to thank everyone for attending today. Thank you and have a great rest of your day.
