Good afternoon and welcome to today’s Flexmls class on custom views for fast summary information. Today’s topics. First, we’re going to talk about what is the list view. Then we’re going to cover how to create a custom views. So if you’re not satisfied with the defaults, you can create your own custom views. How do you set that as a default going forward?
How you can even share a custom view? And then I’ve got a few did you know things here at the end for our fifth bullet point. So all in all today, as we cover these five different topics related to views, this will take approximately twenty minutes. And again, this has been recorded. So if you need to leave for any reason, just wait for that.
You’ll get it in your email in approximately twenty four hours. Alright. What is the list view?
So in Flexmls, when you’re on the main website and you use the quick search, the most powerful search tool in Flexmls, and you look at search results in the list, that is where you’re going to see the view, where you’ll see fields or columns of information like price, status, total square foot, beds, baths, whatever it may be, your build, days on mark market.
So that’s the view. That’s what we’re discussing today. And so sometimes that works well for your needs.
Other times, you look at different things in listings information than that view provides. So it might help to have a custom view with the fields you want, in the order you want, and even maybe with the summary, sort that you want. So if I want it sorted by ZIP code first and then within the ZIP code price, or I want it sorted by status then price, I can create those custom sorts along with the view, the columns of information.
So what this looks like in Flexmls, we’re going to go in. I’m going to exit this full screen right now And we’re going to create a custom view. So I’m gonna show you the default views. They’re different from MLS to MLS, but everybody can create a custom view. So in Flexmls, when I begin a search and right now I’m on a quick search page.
Let me zoom in on my screen and I am just going to put in some really basic search criteria to limit the number of listings that pull up. So I am going to do maybe listings over eight hundred thousand dollars right now just so we can start looking at our results. So right now I have fifteen results. And when I move from edit search to the list, this is where we’re going to find that view.
And so you’ll see the view for this particular MLS has the association as there are multiple associations that use this MLS.
Waterfront, Lake Name, listing member, list date, days on market.
And as I look at the listing summary information on the list, I might say, well, I’m not usually needing access to these fields like waterfront or lake name. Most of the business I do is not using those fields. Or maybe you would like those fields to be present on yours and they’re not on your default view.
So the actual view, those columns of information can be customized. And you can start this process from any search results screen. So I’m just going to put up another slide right now. In order to create your own custom one, when we’re on a search page, I’ll show you the steps. Right now, we’ll click on view, and then we’re gonna come to a page to set our views and customize them.
And it will have three sections, general, fields, and the sort. So that’s what I’m going to do right now.
Any search results screen will have access to this as you just ran a search. I look at the top right of that top row under the list and it tells me these are all the premade views. And you’ll see they’re associated actually with the search templates in your MLS.
So if I were to do a search for multifamily or land with this in it within this MLS that I’m demonstrating in, it would automatically use the view associated with that.
But what I want to do instead is create my own custom view. So right next to that drop down list, we’ll click on the word view. And I get a pop up on my screen. And here are those three tabs to work through: the General, the Fields, and the Sort. The General, this is just going to be our name. And I’m just going to call this my custom residential view. I’ll put a zero in front of it so it’s at the top of my lists.
On the general tab, you have also have an option to give it a description. And that report description only displays when you go in and print the view. And I’ll actually look at printing the view a little bit later in the sec class. So maybe I’ll just say this residential summary. We’ll see where that comes in just a moment. Show the photo.
Now when I’m looking at things in the list, I can see it as a one line view like a spreadsheet, or I could include that photo. If I include the photo here, I can always toggle it to that one line view. So I’m just going to say yes, let’s have that photo available if I want it.
And then I have a default option and this is for when I go to my menu and use the option for pulling up my listings or my office listings or in the address or MLS number search. This is not what sets it for the actual quick search, but if I say this is the view that I always want to use when I look at my office listings or my own listings.
When I set that and I go to my menu and then search for my listings or my office listings, That’s the view, the columns of information that would appear by default. Now I will show you how to set it as a default for quick search as well, but we’ll get to that in a moment. So after naming it, you can put in the report description. It’s optional. I’m going to move to my fields.
And here on my fields tab, I see all the available fields on the left. And I can select different property types here. So if I were making a view specifically for vacant land or something like that, I would select the property type at the top and then I have the fields available for that property type. For this view, I’m going to use residential. I have a search bar here at the top of this.
Maybe something I use in my searches is, does it have a bedroom on the main floor? So your MLS may or may not have a field like that. This MLS that I’m demonstrating in does. I’m just going to type in the word primary, and then I see let’s see. Oh, no. I’ve got that in my amenities unit. We can put that in.
And then over on when I click it, over on the right hand side, I am going to see it gets added to the very bottom. And if I want to rearrange the order, I can put that wherever I’d like it. I put it under beds and then main floor primary bedroom. Now this may not be the field that I want to use. I’m not sure if it’s a required field.
The best fields to use on a view are those fields that you know there will be information for. So when you add a listing and you fill out the required fields, those required fields make great fields to use in the view because it automatically, you know, has actual information in it. Let’s see. In this view as well, I see I have bathrooms, total baths, but I don’t have number of full bathrooms.
So I’m going to search for baths, and I see we’ve got total baths already to the right, but I don’t have full baths. So I’ll click to add that as well.
And then I’m going to bring that up right underneath here. Good. Now, as I’m looking at this, all of the fields that were there, I can keep them. Or if I say like the waterfront present in most of my searches, I’m not searching by waterfront. I don’t need that information taking up a column. You can just click the X and take that out.
And as a matter of fact, I’m going to take out a few of these. I’ll take out, listing member, co listing member for right now And maybe I’ll move my days on market. I’m going to move that down just a little bit. Right after full baths. I’ve got some selling information. I’m going to take out the selling member information here as well.
And then I have the close date. So if I pull up a sold listing, I’ll see the date that it’s sold. So I’ve got that here. And again, I can rearrange things as I would like. A few other things that I can do. I’m going to take property ID off just so we have fewer things to look through as we create this custom view in my example. Some things to note here.
If I want to change the length of the field name, main floor primary bedroom, that’s really long and it’s going to be a yes no field. It’s just going to say yes or no. I don’t need a field column that’s that wide. So you can click on that and I can rename that. Maybe I just want to say primary bedroom primary bedroom may.
And I know this is a yes or no field. So if it has a yes, it’ll just say yes here.
Same thing when I’m looking at there’s my full baths. When I look at total baths, I’ve already renamed that baths, but bring that up full baths. Again, that’s probably not going to be ever higher than maybe two digits. So if I click on that, I may just call this FB for full baths. And again, click done. So I can put the fields I want in the order I want.
One thing that you will notice here, take this one off as well, is that price status and MLS number will always be included. You can’t customize that. That will always be included. They’ll always be first in the list. So you’ll always have that information and everything else then I’ve customized. Lastly, on these fields, if I want the sort.
So as I look at this, if there’s a custom sort for the view I’m currently using, it’ll tell me what the sort is. And this sorts by a lot of different things, list number, days on market, list date, history, sorts by all sorts of things. I could just say column order so I can click on the column headers and sort on the fly. But I can also create my own custom sort. So I’ll click create a new sort.
And so now I am going to call this status price. I’m going to sort by status. So if I have a search that includes multiple statuses, it’ll group by status first, and then I’m going to sort by price within that status. And again underneath that, I select the property type. In this case, I’ll do residential.
And then I’m going to search by or use that search bar to pull up status. So I’ll sort by status, ascending order. So my actives will be first, and then I wanted to sort by price within the status. And I’m going to type in current price. So if it’s a sold listing I’m looking at, it’ll use the sold price to sort, or the listings current price if it’s on market.
And then I can select ascending or descending, and I can put as many levels to that sort as I would like. Once I am done here, I’ve named my sort. I have put the fields in that I want. We’ve put the fields in the order that we want. I click on save. And now that view has been saved. It’s available for me to use. You’ll see I put it at the top of my list.
And the next thing that if you create your own view and say, okay, these are the fields that I want in my view. They’re in the order that I want. I can always say, how do I make this by default view? So in order to set that as a default, we just need to use it once with any quick search template and it will be tied to that template.
So I’ll do a search with quick search. I’ll go to the list and select that view and that’s all we need to do. It sticks with that unless I change it in the future. So the next time I start a search, it will use that view. So what that looks like is I just start a search. Doesn’t matter. Any quick search. I can use any template. I’ll just use the residential template.
I’ve already got it selected and I’m just going to pull up those listings in West Fargo again.
And all I have to do now on any search that I’m doing, I just need to do it once. I go to the list. And while I’m on the list, I come here. I see all the available views. You will always have access to those default views, but you also then have access to your custom views. So I select that custom view. Now it is stuck with my residential template.
I could use the same view for a different search template as well, but that’s it’ll just stick with it from now on. Now it won’t do that actually on my demonstration account because I am super using. I’m using as in my training account. It will work for you when you’re logged in as you would normally log into Flexmls. It’ll work just fine. Now we’ve set the view. How do we share the view?
So maybe I’ve created a view and I work with somebody and they say, well that looks better than what I see for my default views. How do you do that? You can, of course, show them or refer them to this video, or you can go to your menu and my views. And there you can edit your views or you can share the views you’ve created with somebody else. And what that looks like is in Flexmls, I go to my menu.
I’m just going to type in the word my views in that search bar on my menu and it’s under preferences, my views. On this screen, I see all the inherited ones. Again, you’ll always have access to those, but now I’ve got my custom ones as well. So I can’t delete an inherited one. I could delete my custom one.
So if you’re just trying this along at home, you could always do this and then delete it if you don’t want to use it in the future.
Or I can click on that and then at the bottom I could edit that view. I could remove it if I don’t want to use it. Or I could give this to someone else. And when you click give to someone, I get a list of all the offices in my MLS. I would find the office that I want to share that with and then say, give the view to somebody in that selected office. And then I could select from that list of office members.
And then I would select give to that member. Now I won’t actually do that today, but once I do that, it is available still in my quick search results when I look at listings. Also, whoever I shared that with, when they start looking at search results and they go to the list, it will be available for them to use as well. And they can sell it as a default by just selecting it on any search.
It will then stick with that template that was used for that search. So that is sharing that.
And then in our last five minutes, I’m going to, give you a few other things. Where else can I use that view? And the most common place I see this used is maybe when I have a group of listings that I want to print. I can print that list view, on the print screen. So what that looks like, again, I’m going to just edit my search and pull up, some fewer listings.
So again, we’ll go back to West Fargo for today’s example, and I’ll do that eight hundred thousand dollars plus for list price. So now when I jump to my list, I’m using that custom residential view with that’s the view that we had used the last time we were here. And if I want to say, well, remember, I said we included the photo, but at any point in time, I can come here and say, let’s remove the photo.
So it’s just more like a spreadsheet view.
To print this, when I go to my actions at the top and select print, I can select current selected listings or in this case, all results. If I want to select the detailed reports, I can, but then I have my list right here. So I’m actually going to deselect anything other than my list so we can see what this looks like. So I’ll do all results, the list. I can select which view I want to use.
We’ll use our custom one that we just made.
And then I can say, let’s if I want the picture to show, uncheck that. If you want it to appear just as a single line without the preview photo, check that. Word wrapping if I want. Font size. There’s the title that when we said let’s call this the residential summary that’ll show when we print. You’ll see that now and I’m going to decrease my font size just a little bit.
We’ll preview this and now I see our custom view in that spreadsheet format. And from here, of course, I could print that. Some MLS’s would allow you to email this as well from this screen. So I could do that as well as allowed by your MLS. So that’s a really common place where you will see that, and then you’ll see where I said it would that title that would print when we went to the print.
There it is right here, residential summary. So I’ve got that right here. And again, all that was doing I could be on any page as I’m looking at the listing information. When I go to print, I have the option to select the view and print that list. Other places you can see it in the full website, the single listing view when you’re on another search tab.
So when I select the view here, this one’s showing price, list date, total square foot. And then I look at listings on the details, the photos, the map, whatever listing I highlight, at the bottom of this search column, there is the option to toggle between all search results or just show me a summary of the one that was currently highlighted.
And from here, the summary information that displays is pulling directly from our view. So whatever view we select on the list, that’s what displays here in the summary information. So it’s always good if you just are looking at this and don’t want to look through all of that listing information to get to the information that you find useful.
You can always on any listing in that list, when I highlight it, just go to that summary view for that listing and see the summary information. And that summary information is set by whatever view you have selected on the list tab.
Lastly, and it ties into this, when I email this or share this with somebody or I share the search or create a search and turn on automatic updates, the view that I’m using in my search right now is what the recipient sees. They always see the public version.
So if I had something in there such as the listing members contact information in my view or something, that’s private information. Generally, that’s not going to be shared. Most MLSs have that set as private. So, you’d see it when I’m in the MLS, but when I share it, only the public fields will display information when I share this. And so I put that out here.
It’s gonna actually show this.
So on the mobile apps or when I share the interactive listing with anyone, I am going to see when I’m on my app and I go to my summary card view, I am going to actually see the views available. You’ll have an option right at the top where you could change and select a different view here as well.
And then if there are multiple cards or columns here that don’t quite fit on the screen in my app, the iPhone allows you to swipe through and see those other summary fields there as well. So you’ve got your views available on mobile. And since any listing you share publicly from Flexmls or email to somebody, from Flexmls, they are using that mobile friendly version.
That means the summary card on those shared listings displays the view as well.
So that takes us to the end of today’s presentation. We covered what the view is, creating the custom view, coming in. How do you make that your default view, sharing the view, and lastly, a few other places that people commonly use the views and select different views within Flexmls or in this case, when I share listings from Flexmls as well.
With that, I want to thank everyone for attending today and I hope you have a great rest of your day.
