Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Josh Hernandez, and today we are going to be taking a look at some quick search tips and tricks in Flexmls. And let’s go ahead and take a look at the three things that we’ll be covering in the next thirty minutes. And the first is going to be a brand new feature in Flexmls, the default search.
So I’ll cover what that is, how it works, and some of the frequently asked questions that I’ve gotten in some on-site classes that I’ve done while teaching that over the past few weeks since it’s been released. We’ll also take a look at multitasking in Flexmls, how do you open multiple tabs at once, and then draft searches as well.
When I teach classes, these are two of the most commonly asked questions that people will ask. So whether you’ve been using Flexmls for a long time or not, hopefully, you’ve seen these before, but if not, they’re gonna be extremely useful for you. So let’s begin by starting with the default search.
And first, I’m just gonna show you kind of what it is and how it works, and then we’ll talk about some of the particular questions that I’ve had on this recently. So first, what is the default search? The idea with the default search is you can set specific locations or statuses or even regular fields. Maybe you wanna make sure something’s not a mobile home when you start a search or something like that.
You can have preselected criteria that’s always present whenever you begin a search. So some of the examples that I use for this and some of the use cases I’ve seen are MLSs where you belong to an association or multiple associations that cover a really wide geographic area, but you do most of your business and searching in a specific location. You can I’ll show you how to set a specific location.
So when you start a search, it’s always there. I’ll also show you how to set a default status because sometimes I teach appraisers or brokers, and they’re wanting to have a default search that always includes off market listings when they begin the search rather than active listings. So I’ll I’ll do that in my example as well. I’ll probably even use the map here.
So what you do to set the default search is just begin from a regular search page. So I’m already here in Flexmls. I’m gonna zoom in on the screen so it’s a little bit easier for you to see and follow along with what I’m doing. And you’ll set the default search when you’re actually on the quick search screen. So I’ve got the quick search here on my favorites already. I’ll click on that.
And then I’ve got just my normal MLS defined default search, which will only have a status selected. Some MLSs, it’s active or some MLSs may have coming soon inactive or, active under contract or contingent listings. But usually it’s just everything in the entire MLS and a status selected, and that’s the default.
But in this example, I’m using, like I said, for the Fargo Moorhead Association for today’s example, But I’ll show you, you’ll see there’s eighteen thousand four hundred active listings. And if I click to view those listings on the map, you’ll see they cover a huge geographic area all the way into Minnesota.
So I may be wanting to start a search that is closer to where I do business right here. So if I want to come in and say let’s always look at the cities of Fargo and maybe also select a few cities. So in this location, there’s Fargo, West Fargo, and then across the river there’s Moorhead, Minnesota. So I’m going to add that in.
So I’ve got these cities selected. And now you can see there are only six seventeen active listings. So I’m gonna set these locations as my default, but I’m also going to show you, you can change the default statuses too. So let’s just go in and do that. So this MLS in particular has a coming soon status, so I’m going to include that.
But I gave the example of wanting to include off market listings, So I’m going to do closed listings here as well. And so with that, when I select the off market date, I’m going to come down and you’ll see the close date right now is going back using specific dates. I’m going to say, let’s go I’m gonna click this and go to months back.
And I’ll say whenever I start this, actually, let’s go years back. That’s clickable again. We’ll go years back, and I’ll say it’ll go one year back from whatever date I run this search. So when I run it again, maybe I run it next week, whenever I’m running it, those off market dates for the closed listings are going to go back one year. And it’s going to automatically start in these three cities for location that I selected.
Now you could do county as well, or any other location fields. I’m just illustrating it with city. Actually, let me put in one more thing.
So it’s not just confined to statuses and cities. I’m going to come down here. There is a subtype or style. They label it in this MLS. So you’ll see, like, single family options. Your MLS may have this called property subtype or something similar. And there’s a time share option here. I’m gonna select not of time share. So I click to select it.
I click to say not of so that when it initially is including this, there’s only one, but I can say not of. So whenever I run this search, it’ll automatically in exclude the time share. So now I’ve just got my basic search started, and these are the things that I personally want selected whenever I just begin a search.
Maybe ninety nine percent of my searches or eighty percent of my searches are always looking for these statuses, those locations, excluding timeshares. Rather than taking the time to add that every time I begin a new search, we’re just going to start a default search. So these will all be preselected.
So in order to set the default after we go in and put the selections that we want here, To make this my default search, whenever I start a quick search, I’m going to go up to my actions at the top of the screen. I’m going to click on save and it will be the second option down, set as default search. So when you click that, it’s gonna load the screen for me, and it’s going to say, are you sure you want to do this? You can click don’t show this again.
I demonstrate this a lot, so I’m just gonna click confirm here. So I’ll see that again next time. But you can click the box so you don’t have to see that again if you ever decide to change it. So right now, when I’m just gonna click close here. Now I’ve got three thousand listings that are going to be, in my default search.
And what that looks like, I’m just going to leave the screen, click that logo in the upper corner just to leave the screen. And then when I begin a quick search, you’ll notice that now the postal cities here are preselected to those three cities. Statuses coming soon, active, closed, my closed are going one year back whenever I start a search, and the style is not of timeshare.
So I’ve just come in and set that. And you’ll also notice if I change the search template so I started this on a residential search. But if I say, well, let’s do a land search from here, and I click land. Anything that’s applicable in those defaults is going to carry over.
So you’ll see city of Fargo, Morehead, West Fargo, statuses coming soon, active, closed, style, not of. Because it’s land, it doesn’t really have, like, the timeshare option because it doesn’t exist. So you’ll see nothing is selected there. Even though style says it’s selected, there’s nothing that’s selected. It’s not actually using that here.
So if I use one of my presets that’s not in other property types, it won’t apply to that property type, when I change here. But now I can just go back to residential. And, again, those presets are there.
So now anytime I start a search, whether I’m here on the search screen, switching search templates, or whether I just click quick search to begin that brand new search, those presets are in already. And now I’m just be able to go in and say, alright. I know everything is where I want it.
So now when I click on list price, for example, and I put in a list price, I know this is already in the location that I want it with the statuses that I like to see. Now I can always modify things as well. So if I want to say for this particular search, I’m going to get rid of the sold listings, I just want the active and coming soon.
I can hold my control key, command key for Mac users, and I’m just gonna deselect closed. So you can modify what’s here as well. So even though that came in as the default, maybe in this case, we’ll get rid of Moorhead, you can modify those defaults on the fly. So the default is just kind of the starting position for the search.
And I think the best use cases are location, geography, and statuses, what statuses you like to see when you begin a search. But not limited to just those things as we saw I put in style here as well. So it’s not of time share in this case in my example. So that gives you the idea of how that works. Now sometimes people will try a new feature like this out, and one of the first things is going to be you start having questions.
So I’ve put together sort of a four question FAQ that I’ve encountered so far, like I said, in some of the classes I’ve taught in person. And number one, how do I remove default search criteria quickly but not permanently? So when I just begin a search and I say, oh, in this search, I’m not limiting my search to just those three locations. I just want active listings. I don’t care about the style.
There’s a new option right at the bottom of your search template. So I just scrolled all the way down. And just to the right where it says add a field, it says reset filters. That’s a temporary reset. So when I do that, it’s just going to clear out anything that I put in for my default search criteria.
So now, just like the very first search I ran today, this is looking at the entire MLS, cleared out all the other statuses. And I could always come in here and just start putting in whatever it happens to be that I’m looking for in this particular search. And then I can look at the results, do whatever I’m going to do with the results.
But that’s just a temporary reset. The next time I start a quick search, I just clicked on quick search, I still have my default search. So that’s a temporary reset at the bottom. The next question is, sometimes people will set a default and say, you know what? I thought I would like it, but I would rather see more listings than fewer listings.
How do I permanently remove the default search criteria that I set? So maybe you came in like I did. You set a default search, but you’re like, I don’t really care for how this works or I liked it better the way it was previously and nobody necessarily likes change. So if I want to say, when I start a search, I want it to be like it was before. No no locations preselected.
No style preselected. No statuses other than active preselected. So the easiest way to just get back to the reset or the defaults, before the default rather, click reset filters just to kind of clear everything out other than the original MLS defined default of looking for active listings in this case.
And now that I’ve done the temporary reset of the filters, go to save at the top of the screen and just set this new search where there’s nothing selected as your default.
And so now I’m going to come in, say, yes, I wanna replace that. That’s my new default search. So when I click on quick search, we’re back to where we were initially. Now I am going to do one more example. I’ll set another default in just a moment. But I wanna do a couple more questions here.
Well, one more question, and then I’m gonna do another example, and then we’ll do the last question. And the third question is, does my default search apply when I use my Flexmls Pro app for iPhone or there’s an app for Android? It’s called Flexmls for real estate pros, if you don’t have that already.
And yes, if you come in and set the default search on the full website, when you do a search on the app, those same defaults are going to apply. Or maybe you use the app more frequently. When you save a search on the app, there’s an option to set a search as the default in your app. And if you do it and set the default on your app, that would then sync back in to the full website.
So they whatever one you set your default search, it carries across all of those platforms. So you can set it on the mobile. You can set it on the full website. Doesn’t matter where you set it. All of them will have them the same default. Or if you clear it out, it will clear it out from I clear it on the full website, clears out the default on the app as well.
So, I just wanted to address that, that that does carry across platforms. One other example that I will do here, just because I have seen people, inquire about this, is maybe in this example, I am looking, this is, an example particular to this MLS, but you’ll be able to see applications hopefully in your own MLS.
Where when I select county, as a member here, maybe I’m a member of the Fargo Moorhead Association of Realtors, they’re in Cass County. And if I say let’s look in Cass County and start that as my default, there’s a Cass County here. But if I go to my overlays, go to my counties, whoops, not flood zones, counties. I see there’s actually a Cass County here in Minnesota as well.
And you’ll see it’s pulling both of those. So I didn’t really want to search Cass County here.
So what I’m going to do instead is you can set a default search and it doesn’t have to be just driven by fields. You could just have your default search driven by a map search. So what I’m going to do is I’m gonna just use this map. I’ve got this overlay for counties in the North Star MLS, they have a county overlay. So I just have that pulled up, but I’m going to draw on my map. I’m just gonna go to my draw tools.
I’ll click the free form polygon. And then I’m just going to outline Cass County. I might do Clay County here as well, because this is the Fargo Moorhead Association of Realtors. So jumping into a little bit of Minnesota here won’t hurt us. And once I get this drawn the way I want, I double click to stop drawing. And now you’ll see I’ve got this polygon drawn on my map.
And so here, and I’m also going to add coming soon.
So I’ve got this selected and I’m just going to click on set that as our default search. Now I’ll just confirm here. Again, you can check the box so you don’t have to see that every time. But now when I start a brand new search, whether it’s residential, land, it’s just looking in that shape that I’ve drawn. So you don’t have to do this. You can always just use the defaults that are in your search template.
But I just wanted to show you, it also, if you have an application where you’d rather draw on the map, in this case it was because of counties with similar names or the same name but in different states, this can solve that problem here as well. Now the one thing to note with this, this does carry across to the app.
But on the app, when I start doing a map search and I click search nearby me, it doesn’t matter if I’m in the shape. It’s just gonna disregard the shape on the on the app. So your app, because the app can do a location search and search nearby, that search nearby feature in the app will ignore it if you’ve drawn a shape, and it’s actually just gonna search nearby you.
So it doesn’t matter if you’re located within that shape or outside of that shape when you’re on the map. So map searching works just slightly different on the app because the app knows that you may not be in this particular location when you start doing that.
So just wanted to point that out that your app can, we’ll use this for a default search on the mobile app, but also when you’re outside that area and click nearby, it’ll just ignore that shape and pull in nearby listings. So that is setting the default search template and some of those common questions.
Now the last question that I’ve had is when I start a search with the quick launch, the search links that I click, they don’t apply the default search criteria. So why is that? So what I’m what I mean by this is when I begin a search here, you’ll see the map, the statuses I’ve selected. But when I use this quick launch bar at the top, you’ll see it tells you to enter an address, city, zip code.
This quick launch bar works great for all kinds of searching. And I could even put in, search.
Let’s go actually I’m gonna say five hundred dash six hundred k, city of Fargo, four bed. So you can put in search criteria. Price, location, bedrooms, bathrooms, square footage are usually searchable for most MLSs through that.
And then if I click to begin that search here, you’ll notice that if I go to edit the search, it’s not looking for the coming soon statuses, it’s not applying that map overlay, it’s not using my default search criteria. And that is by design.
So when you search from that quick launch bar, even though you’re using a search template, you can designate, the location here. So if you’re putting in a location or anything like that, that’s one of the reasons why when you launch and begin a search from the quick launch bar, it’s not going to use the defaults.
So it behaves a little bit differently when I search from that quick launch bar. It will not use my defaults. Instead, it own the default only applies when I’m using that quick search button or when I’m changing search templates while I’m already on the quick search page. But anything that I put in here, I’m gonna say city of West Fargo, four bed, three bath.
And when I do that, you’ll notice it’s not applying the default search criteria. So don’t expect that when you start a search from the quick launch bar, it will not apply the default search criteria only because it assumes you’re typing in some search criteria here and doesn’t want to limit things if you don’t type in everything that you want. I could always put in statuses here, active, coming soon, and have those appear here as well.
So that you will notice, but now that we’re talking about this quick launch bar, I’m gonna go into my last two quick tips for more effective and efficient searching in Flexmls. And the first one is multitasking. And one of the biggest, most frequently asked questions I get in any class is how do I run multiple searches at the same time?
Maybe I’m working with a contact on this search, putting together a CMA for somebody else on another tab. How do I open multiple tabs? There’s no menu item that says open another instance of Flexmls. And to do that, you’re going to open up those multiple tabs by using that quick launch bar, that search bar we were just looking at.
And whenever I hover over any item in that quick launch bar, there’s the option for new tab. So what that looks like here, here we started a search five hundred to six hundred thousand city of West Fargo four bed, three bath. And now I’m going to say, I’m just going to add something to this.
I’m going to say recently closed five hundred to six hundred thousand city of West Fargo.
So it is going to come in here and say recently. Yeah. But instead of just clicking and opening it in this new tab, I’ve got one tab open already looking at active listings. I’m gonna look in a new tab. As I hover over that, you’ll notice when I hover, there’s the new tab option. And when I click that, it opened an additional tab for us.
And as I come in here and do this, I’m looking at sold listings. I’ve got my date ranges here at the bottom.
I’m gonna make sure that we’re looking at specific close dates here as well. So I’ve got that. So in order to multitask, maybe I want to come in here and say for let’s do five bedrooms in the city of Morehead. Just start another search that way and come out here. So all of these are different searches. I don’t have to stay on this search page that I started on. I could go anywhere else in Flexmls.
So whenever you use that option to open anything that you’re using in that quick launch bar, it will always have the option to open that in a new tab. So you could have tons of tabs open working with different prospects in different tabs. If I save it to one prospect here, that doesn’t affect what I’m doing over here in the other tab. I could save this for myself or whatever it is.
So in order to multitask, just use that quick launch bar at the very top of the screen. And when you open up those search results, you’re not limited to just staying on this search. You’ve got your full menu. I could come in here and do anything that I wanted to do from here.
So I could even come in under my daily functions, you know, run a hot sheet from this one and come in here, make my selections, and run that hot sheet from here. We’ve got our searches going over there. So true multitasking, and I can use that on any screen where I see that quick launch search bar at the top of the page.
Just lets me multitask. And I can close one. The other ones stay open, so it doesn’t matter if I close one. It doesn’t shut everything down. But I’m gonna just close all of those ones here for right now. And then we are going to end with the draft searches. So searches that you ran but did not save.
And I’m going to illustrate the most common use for this is maybe I am starting a search, I’m beginning a search, put in all of my search criteria, whatever it happens to be. And I’m just gonna do four bed, four bath, at least twenty five hundred square feet above ground. I start this search.
We’re over here looking at the photos or the the map, the detail pages here. And if you accidentally leave the screen. Now, normally, if I want to get back and edit the search, I want to navigate along this results row on the search right above where my photos are. So I would just navigate back to edit search.
But sometimes you’re in a hurry and you forget and you just go in and you click that back button button on the browser. And because this is framed in, you will have permanent frame at the top of your screen and then whatever shows beneath in Flexmls. When you click that back button, what I think is the previous screen and what my browser thinks is the previous screen, they do not match. So I just accidentally left that entire search.
So in order to get back to that search, use that quick launch bar at the very top of the screen, type in the word draft, And then here you’ll see that residential search ran one minute ago. I can open it up in this screen or just to show off what we did on our last example, we’ll open that in a new tab. But here’s the search that I ran, but I haven’t saved. So I don’t have to go in and reenter the search criteria anymore.
So if you accidentally leave the screen, draft searches become extremely useful to get back to where you were without having to type in a bunch of extra information and redo the work that you already started. So just go to that quick launch bar at the top of the screen, type in the word draft, and it’s gonna give you the past five draft searches.
And that draft search, remember, is just a search that you were running, but you didn’t actually save. You didn’t get a chance to save it or maybe you weren’t planning to save it. It’s still available right here under your draft searches. So that was my last tip for you. I think can become really handy, save you some time if you accidentally leave the search screen.
With that, that does take us to the end of today’s presentation. I want to thank everybody for attending today, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.
