What Is IDX in Real Estate?
IDX lets a brokerage, and often its agents, show other brokers' MLS listings on their own website. How it works, who can have it, and what it costs.
IDX stands for Internet Data Exchange: the MLS rule, and the data feed that comes with it, behind the home search on an agent's website. Your broker holds the right through the MLS membership, a vendor turns the feed into search pages on your site, and the MLS's rules say what those pages must show.
On the website it is the property search: a buyer filters by town and price, opens a listing, saves a search, and you get their details when they register or ask about a home. An IDX website is a real estate site with that search on it.
How the listings reach your site
- Your brokerage belongs to the MLS.
The broker is the MLS participant. Agents work under the broker's membership as subscribers.
- You ask the MLS for an IDX feed.
You and your vendor file the MLS's IDX forms with your broker's approval, and the MLS has five business days to act on the request.
- The feed arrives, refreshed at least every 12 hours.
More and more MLSs send it through the RESO Web API, the standard that is replacing the older RETS feeds.
- A vendor builds the search on your site.
Search pages, listing pages and sign-up forms, with each listing naming the brokerage that listed it.
IDX feed, IDX website, IDX vendor
- IDX feed
- The listing data an MLS sends its members for public display on their websites.
- IDX website
- A real estate website with an IDX home search on it, on a platform or your own site.
- IDX vendor
- The company that turns the feed into that search, as a plugin for your site or with a website of its own.
- MLS
- The multiple listing service: the database of listings the brokers in your market file and share with each other.
Who can have it
IDX belongs to the brokerage. NAR's IDX policy gives the right to MLS participants, and a participant is a principal broker. An agent under that broker can run IDX on a website of their own where the MLS allows it, and then with the broker's consent and under the broker's control. So the first call is to your broker, before any vendor. The site then has to name the brokerage you work under, in type a visitor can readily see.
What it shows
An IDX search shows the MLS's active listings, and its pending and sold ones too within the limits your MLS sets. It never shows a home whose seller told their broker to keep it off the internet, which is one reason it can show fewer homes than the MLS; IDX vs MLS lists the others.
What IDX does for you, and what it doesn't
IDX keeps a buyer searching on your site instead of leaving for Zillow, and it gives them a reason to register: saved searches, alerts for new listings, a question about a home. It doesn't bring them to the site: every agent in your MLS shows the same homes, the portals show them too, and Google ranks the portal's copy of each.
What ranks for an agent is a page for each area they sell in, with the feed's listings on it and what they know about the place. Building those pages on an IDX website is what our IDX SEO does, and getting an agent found in the map and for each town is the wider work of a real estate SEO agency.
What it costs
A plugin for a WordPress site you already have starts at $60 a month plus a setup fee with IDX Broker, or $94.95 with Showcase IDX. A hosted website with IDX and a CRM runs from $299.95 to $399 a month on the entry plans Sierra Interactive and Real Geeks publish. Your MLS may charge its own data fee on top. Which to demo, and the test to run before you sign, is in best IDX real estate websites.