Wow – Virtual Open Houses and Tours Integrated!

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During this period of rapid change and uncertainty, we’re here to help you serve your customers while also keeping yourself, your family and community healthy and safe.  Agents who want to show a home virtually instead of in-person will benefit from this new virtual open house or broker open house feature. Use it to host an open house for prospective buyers or to schedule a virtual tour of homes for a group of agents in FlexMLS. You can use any online communication service or event tool, such as Facebook, Zoom, or Microsoft Teams, to schedule a live online walkthrough of the home. Homebuyers or agents can join your virtual open house/tour of homes and view video via the camera on your phone, or via a shared presentation. Anyone who joins will be able to ask you questions in real time.

You simply will add an open house and choose ‘Virtual’ and then place in the video link for the public or brokers to join in. We’ll get more into how to do that in a second.

Options for Virtual Open Houses and Tours

You have multiple options for adding digital media (other than photos) to your listings. With the introduction of virtual open houses/tours, we wanted to give you a refresher on how to use each option in Flexmls.  To accommodate virtual open houses and tours of homes, new options are available on the New Open House and New Tour of Homes pages. You’ll be able to select Virtual or In Person, depending on the settings of your MLS. If you select Virtual, you can add a link to an online event, along with a description for the link.  The following live web conferencing services are allowed… and the links are to the sites and an instruction video by one of the many people who have offered good content online to assist you in the process. (no endorsements, just resources!)

How to Add A Virtual Open House or Broker Tour

Upcoming virtual open houses and virtual tours can be viewed in the same places where you are used to seeing open houses and tours of homes.

When you’re viewing listings on the search results page, click the Detail tab, and then click the Open House or Tour of Homes link. For virtual open houses and tours of homes, a clickable link will be displayed in the new Link field.

To search for upcoming tours or open houses, under Daily Functions on the menu, click Tour/Open Houses and enter search parameters. The link to a virtual event will be available in the event details.

Flexmls Pro
When you view a listing on Flexmls Pro for Android, iOS, or Mobile Web, virtual open house/tour of homes information will be included in the listing details.

Flexmls Portal
Your homebuyers will also be able to view virtual open house information for listings on the Flexmls Portal.

Coming Soon
Links to virtual open houses and tours of homes are currently not available to third-party sites via RETS feeds. We anticipate that this information will become available later this week.

Why We Are Making These Changes
We know that the current pandemic situation is causing uncertainty in your lives and in your business. And we’re committed to helping you adapt to the rapid changes while also keeping yourself, your family, and your community healthy and safe. In an effort to help you continue to make the market work, we accelerated our typical feature release process to make this feature available as soon as possible.