I got to wondering WHY MLS.ca seems to have lost in real estate searches to Google and others. So I did a little looking around, I went over to MLS.ca do do a little checking. Now I realize real estate agents do not use MLS.ca to do searches, and that may be why nothing has been done about it. Here are a few of the website atrocities I noticed:<\/p>\n
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- Load time<\/strong> from the time I typed “mls.ca” into my browser, until the time I had relevant search results for properties in the Kitsilano area of Vancouver was an astounding 40 seconds. As a reference, I typed “Kitsilano Real Estate” into google and was presented 109,000 search results in less than 1 second.<\/li>\n
<\/p>\n
- Ease of use<\/strong> Count them, 5 maps I had to click on!\n
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- The British Columbia portion of a map of Canada.<\/li>\n
- Then click on “Vancouver – Lower Mainland” on a map of BC.<\/li>\n
- Next (when it loaded), I got to choose “Greater Vancouver”, I thought “Great! finally the area I want!”.<\/li>\n
- Wrong! Assuming that I am immigrating to Vancouver from say, Toronto (some say escaping rather than immigrating) I needed to determine if Kitsilano is in VW, VE, BU or RI.<\/li>\n
![\"Example](\"http:\/\/www.vopenhouse.ca\/blog_images\/map.jpg\")
<\/p>\n - That aside, after choosing VW, I finally get to choose between KT, FA, AR or gag me now…<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
I feel sorry I had to write all that. You probably didn’t read this far! I wouldn’t.<\/p>\n
So Why did I have to click on 5 maps, then select my property search criteria just to see listings! <\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
Before someone points out the “Advanced Search” page on MLS.ca would have been quicker, I will try to recall the the last time I clicked on the advanced search link in google. Never! Why? Because I don’t have to. <\/p>\n
It is not too late, some basic site redesign, speed enhancements and a proper marketing effort could save MLS.ca. The call for change might have to come from the people who don’t use it, the Real Estate Agents. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After a night of investigating some new website stuff, a new spam filter for the blog, some interesting new prospects for playing flash video, an overall assessment of website performance… I got to thinking about a common thread in many different real estate blogs. Articles with titles like: Big Changes at Zillow.com – Are they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4,9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.vopenhouse.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.vopenhouse.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.vopenhouse.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.vopenhouse.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.vopenhouse.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.vopenhouse.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.vopenhouse.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.vopenhouse.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.vopenhouse.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
- Ease of use<\/strong> Count them, 5 maps I had to click on!\n