Trulia Voices points me in the right direction.

Today on Trulia Voices, a question came through about the Big Springs subdivision in San Antonio, TX.  I answered the question with some links, but thought to myself, "Wouldn't it be great if I could provide a link to homes available in the subdivision without having to list them one by one?"  Now of course, this seems simple enough and should be an option on every IDX, but it had never occurred to me since I started using ARE-TEC.  When it did, I wondered how to do it.

So I emailed Chris at ARE-TEC (if you don't know him, he's Kelley Koehler's (@housechick) husband and can be found on Twitter at @azgeek) to ask a few questions about passing variables through the URL to get the desired results I was looking for.  Within moments, I had my answers.  Follow up emails defined even more of what I was looking for.  Chris explained that at some point he wanted to write an advanced user's manual to cover issues like this, but as a small, growing company, he just hadn't gotten to it yet.  So I asked for his permission to pass on the information to anyone here who might be using it and told him to feel free to use it to help others outside of ActiveRain.

Understanding basic URL design.

I know not everyone is a computer geek, so let's take a look at what we need to build a proper URL to find what we need.  My site, www.rerockstar.com has its ARE-TEC IDX search page at the following URL: http://www.rerockstar.com/buyers/search/  If you're not sure what your IDX search's URL is, you can either visit that page and copy the URL from your browser or ask Chris and I'm sure he'd be more than willing to help you.

Ask the URL a question and you'll get answers.

In URLs, the question mark ("?") is often used to pass variables to the scripts or code contained within that URL's page.  Sounds confusing, huh?  Here's what Wikipedia says about it:

The generic URL syntax allows for a query string to be appended to a resource location in a web address so that additional information can be passed to a script; the query mark, ?, is used to indicate the start of a query string. A query string is usually made up of a number of different field/value pairs, each separated by the ampersand symbol, &, as seen in this url:

http://www.example.com/login.php?username=test&password=blank

Here, a script on the page login.php on the server www.example.com is to provide a response to the query string containing the pairs "username=test" and "password=blank".

Lucky for you (and me), ARE-TEC's IDX search works with these same principles.  By passing variables to the search, you can define exactly what you want to show up in your link, so that you're not just sending your users to a generic search page.

So let's take a look how it works.

Let's assume you have a buyer who is interested in moving to San Antonio and they've indicated the want to live in the Westcreek subdivision (an area popular with Air Force members based out of Lackland Air Force Base).  We need to know the variable name for subdivisions in order to pass the correct value to the search function.  Luckily, a quick email to Chris brought me the answer to that question too.  The subdivision name is stored in a variable named "subdivision_name" (I provide a list of all the variables later).  With that information, we can begin building our URL:

http://www.rerockstar.com/buyers/search/?subdivision_name

Of course now we need to give the variable "subdivison_name" a value (in this case, "Westcreek").  In order to that, we use the equals sign ("=").

http://www.rerockstar.com/buyers/search/?subdivision_name=Westcreek

See how simple that is?  We define the "subdivision_name" variable as equal to "Westcreek" and telling the URL to do the work for us.  As you can see, this search brings up 21 houses ranging in price from $133,900 to $229,900.  (I should note here, especially for any San Antonio Realtors® reading this, that Westcreek is a complicated search as it contains multiple subdivisions that agents list in different ways - in the interest of keeping this simple enough to teach, I have omitted the extra steps required to deal with a subdivision of this nature.)

So now that we can quide out client to the subdivision they like, what about refining the search a bit more.  We happen to know that our client can't afford anything over $180,000 (6 of the 21 houses are priced above that), so let's eliminate those homes too.

First thing we need to learn is how to add another variable to our criteria.  This is done with ampersand ("&").  Think of it as telling the search to find a certain subdivision and a price range.  When dealing with multiple values for the same variable, we also need to learn a new symbol - the comma (",").  Because we want to include everything up to $180,000, we need to set a minimum price and a maximum price and use a new defined variable - "listing_price" (again, a complete list will be provided at the end).  So our new URL would look like this:

http://www.rerockstar.com/buyers/search?subdivision_name=Westcreek&listing_price=0,180000

Now, our URL returns homes in Westcreek priced between $0 and $180,000 (15 homes - 6 less than our original search).  This section of the URL, "&listing_price=0,180000" defines that we also want to look at list prices between "0" and "180000" (we could make the 0 a higher number, but in this case, we knew where the prices started, so didn't bother - most searches would probably be more similar to "&listing_price=150000,180000" (looking for homes between $150,000 and $180,000).

A few other important tips.

You can keep adding extra search criteria as long as you attach them to the URL with the "&" symbol.  When looking for prices, we learned that we can set the minimum and maximum using the "," symbol.  It can be used to not only define a range, but also to add additional values to a variable.  The best example of this is with "subdivision_name" variable.  Suppose your client loves Westcreek, but also is curious about Spring Vistas.  With "subdivision_name" you would just separate the values (names of the subdivisions) with commas, so that part of the URL would be "subdivision_name=Westcreek,Spring Vistas" and you could add as many subdivisions as you want, just keep the commas coming in between each name.

Spring Vistas leads us to our other helpful hint.  When a subdivision has two (or more words), you need to separate each word with a space (" "), but many browsers hate spaces in URLs.  Technology has gotten better and browsers like Firefox have no real problem with them, but in order to be safe, you should use its URL-code "%20", so in our previous case of adding Spring Vistas to our subdivision search, we would come up with:

http://www.rerockstar.com/buyers/search?subdivision_name=Westcreek,Spring%20Vistas&listing_price=0,180000

Now the results include the other subdivision (Spring Vistas) within our price range.

How would you use this feature?

I can think of some great uses of this URL-building capability, my Trulia Voices example being one of them.  By combining the URL variables you can get pretty specific as well, so it allows you to bring the reader direct to what you want them to see instead of saying "go to my site and search for some houses."  You've done the work for them and with practice, its actually quite easy (it takes me less time to build a custom URL than to run a search on my MLS and send the properties to my client).  The general search feature is great for someone who happens upon your site and you know nothing about, but if you have a client and you know their criteria, why not point them to exactly what they're looking for?  Now that's customer service.

As promised here are the variables you can use to build your custom URLs.

I have also placed this entire post into a Word document so that you can download it and cut and paste variables from your own computer (so you don't have to search for this post two years from now to find out what the variables are).  You can download it here (Microsoft Word .doc file).

address_city
address_zip
area
bathroom_count
bedroom_count
external_identifier   (MLS ID#)
listing_price
listing_status
property_type
square_footage
school_district
school_elementary
school_middle
school_high
subdivision_name
year_built

Good luck building your new custom URLs.  If you haven’t tried ARE-TEC’s tools yet, I highly suggest you do.  Their search looks absolutely amazing, it’s simple to use, clients love it, and you get direct access to the developer and have a say in how the tools perform (for instance I just put in a request for different size of their “Listing Galleries” and they are working on it).  Their pricing is great and what you get for your money is phenomenal.  They are busy expanding to new markets all the time and as they grow, you can really see the excitement in their eyes over building an IDX search that works for consumers and agents alike.

* One note - be sure you use your local MLS' terminology when inserting values into your URLs.  For instance, a local subdivision, "Big Springs At Cactus Bluff" is known in our MLS as "Big Springs At Cactus Bl" using the full name will result in no homes being found that match the search criteria.