On behalf of SGRS I am proud to welcome the Vancouver Island Real Estate Board (VIREB) to Sutton’s Downloaded Listings Program. They become the fifth real estate board to join our program. The Vancouver Island Region includes 4 offices:

and the following areas:

Check out these areas on our British Columbia Listings page

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On behalf of SGRS I am proud to welcome the Red Deer Real Estate Board (RDREB) to Sutton’s Downloaded Listings Program. They become the fourth real estate board to join our program. The Red Deer District includes the following areas:

Please take a look at these recently added areas on our Alberta Listings Page.

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On behalf of SGRS I would like to welcome Barrie and District Real Estate Board - BDREB to Sutton’s Downloaded Listings Program. They become the third Real Estate Board to join our program. The BDREB has listings in the following Ontario towns:

As an added bonus we are lucky enough to have a Sutton REALTOR® from the BDREB with international listings. These listings, which are for Panama City, Panama, are Sutton’s first international listings in the Downloaded Listings Program.

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In life, many people tend to look back on their mistakes and wished they had approached a situation differently. It’s always so much clearer when looking back, what a better choice might have been; as they say, hindsight is 20/20. Thankfully these “lessons learned” are not always as painful in programming as they can be in life. When it comes to programming, particularly when dealing with 3rd-party data, you have to learn to expect the unexpected. If you happen to miss something, well… just roll it into version 2.0.

We quietly released version 2.0 of our listings system last week. The change was (hopefully) transparent to the everyday user. However, it will mean great things for us in the near future. After dealing with two separate sources (Toronto Real Estate Board - TREB and Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver - REBGV) in version 1.0 of our listing system, we quickly realized that we were going to have to revamp things down the line. Each board can have a very different way of displaying data. For example, for a building’s age, TREB uses year ranges “15-30 years” whereas REBGV uses a single integer “15 years”.

With the number of boards there are across Canada, we were bound to run into more of these unique situations. Time for version 2.0 to compensate for these types of situations. I am happy to say we now have a system that not only is more consistent but also more flexible.

Our listings system revamp has provided us with:

• Data Abstraction
  - In addition to common data among all boards we also have another layer of abstraction. This layer allows for customized fields per real estate board so we can have virtually any data type and can easily accommodate for it.
• Listing Redundancy
  - We will have better control over every REALTOR®’s and Office’s listings.
  - Because we deal with several 3rd party data sources, in the past our listings were not working as consistently as we would have liked.
  - Now, generally if there is a problem we can just “flip a switch” to a different data source so we should always have something to show for listings.
• More consistent visual presentation of the listings
  - We revamped the template system to use common templates throughout all sections of the site which display listings.
  - However, if needed, we have allowed for separate CSS (style) files and images per page allowing for some flexibility.

Now that we have an improved and more consistent platform for our listings we have starting contacting many of the boards across Canada to obtain 3rd party data agreements. Before long, you’ll be able to see our advanced listings in your area and virtually every area Sutton has an office. At that point, we’ll have the most complete and most advanced listing aggregation system in Canada.

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With the franchise office move upcoming we only have a couple new features/improvements and a few smaller bug fixes for this week:

1. Added Educational Designations to flex-site contact form.   REALTORS® can now add designations such as: BA, MBA, or any other real-estate related designations.
2. Updated settings to improve search result on Google and other search engines.
3. Several small bug fixes:
   • Realtor search results better represent smaller areas (especially when these areas are represented by more than one office).
   • Resolved an issue we were having downloading listings from REBGV (Greater Vancouver).
   • Made the “Realtor/Listing Linker” script a little more efficient.
   • Fixed a bug with the Flexi-site page titles that was occuring in rare cases

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On Monday, you will notice two small updates:

1. Flexi-sites: Now REALTORS® and Offices can add/update their main Flexi-site photo via the upload page under the Presentation/Photo tabs in the Flexi-site editor.
   Note: This upload change is not instant, as SGRS must approve all photos for size, format, and quality.
2. Listings: We’ve added a new REALTOR® / Listing linking script for downloaded listings that will run during business hours on the hour from 6am PST (9am EST) until 6pm PST (9pm EST).

Explanation:

• In order for downloaded listings to appear on the REALTOR® Flexi-sites, the user must enter their Real Estate Board ID in the editor.
• For those REALTORS® who haven’t entered this Real Estate Board ID yet, you no longer need to wait 24 hours (the next download time) to be linked to your listings.

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