Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to today’s webinar on the FlexMLS homebuyer app for iPhone or iOS devices. We did a previous webinar earlier today for the homebuyer app for Android devices, And this one will look specifically at what that app looks like for iPhone. Now this is going to focus mostly on your client side app. So what that is, it’s an app version of the portal. So we’ll take a good look at what your clients can do in the app, which is similar to the portal, has a little bit different functionality for iOS. And then we’ll also talk about how do you track that activity inside Flex MLS.
Before we begin, if you have any problems with GoToWebinar, we are recording this session. So we will send you a link to that recording. But if you experience those problems, you can click on help. And that on your GoToWebinar control panel is right at the top section. If you experience audio issues, make sure your computer speakers are turned on and enabled. If you still have audio issues, you can try going to the GoToWebinar control panel, clicking the audio option, and selecting the option for phone call. That will give you a phone number to call in as well as a PIN number for access code.
If you continue to have a bad connection or need to leave for any reason, we are recording today’s webinar and we will send that to you in approximately twenty four hours. Lastly, as we go throughout the presentation today, when you have questions, go to your GoToWebinar control panel, open the questions section and type in your questions. We have both Anne and Amy on the line today to respond to those questions. As always, you will be muted throughout the presentation just so you’ll, I’m the only one who will be speaking.
Now we’re going to begin by looking at what is the FlexMLS home buyer app. It is literally the portal experience through a dedicated app on your client’s iPhone or iOS device. And just like the portal, it’s helps you strengthen those relationships. And I’ve got a list of some of the things that it will allow your clients to do. They can contact you directly from any listing or any place inside the portal or the app rather. They can see any agent created searches, searches that you saved for them. It allows your contacts to run their own searches, save and hide listings, manage their subscriptions.
It allows your contacts to get push notifications directly to their device. And lastly, and the most important thing is it allows you to review your client’s activity inside the portal. So you can see what they’re clicking on. You can see what they’re searching for. You can see what they’re marking as favorites to give you that insight as to what your clients are doing when they’re using the app. Very first question that we’ll cover today, and I’ll go through this and show you physically how to do it, but how do your clients get the app and what do they do when they have it? Before your clients get the app, before you tell them, hey, go to the store, download the app, you need to invite them to use the portal. They can’t get into the app unless they have a login. So you need to send them an invitation to the portal. Once you send that invitation, that allows them to click a link and then they’ll create their username, which is just their email address, and they set their own password. Once they do that, you can tell when they’ve logged into the portal and I’ll show you how to identify when they’ve logged into the portal. Once they have a portal login, you can suggest that they download the app and I’ll show you how they can download the app today. So this is kind of where we’ll begin. How do they get the app after you invite them to use it? You have to give them that portal access first. So if you’re testing this yourself and say, I wanna see what my client sees, you need to invite yourself to the portal in order to log in to the app. Remember, this is the client side portal app. This is not the agent app that we’re looking at today. So this is what we’ll cover first. And then we’re going to go on to taking an in-depth look at the app. What can your clients do there? Search for listings, save listings, view those searches that you created, manage the notifications, hide listings, contacting you from any listing, and also they can enable push notifications. I’ll show you what that looks like on the iOS device. And how can you see what your client is doing when they’re using the app? So we’ll review that inside FlexMLOS Web, how we can identify contact activity and their portal activity. With that, I am going to go ahead and change screens.
Give me one moment here. And we’re just going to move my screen over.
And you should see my screen. And now I’ve got my phone on my screen that you should be able to see. Let me center that in here. Make that nice and big so we can see what’s going on. And like I said, the very first thing you need to do is invite your client to the portal. We’ll run through that once we jump back into Flex MLS web from the agent side of things in the last part of this webinar. After you invite them to the portal, you can suggest that they now that they’re using the portal, that they go in and download the app. It’s available for iPhone and Android. And if they’re using iPhone, I’ll show you that’s what we’re concentrating on today. So they would just go into the app store and they would search for Flex MLS.
And in the app store, this is the FlexMLS app. It’s just called FlexMLS and they log into this with their portal information. Let them know they log in just like they would log into the portal. They will see this other option. This is the agent side app. If you have not downloaded the agent app for your iPhone or Android device, I suggest you do that. We won’t be talking about the agent side app today, but, this is a great app and I’ll show you how to get some help with that app if you’re not familiar with it. So once they download that, it’ll be on their iPhone device and they’ll log in with their portal login information. And again, if you’re testing this for yourself, you’re going to need to set yourself up as a contact and send yourself a portal invitation so you can log in as a client and look and see what do they see inside the portal. So I’m going to go in as my client. I’ve set this up already. So I’ve got Megan’s login information. This is my contact, Megan. I’ve already logged in. So it stores that login information so she doesn’t have to log in every single time.
And inside the app, there are multiple functions and we’ll go through each one. At the bottom of the screen is the menu, home, search, newsfeed, saved, and more. We’ll cover each of these items. On the home screen, Megan can of course contact you and just tap to contact your direct phone number. Tap on your name to get all of that contact information for you, office information, email.
So all of that information is available from the home screen. So Megan always has that ability to contact you here. If I reply, Megan sends me a message from the app and I reply from Flex MLS, she’ll be able to come into the messages and see that here as well. So these these are all, information that we’ve gone back and forth with. And lastly, in this blank section on the home screen, if you have any active listings, your active listings are always available here so they can look through those active listings. Now the first feature that clients can do inside the portal is they can run their own searches. So I’m going to tap on search. And when Megan is here, you’ll notice that I’m demonstrating today in the Fargo Moorhead database. And so these listings, a little information on them might appear a little bit different than what you’re used to seeing in your MLS, but all of the functionality remains the same. So if Megan is looking at this and she says, well, there’s a thousand listings here. Maybe Megan is saying, well, I wanna look for a lake property in Pelican Rapids. She can go up to that search bar at the top and enter in what she’s searching for. So I’m going to start typing in Pelican Rapids.
So now there are twenty one listings that she can start viewing. At any point in time, if she wants to see them on the map, she can tap on map at the bottom and see them on the map or go back to the list by just tapping list right at the bottom again. She can also search by more than just location. There is a filter option up at the top right of the screen as well. So if Megan says we’re looking in Pelican Rapids residential listings and maybe she’s got a price cap.
So she’s going to say no more than two point one million.
And let’s come down here and select some other items. Let’s look at a subtype. Lake property. Megan’s looking for lake property so she can select lake property And then tap on done.
And she continue can continue putting in any information that she would like. She can tap on, let’s see, bedrooms, maybe total of two baths. And now there are ten results. Whenever she wants to view the results, she just taps view those results. And she can look at these listings. If there’s any that catch her eye, she can tap, of course, to view the details. While she’s viewing the details, some things that always stay on the screen. Number one at the top, contact agent. If she has any questions, she can always contact you. She’s in your portal. This is your portal in her app. So when she taps on contact agent, that comes to you. That’s not going to the listing agent, it’s going to you, the agent who she’s working with. She’s in your portal. She can send that message to you. Put in her message here, tap on send.
And if you exchange multiple messages on this, she can go in and view messages and there’ll be a threaded chain of messages here. Now she can also scroll through all of the listing photos or tap the photos to view those, zoom in, zoom out. But as she’s scrolling down and looking at the listing details, you’ll notice at the bottom, there’s a blue ribbon that’s always available. She can tap on save. So if she saves this, that listing gets marked. Just tap on that as a saved listing. So now it says saved. If she hides it, I’ll show you where it removes that. It removes that from her saved search and her newsfeed. So we’ll take a look at that in a bit. And she can also share that.
So if she taps on share, that’s just going to open up those apps on her phone where she could text that link out to somebody, send it through any of those apps available on her device here, messages, mail, Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, send put a link in the Dropbox, whatever she’s going to do with that so she can share that as well.
I’m going to just click on x or if she wanted to just go to the next listing that was in the search results, she could tap on that arrow and navigate just directly to the next listing. And I’ll tap on that arrow again. So she can move back and forth between listings that way or tap the x and that goes back to the list view. She can always change it to the map view. Again, that’s at the bottom. And change it back to the list by just tapping again at the bottom. She could even change the sort. Right now it’s sorting price high to low. But if she taps on sort, she’ll have several options here. New listings at the top, recently changed, price low to high, status city, bedrooms, bathrooms are all available to sort by. Just going to cancel off of that. So that gives her the ability to search. The number one question that usually comes up when they’re searching is, can I save these searches? Can can Megan come in and create a search and save it and call this Pelican Rapids? And the answer is conditionally, yes. So she can’t save it unless I, as the agent, am a FlexMLS IDX subscriber. And that’s an additional service. The IDX is great for generating web leads. It allows people who are using your portal to save as many searches of theirs as they want. Just using the basic portal that I’m demonstrating today, she won’t be able to save the specific portal search. She can’t save it herself, but she can save individual listings. So if she taps and puts a star on that, it gets saved as an individual listing.
Now I’m going to go from the search at the bottom and I’m going to move, I’m gonna skip the newsfeed for now and I’m going to move to our saved section. And when I go to saved, you’ll see there are two groups on my screen. The top, these are the searches that I, as her agent, have created. So I’ve created these searches, added them to Megan’s record, and it says general residential search and Megan West Fargo residential. That’s just the name of the search. She can access any search that I’ve created for her. So if she wants to look at this West Fargo search, she taps, she can view those, she can sort, she can change that filter temporarily. When she comes back, it’s not a permanent save. So she says, let’s look at things that are over a million dollars in this neighborhood. She can tap on that filter and do the same. But the search will revert back after she leaves that, to the original search that I had created for her. You’ll also notice that she has this green tag next to these searches. That means that I created a subscription for her. So these searches, every time there’s a new listing, she gets an email notification that there’s a new listing. That’s what the subscription does. And she can see that she subscribed to that in her portal. If Megan says, maybe I’ve created a land search for Megan and a couple property searches for Megan, and they’re all subscribed. And she says, well, I don’t need notifications on this general residential search. This one is not that important to me. She can manage that subscription and she can turn notifications on or off on an individual search basis. So she could take this one and just turn it off, but she’ll still get updates from this. Or if she looks at this search and says, oh, I do want to receive those updates, she can tap and she subscribed that. Now, when she does have that subscription going, remember that will send an email notification and those listings will also appear in the newsfeed. We’ll look at that in just one moment, the actual newsfeed of of listing updates. But first, let’s go to this bottom section. And here we can see listings that Megan has marked as saved, agent recommended, or listings that she’s removed. And we’ll talk about what that hidden option does. So let’s first look at saved. Let’s tap here. Remember when I marked those listings with a star, they come here under her saved collection. And as she’s looking at those listings, she has the option here to put up to three stars on any of these listings. So maybe she wants to put this as a two star listing. Maybe she’s looking at this one and wants to mark that as a three star. So she can change their ratings here in that saved collection.
And of course, she can always tap to view listing details on any of those as well.
And scroll through to the next one by just tapping that arrow or clicking the x and just exiting out. Let’s back out from here. Agent recommended. If you have watched any of the training videos on using the portal previously, there’s always a section there talking about how do I recommend listings to my contact. These are listings that I, as her agent, have recommended. So we can see, or she’ll have access to those as well. And then the hidden. These are listings that she’s marked as hidden. So when she’s viewing the newsfeed or when she’s viewing a saved search, she can say, I reject this listing. I don’t want to see it anymore. So let’s take a look and see what that looks like. So I’m just going to go to my newsfeed. And when Megan checks this newsfeed, anytime there’s a new listing, it’ll pop up. There’ll be a little flag down here that pops up one, two, three, four, however many new listings there are. But she can always come through and see all of the listing updates. This means she doesn’t have to look through her email to see the listing that I sent her last week from one of those subscriptions.
She can scroll through and find that listing that she received previously. Tap to view the details, do whatever she’s going to do with that listing. But maybe she gets a new listing in this newsfeed and she says, you know, I don’t really like this listing. I don’t want to see it anymore. So when she taps on that, she has the ability to hide the listing. And that removes it from the news feed. I’ll just tap on hide. And it will also remove it when she’s looking at those agent saved searches. She won’t see that in those search results. So that just removes it from the newsfeed and the search results itself. The next time I come back to the newsfeed, in just a few minutes, this one will no longer show. So that’s just what happens when they go in and hide. It removes it from the newsfeed and saved searches. So when she goes to her saved section, she won’t see it in this search either. It won’t appear in any of those searches. She will always have access to listings that she has hidden down here in case she wants to revisit them for any reason, she can tap to view the ones that she’s taken out previously. There are two sections here hidden. These are ones that Megan has tapped to hide. If I remove one as the agent, it’ll say hidden by agent, then she can review any of those. It’s gonna go back out.
Lastly, one thing that the iOS app offers that the regular portal website does not offer, it gives Megan the ability when she has a subscription, instead of having to check email to get the new listing updates, she can turn on push notifications. So the notification would appear directly on her phone. She could tap it and it would open up directly in the portal. And to do that, she can go to the more tab. And here you’ll see different options. She can enable touch ID or face ID here. So she’ll never have to enter her password when signing into the app. It’ll just recognize her fingerprint or face scanner. And she can also come to notification settings. This can only be done through the iOS app. It’s the only way she can get these push notifications directly to her phone. It’s not an email. The new listing just pops up as a notification on her phone. And so she can say, give me notifications for agent recommendations. When Josh sends me a recommended listing, it’ll pop up on her phone. New listings, price changes, and maybe just status changes in general. She can decide which one she wants notifications on and just come right out here. So this is a really great feature for the iOS app. It just allows her so she doesn’t even have to check email or the push notification. It just her mobile device buzzes. She looks, she’ll see a pop up that she’s gotten a new listing and then she just taps to view it and she can mark it as safe or she could hide it.
So how do we track all of this activity that Megan’s been doing inside the app? How do we look at that? And we’ll spend the last part of today’s webinar.
I’m going to go in and look at the full website and I’ll start off on contact management. So on contact management, immediately when you come here, you can identify contacts who’ve been clicking on listings because they’re going to have this blue bar under their contact activity. This blue bar updates nightly. It doesn’t update in real time, but I can see Megan’s been clicking on listings. And if I want to drill down and say, what has she been clicking on? I can drill down by clicking on that blue bar. It opens up Megan’s details and it gives me the past thirty days worth of contact activity. So I can tell which days she’s been clicking on listings. And this actually, this is a good representation. These are the days I give webinars or the days before because I always go in and act as Megan and click on listings. So you can see when she’s been viewing those listings. I can drill it down and see which listings she has actually viewed by just clicking on this. It tells me how many times each of these listings has been clicked on. So it will give me the address and then how many times it’s been clicked on. That’s the number. Thirty seven ten sixth Street East West Fargo has been clicked on sixteen times. Everything else, six or five times, I could load more and then everything else is getting clicked on one or twice, once or twice. So before I even reach out to Megan, I’m able to see what she keeps going back to. Now these clicks, it doesn’t matter if she’s using the app as the portal, maybe using the full website portal, maybe she never signs into the portal and she just has a subscription. All of that counts as contact activity and all of that will accumulate under those viewed listings. Same with shared listings. I can see listings that she has shared. So she used that share feature. She shared a particular listing. I can tell how many times she shared it. The question is usually, can I see who she shared it with? Can I see if they clicked on it? And that information does not show up here. It just shows the listings that she has shared. And then an email summary at the bottom. How many subscription emails sent, opened, manual emails sent, manual emails open. So this gives me a good idea of what she’s been clicking on, but what has she been doing in the actual portal? Here on the portal tab. So activity is here, searches and subscriptions. These are searches that I’ve saved for her. These are what we saw in her portal. And then the portal itself. I can see she has twelve saved listings, seven recommended hidden, thirty five listings hidden by agent six. And I can also see the newsfeed. So when I click on news feed, that just shows me her news feed. It’ll show me the agent version of what she sees in her portal. So I see her news feed here, her saved searches here. I see the saved listings here. And so I can always go in and review what she’s saving, review what’s in her newsfeed. I can review what she’s hidden.
And remember, before I can tell Megan, hey, why don’t you download the portal app? I do need to send her a portal invitation. So we’ll cover that in just one minute. The last thing that I like to show on this portal tab is remember when Megan was in and she was running her own searches.
Underneath her newsfeed and saved and recommended listings, I see the most recent unsaved search. So I can click here and say this is what she searched for, city of Pelican Rapids.
List price up to two point one million active bedrooms, three and up. So I can click there. If I want to see the listing she saw in those results, just tap on that most recently unsaved search and that will just actually show those listings that she saw. And I can actually look here and say, oh, she’s got a star on a few of these listings that she has been searching for. So she ran this search. Obviously, she can’t save it because I don’t have IDX for Flex MLS on this account, but she was saving particular listings. She’ll see those in her saved, but that gives me an idea as her agent. I might say looking at what she’s looking at here under her search, I don’t have a search for her called Pelican Rapids. I can say, Megan, I noticed you saved a few listings in Pelican Rapids. Do you want me to create a search for you? And I can go through that process by just clicking on add a search, create a new quick search, and of course, then I would put in whatever she tells me when I reach out to her. When I say, are we looking for let’s see. Come down to Pelican Rapids. And she tells me she’s looking at three bedrooms, two baths, whatever it happens to be. And I can save this search.
And I can even add a subscription so she gets notifications to that inside her portal. I would go in, set up my schedule, set up my email, and go through that normal process of adding the subscription.
So now when Megan is using the portal, she’s going to see that there are three agents saved searches here.
So she’ll be able to see all of the searches that I create for her. Maybe I didn’t save that subscription right now when I just added it.
But, I can see what I’ve done. Megan can now see that inside the portal itself. Oops. Didn’t want that up yet.
Lastly, how do I invite a contact to use that app? I mentioned at the beginning, we needed to do three things. I needed to invite Megan to the portal first. She needs to log into the portal so she creates a password. And after that, she can use the app. So how do I invite somebody to use the portal?
Right now, I’ve got some columns of information set up in last active and last match. Last active tells me the last time somebody logged into the portal. And last match tells me the last time their subscription turned up a match. You can customize these columns of information by just going to advanced, customize contact list, and these are the columns of information where my mouse is hovering. I can add any of these columns of information up here. I can rearrange the order right over here. So this lets me see if the portal is on or off for any of these specific contacts.
I’m going to come in here and I see Anne’s portal is off. How do I invite somebody to use the portal since that’s the very first step before they’re ever going to be able to download the app? I need to get give them an invitation so they can set up their username and password.
Just click on the contact, click on the portal tab, make sure the portal is on, step one. Step two, click invite to portal. And that is going to bring up my portal invitation from here. I can modify it if I would like.
And then I’ll just send Anne that invitation. And that is going to then Anne gets an email invitation to use the portal. She clicks that link. She signs up for the portal. What does that look like? Let’s just open that up.
Just so you can see what that invitation looks like. I wanted to come back here and make sure I’ve got Anne’s email address correct.
Here’s the portal invitation. When a client signs up for the portal, they open up your invitation. All they need to do is click sign up. Her username is already in as her email address. She creates her own password. As to click that little I’m not a robot thing.
And then has to verify she’s not a robot the very first time. Click confirm. Now Anne is signed up. She can use the portal on the full website. And now if I tell her, hey, download the app so you can have it on your phone and get push notifications, she can download it to her phone, get those push notifications. She’s not gonna be able to log into the app on the phone until she has logged into that full website. She does need to create the portal account first. And then here, this is of course the full website version of the portal.
With that, I want to close for today. That’s a lot of information. Hopefully you found that useful to see one, what your client sees with that app, how they get that app, what they can do inside the app, and then what you can do to track that contact activity. I want to thank everybody for attending today. This session was recorded and we will send you that recording in approximately twenty four hours. So look for it in your inbox tomorrow afternoon. Have a great rest of your day.
