Good morning, everybody. This is Josh Hernandez with Flex MLS. And today we are going to look at the Flex MLS home buyer app for Android. So this is an app specifically dedicated for your clients. And we’ll take a look at at what it can do and what it is and how we can track that activity in today’s webinar. The topics we’ll cover today. We’ll take a look at what the FlexMLS Homebuyer app is. How do your clients get that app? How do they log in? And then we’ll take a look at the experience itself. What your clients see inside the app. And lastly, we’re going to take a look at how we can track what clients are doing when they’re using the app or even if they’re just using the regular portal. So to address the options here right at the top, what’s the Flex MLS Homebuyer app? The app itself is just another way for you to build your relationships you have with your clients. It is the Flex MLS portal in app form. So it’s just a dedicated app. They will log into it the same way they would log into the portal with the same email address as the username and the same password. It does store their password so they don’t have to enter it every single time they’re accessing the app. And what does that app do? We’ll talk a little bit, in pretty good detail over the next half hour about what the app can actually do. But just a summary here, they can search for listings, save listings, view the searches that you’ve created for them, and they can also manage those subscription notifications. So they could turn on their subscription. If you saved a search for them, they could say, I want to receive the subscription notifications. And that’s just an email notification when there are new listings. And they can also get rid of listings so they don’t see them in the search or the news feed. And they can contact you about any listing from any listing that they’re viewing inside the app. So let’s take a look at what your client actually sees. So I’m just going to change my screen. And in just a few seconds, you’re going to see my Android using phone up on the screen itself. And for your clients to get the app, the easiest way is for you direct to direct them. Invite them to use the portal. And once you see that they’ve logged into the portal, say, here’s a link or you can just direct them, give them directions on how to do it. Download the portal as an app. It’s called FlexMOS. And this specific webinar, we’re going to be looking at the Android version. So they would go to the Google Play Store. So if your client uses Android, direct them to go to the Google Play Store and then they can just search on FlexMLS apps or they can search for FlexMLS within the apps. I’ll just type in FlexMLS.
And the top version is pro, that’s for agents. So make sure to tell them it’s blue. It just says FlexMLOS and it is for searching for house and homes. And you’ll be able to log on with that same portal information that you’ve already used to log in. And so when they download that, they just have to tap on the app, download and install the app. It’s free to use, of course. And that will allow them to have the portal as a dedicated app on their Android device. Now we’ll also be taking a look later this afternoon at two thirty central time about what this app looks like for iPhone. It’s been in existence for iPhone for quite some time. But we’ll look at the Android version today. So what your client sees once they come in here is they’ll have a log on screen. They log in with the same login information that they would use to log in to their portal. And then they’ll have the same options that they have in the full website for the portal, but you’ll see everything’s been refitted to sit for their their mobile device screen. So if you send them messages, they’ll appear down here.
They can tap their messages on the home screen, view those messages, just going to back out from here. On that home screen itself, they can always have your contact information, your phone, your website, your email. They can tap to get your full contact information there as well.
So that’s just the page that they get to after they log in. And let’s go through the options that they’ll have inside the app on their menu. And the first thing you’ll notice is they have a menu at the very top of the screen. Home, search with a magnifying glass, favorites, we’ll take a look at what’s there, Notifications of new listings, and then they can access their profile here as well. So let’s look at search and see what it looks like when a client is searching for something. I’ll tap on search.
And that will take your client to the listings in your MLS. And you’ll notice it’s just looking at the entire MLS.
But right up at the top, they can tap on filter and that allows them to run their own searches. So let’s just take a look at some things that they could do. I’ll tap on filter as if I’m the client using the app and they can enter the location at the top. So maybe Megan is looking for a lake home. So we’ll put in a location of Pelican Rapids. And they could put in multiple locations as well. Now I’m demonstrating using the Fargo Moorhead MLS. However, of course, your clients would be searching your MLS, not the Fargo Moorhead MLS. So the fields that they see may be different. Statuses, property types. The Fargo Moorhead association belongs to a data share. So if your MLS belongs to a data share and shares listings with other MLSs, your client could go in and actually search for those as well. Oops. Let’s come back. Accidentally touched my screen. Let’s put in, it’s a lake house.
So let’s put in max price of two million.
And then they can keep scrolling down. For this, I’m going to say subtype and let’s do lake property. In the Fargo Moorhead MLS, they have a lake property subtype.
So Megan will select that and then say maybe three beds, two baths.
And of course, could continue putting in things like square footage, your built. As she scrolls to the bottom, she could even add fields here. So if she wanted to search on something like a deck, you could tap in add filter and they could find the fields that they want to add. Now when she wants to review the listings, all she needs to do is tap that little blue button at the bottom that says view x number of listings. So this allows her to view those search results. She can scroll through anyone that catches her eye. She could tap to view the details.
If she likes that listing, she can tap on save. We’ll take a look at where this ends up, but she can save that listing. So I’ll just tap save and now it says saved. If she has a question on the listing, maybe she wants to contact me saying, is this one available for in person showings yet or do we have to wait a few months still? She can come up and she can contact me directly from here. Whenever they put or type in contact agent, they’re in your portal.
So that contact will go to you. It’s not going to the listing agent. So she can send me messages directly from any listing, lets her know that the message has been sent. And if she goes back to the search results, I just tap on back, still has the ten search results here. Maybe Megan says, well, I want to see where these ten listings are on the map. And as she’s scrolling, you’ll notice here’s the map icon at the bottom so she can view those search results on the map. Now she can click this location arrow and it will show her as a blue dot wherever she happens to be on the screen. I won’t do that. I’m broadcasting from San Antonio, Texas today, quite a ways away from where these listings are, so you wouldn’t see any listings on the screen if I located myself.
So Megan can zoom in on listings by pinching the screen and zooming. She can tap to preview a listing. She could scroll through the photos while previewing the listing. And if she wants to view the details, she just has to tap on the listing and it goes directly to those listing details. You could see this individual listing on the map as well by just tapping on map at the top of the listing detail page. I’ll tap on back.
She could even draw on the map. So maybe she wants to come in and look down here. If she taps the draw icon, she could just say, what’s in this area? And this is just like if you were drawing on your Android device from the Flex MLS Pro app, you just tap to set those points and now it’s filtering down to just those three listings. I could always go in and access the filter again or just tap that x and that will bring us back to the list. So now that list has three listings.
Let’s go ahead and move on to the next tab. Before we move though, one question that often comes up is, your client’s allowed to run these searches and save listings as favorites. Can they save this search? And the answer is on the default app, no. If you use Flex MLS IDX, which is a separate product and it’s designed for websites and generating leads, but it does allow your clients to save the searches and name those searches, if they’re creating those. And to see the searches that you’ve created for them or the listings that they’ve marked as saved, the next tab, that favorite star tab.
Any search that I’ve saved for Megan is here in the top half. These I’ve created one search called general residential searches and Megan’s West Fargo search. When she marks listings as favorites, they come in here in that saved collection. And when she views her saved collection, she can rate those listings with up to three stars. So there’s a few three script r listings. She just added, some new listings here as well. This one in Pelican, she put as a favorite. Maybe she wants to mark that as a three star because it has an open house and she wants to remember it.
By default, it will rate or sort her listings high to low, but she can also tap to rearrange how those listings are sorted here as well.
And she can tap on back. From here, this is how she would see listings that she’s marked as hidden. We’ll talk about that in a moment. Or if I hide a listing so it does, she doesn’t see it, we’ll talk about that. But she also sees the searches that I created for her. Now if I use Flexible SIDX, they could create their own searches and see them in a list as well. But these are just ones. This is the basic, most basic version of the portal that she has available on the app. And these are searches that I created for her in FlexMLS. She sees them here and she can go in and I’ll just tap on Megan’s West Fargo search. And it tells her that she’s subscribed. That’s the subscription updates. So whenever there’s a new listing, she gets an email notification. She can open it up and see it right inside the portal in the app.
So this one, residential, if she wants to turn off notifications just for this search and keep them for the other search, she can manage which searches she gets those listing notifications from, by just this single toggle right at the top of the search. Didn’t tap on my screen fast enough. It went blank on me. And she can scroll through, view the search results. He could also temporarily change the filter on this search.
So just like when she was on the full search screen, she can go into the filter and she can change the search criteria. Now it won’t permanently change the search. Only I, the agent can change the search that I created for her. But she could always come in here and say, well, let’s put a max cap on this and just temporarily change that search to see what those search results bring up.
And now there are fourteen listings and she can tap just to see what that search brought up for those fourteen listings. And it tells her that she’s using an edited filter that we’ve already created for this. Back on that favorites. Like I said, she can manage her searches. Maybe I’ve created a vacant lands search, one in West Fargo, that one in Pelican Rapids she ran.
When she says, well, I don’t wanna receive updates. She can go into the search itself and tap to change the notifications. I would see that reflected in the main website when I log into FlexiML. So I’ll show you how to tell if she’s turned off notifications for a search.
The next tab is this icon for a bell. That’s the notifications icon. Every time one of these searches turns up a new listing, Megan gets an email notification about it and it appears in her newsfeed. So if she’s logged in to the app, she can go to this newsfeed and you’ll see that since I’ve begun this webinar, there have been four notifications for new listings. I that’s because I have a very general search for Megan so I could get some listing action today.
So her news feed shows the most recent listings at the top of the news feed. And she can tap to view details or tap to view the listings on the map. But if she sees something in the the newsfeed and she says, well, I don’t like that. When I come to my newsfeed or when I do that saved search, I don’t want to see that. She can tap that hide icon. You’ll see the card temporarily hide here. And anything that she marks as hidden is going to be removed. So when she goes into her searches, she’s not going to see those listings when she taps to view the search results. She won’t see them there. Or when she goes to view that newsfeed, those hidden listings will no longer appear there. And it will take just a few minutes for this to be permanently removed. But she’ll always have access to them. Maybe she wants to review some of those ones that she hid previously. When she goes to that save tab where she has all those saved collections at the bottom, saved agent recommended, These are the ones she’s marked as hidden. She can always access them, but by default they won’t show in search results and they will no longer show in that news feed. So that’s what Megan has access to when she’s using the FlexMLS homebuyer app for Android. So if your client uses Android, again, you can direct them how to get that. When they open up an email and view an interactive listing, usually there’s an invitation that pops up there saying download the app. So it will encourage them to download that app once you’ve invited them to the portal anyway. But it’s always good to just explain to them. They can go to the Google Play Store and download an app version of their portal. Now, in our last ten minutes, we’ve seen what Megan can do inside Flex MLS.
So when she’s in here and she does something like, run that search and she looked at listings in Pelican Rapids, and put in her price and and information like that, how can we see what she’s doing inside Flex MLS?
I’ll just come down here. I wanna run this just to make sure three bedrooms, two baths.
So Megan comes in, runs that search. Back in Flexible S, I as the agent can tell what she’s doing here inside her portal. And that’s really all the app is. Remember, it’s just an app version of the portal itself. So I’m going to bring up my Flex MLS screen. So this is my training account. And if I go to contact management, I’m going to see Megan in my contact management. Now I prepared for this, yesterday and I use Megan as a regular training contact. So I see her here automatically with her activity. I know she’s been clicking at listings and this blue bar just shows me who my active contacts are. The most active contact will have a full blue bar and everything else is rated off of them. I put in this column called last active. This is the last time that Megan has logged in to that portal.
So if you want to call or customize these columns of information that appear when I’m viewing my contacts, you can go to contact management, hover over advanced, and just customize that contact list. When you do that, you’re going to see the columns of information that are currently there. And I had entered in this last active. I don’t have anybody with a subscription with that needs to be approved now. Subscription last match, email activity, sent and viewed manual emails and subscription emails, listings that they’ve marked as saved inside the portal I also have here. So if you change those columns, you just click on save. And remember to get there was advanced to customize that contact list. So now I see Megan last logged into the portal right at the start of today’s webinar. I logged in beforehand. So right at eleven a. When this webinar began, that’s central time. Her last subscription match came at eleven twenty just, three minutes ago. So we saw those popping up in the news feed.
And I can see how many listing updates she’s been sent here. Manual emails, saved. Those are her ten saved listings. So if I wanna say, well, how many listings, which listings has she marked as saved? Just tap on that. It’s going to show me, my version of Megan’s portal. So this is the agent side version of the portal. I’ll see Megan’s newsfeed, the searches I have saved for Megan, and then these are the listings she’s marked as saved. So I know what she’s marked as saved. And I can look here and I can see, here’s the one in Pelican that she just added.
So I can see those listings she has marked as saved. On Megan’s contact details themselves, if I click to view Megan’s contact details, I’ll click on this activity column because Megan’s my most active contact. So when I see her as the most active contact, click on activity and we’ll get an idea of what she’s been doing. This graph at the top shows me the past thirty days worth of activity for Megan. So I can see when she’s been clicking on listings. Now, this doesn’t tell me how she’s clicking on them. It doesn’t say she’s on the full website portal or the app version of the portal or maybe she’s just looking at the subscription emails and never logs into the portal. This activity doesn’t matter where she clicks the listing. It just means she’s gotten a listing from me and she’s clicked to view it. And so this tells me the day she’s most active. Coming down, I can see her most recently clicked listings. A hundred and seven listings she’s clicked on over the past thirty days here. And I can see the one she’s clicked on the most. Thirty seven ten sixth Street. She’s clicked on that fifteen times. Twenty one zero seven five Broadwater in Pelican Rapids. She’s clicked on that six times. This one six times, and then it’s going to taper off from there as I load more. Most of these, she’s probably just viewing once or twice. But I know these few at the top she keeps going back to. Listings that she shares. One thing I didn’t point out was when she is looking at listing details, and I’ll tap on this listing as Megan, she could share that listing. So she can save it, she can hide it. There’s a share option. So when she taps to share the listing, she gets a link. She could share that through Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, her messages. Maybe she has a Google plus account. So whatever app she has available on her phone, she can share that. And when she’s sharing that, those shared listings will appear here. It’ll tell me which listings she has shared, how many times she has shared it. It will not show me who she shared it with or who looked at it when she shared it. This just shows me individually has it been shared. And then of course I have my email summary here. Now I’m interested, I want to know, well, what’s Megan looking at? I told her to download the app. I see she’s been logging into the portal, so she’s probably logging into the app. What’s she marking as favorites in here?
If I want to go in rather than than just looking at her saved right here, I can go to Megan’s record and go to her portal tab. And this also gives me a summary of her saved recommended just like when we previewed that by clicking on that link earlier, I can come out here and see what she’s marked as saved. And it gives me again, the agent side version of her portal so I can see what she’s doing.
But the thing I really like about this is as I’m looking on her portal tab, when she’s running those searches and just doing those temporary filters and looking for listings, I can click to view her most recent unsaved search. So I can tap to view search parameters. And I see city of Pelican Rapids, list price up to two point one million, status of active, bedrooms three plus. So this is the last search that she ran and that’s why I ran it again just so we could see that the last search she ran is available here. Those are the search parameters. I can also view the listings that were in that particular search. So I can see that search pulled up these listings and I can say, oh, look at that. She marked one of those listings as a favorite.
So I know she’s looking in Pelican Rapids, but if I go to her saved searches, the searches that I’ve saved for her, there’s nothing here that searches Pelican Rapids necessarily. So when I’m talking to Megan and I say, you know, I see that you’ve got a new saved listing in Pelican Rapids, do you want me to set up a search for you in Pelican Rapids? And I could go in and click add a search to Megan, create a new quick search, and then I could come in and select Pelican Rapids.
Just go down and put in search criteria. Megan’s saying, you know, I am looking for something, something on the lake, at least three bedrooms, maybe two baths, square footage, whatever it is. And I could save this search for Megan if I want. So that helps me build that relationship. I know what she’s searching for and I can clearly see if she has searches out there already that look at what she’s searching for. Maybe I can create a new search for her. So I’ll just save that search for Megan.
And I could even add a subscription by just saving that search, adding the subscription, setting that frequency, and setting up that email that goes out every time there’s an email update from that subscription. And remember, she can see everything that she’s received from these subscriptions in that newsfeed when she’s using the portal and the app. So now Megan is going to have that new saved search and new subscription that I just did accessible inside her portal. I’m going to go back to contact management. And the very last thing that I like to point out is sometimes it’s really handy to say, well, I’ve got a lot of contacts. They’re all using the portal. They’re all marking favorite listings. When I go to Megan’s portal, I don’t know what the she’s got ten saved listings, which ones are new. There is a report and I’m going to put that on my favorites menu.
And that report will show me the new listings that she has. The report is called the contact summary. So I’m going to come down on my menu, hover over contact summary, and I’m going to put that on my favorites.
And the one thing that I like in this report that I don’t see in my summary information in contact management has specifically do, to do with the portal itself. So I can show I can look down here and find Megan in the list. And you’ll see her portal. It tells me when she was last active. I know that information already. And let’s just bring her up toward the top. I see newly saved listings, listings that she’s marked as saved. That’s going to be within the past seventy two hours and then the total that she has. So new listings, she’s got ten new ones in here, ten saved. So she’s done all that activity with the past few days.
But this does give me new newly saved listings and total saved. So over time, your client may build up thirty saved listings, but there’s only one new one. And I can click and see what that specific new saved listing is.
So, that that’s one thing that I like for this contact summary report. Newly saved listings and total saved listings.
With that, I’m going to go ahead and conclude for today. I want to thank you all for attending. This webinar has been recorded and we will send you a link to the recording in approximately twenty four hours. And we also have a very similar presentation this afternoon at two thirty central time. So if you want to sign up for that, if you say, well, I’ve got clients that use the iOS phone, the iPhone, What do they see inside their portal app? That app for their home buyer app looks a little bit different. So feel free to sign up for today’s webinar here at two thirty central time, and we’ll take a look at what Android or iPhone users see as well. Lastly, you may be saying, well, that’s great. I see what my clients see. Well, what about I have an Android phone and what about the FlexML S Pro app for agents? Go to help, video training, and just search Flex MLS Pro. And that is going to give you we just did a few weeks ago, Flex MLS Pro for Android, a nice short thirty minute webinar that covers all of the functionality for agents in your version of the app for Android. And I do see one question out there for somebody who’s testing this themselves right now saying, I downloaded the app. It did not ask me to register. You will want to send your clients an invitation to the portal in order to give them access so they have a login. And that’s why I suggest send that portal invitation first. Just go to their contact information and click invite to portal. Send that portal invitation first. Once they’ve logged in, then invite them to use the app. And the name of the FlexMLS app for homebuyers is just FlexMLS. The agent version is FlexMLS Pro. With that, thank you for attending today. We’ll send you this recording in approximately twenty four hours, and I hope you have a safe and healthy rest of your afternoon.
