Sacramento Real Estate Blog

A reader recently emailed and asked: “Hi, I was wondering if your web page ‘New Houses In Sacramento’ is up to date since I saw them pretty much the same for more than a month.”

OK, busted.  Actually those of you who’ve been reading the blog probably know the answer to this question because periodically I talk about it, but there are actually two sources of listings on this web site.  If you go to the search page, you’re going to have access to listings that are updated once each day, so it’s almost as current as what we Realtors have access to in the MLS.

If you look at some of the other pages where we just have page after page of listings, such as the new homes pages, the condo pages, or the foreclosure pages, you’re looking at listings that are also from the Metrolist MLS, but that are updated manually, so they sometimes get a bit stale.

One thing I would take issue with this reader on length of time involved in this particular case, which has “only” been two weeks.  Yes, I realize, in Internet dog-year time that’s “more than a month” — it’s practically an eternity. 

Time for me to do another round of updating, it looks like.

We’ve updated our listings database.  It was getting pretty long in the tooth there.

Most people who are users of our web site(s) probably don’t know it, but many of our web sites including this one, our Roseville real estate site and our Elite Properties company site actually rely on two different databases of listings.  When you use our search page, for example, you’re using a listings database that’s our IDX company gets from our Metrolist database.  These listings are updated daily, so when you do a search, you’re looking at listings that are within twenty-four hours of being as current as the ones that we as Realtors® can look at..

In addition to the search tools that our IDX company provides, however, we also wanted to allow you to browse for certain types of listings.  One thing our IDX system doesn’t do, for example, is show you short sales and foreclosures.  Because we don’t have direct access to the database our IDX company uses, we’ve created a second database that we can use in various ways.

For example, our foreclosure search page lets you search for foreclosures and short sales, or browse them by county.  Similarly our new homes section let’s you see homes that have just been built that are listed in the MLS, and our condo pages contain links to condos grouped by price and county.

As we mentioned above, we’ve also used this database on some of our other sites.  Many clients find us through our the maps of listings by zip code that we maintain on our company site.  These maps include zip codes in El Dorado County, Placer County, and Sacramento County.  Within each zip code you can find active listings and get recent market data.  We publish similar data for Placer County only on our Roseville site.

Unlike our IDX system, which is updated automatically on a daily basis, these other resources are updated manually as time permits.

We realize that from a software perspective, that’s not the brightest way to do it.  But if you’ve ever tried to get someone from Metrolist to call you back about a data feed, you probably have a good idea that it’s not half-dumb from an organizational perspective.

The good news is, it’s up to date now.  So as my wife is fond of saying, “Get your red hot houses here!”

Enjoy.

I’ve updated our site home lists, including the sections for:

• Condos
• New Homes
• Foreclosures

Most of these sections are pretty much “browse only” as of now, but I plan to have a search tool in place for the foreclosures soon — probably some time this week.

A client once told me that it’d be nice to have such a thing for the new homes section as well, so I may tackle that this week as well.

Enjoy.

Those of you who do real estate searches from the either our main search page or many of our other search pages have access to listings that are updated six times per week.

I’m not sure why it’s six and not seven.  Presumably it’s to give FTP a Sabbath.  The point is, it’s practically daily, so it’s about as up to date as you can get without calling a Realtor up and asking him.

In addition to the search pages, there are also a lot of pages where you can browse listings, such as our foreclosure pages, the condos pages, and the new homes pages.  These pages are driven by a separate database that we maintain, that we update once per week or so.  We’ve recently improved the import mechanism on these pages to fix a few issues, so we expect these pages to more closely match our MLS (Metrolist) as time goes along.

We just did an import as well, so we’re pretty current as of now.  Enjoy!