You probably noticed that in the Account Data Feeds section in your Account Profile, there is a new feed called YGL Standard Feed, and might be wondering what that is for. The YGL Standard Feed, when activated, will contain a list of all your active listings in XML format.  This XML feed, will allow you to feed your listings to your own website, as well as other websites (of course, they’ll need to be willing to take your feed).

As a real estate company, you are always looking for ways to increase exposure for your listings.  At YGL, we do not want to limit you to only the marketing tools we can provide you.  The YGL Standard feed will allow you to give your listings, in a formatted way, to third parties who can potentially give your listings more exposure.

Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have questions on how to use it.

We have just added the ability for you to separate out a Hotpads feed for your own account.  YGL has a feed to Hotpads that includes all of our listings, but you might get more exposure by separating out your own feed.  Some of you have asked for  this, so there you go.

Admins and managers will be able to turn on your account Hotpads feed in your Account Profile from the Dashboard.  You’ll find an extra section called Account Data Feeds in the Account Profile page.    See screenshot below for more information.

The reason for this is because one of the questions we get fairly often is how does Hotpads handle the duplications?  For example, I have listings from a landlord that YGL’s other clients also have, from the feed YGL sends to Hotpads, how does Hotpads determine which ones to show?

The honest answer is that we do not know.  Hotpads does not tell us how they handle duplications on their end (which they do).  We are guessing that they probably have some internal algorithm to rank listings based on certain criteria, such as quality of data, available date, last update date, etc.  These are, of course, just our guesses.

For those of you have a website that’s developed by us, you’ll notice your speed has been greatly improved.  This is especially apparent if you have a map based search interface, where search results now come back in less than half the time it used to take.

We are gearing up to provide more of you with the map based search interfaces, as it is becoming more popular.  Google, Hotpads, and many other modern apartment search websites use a map based searching interface.

Second, for those of you who are subscribed to our MLS data feed, your front end website now can have the ability to search for both MLS rentals and YGL rentals side by side, which was not possible before.