It’s that time of year again to update your listings with the latest property tax information so they are reflective of the 2014 tax year. Most county auditors have updated their tax records to reflect the taxes owed for each parcel in their taxing districts for the 2014 tax year. Voter approved school and bond levies impact those figures usually each year along with any auditor reassessments or owner appeals of property valuation. Since most real estate taxes change annually, it is important that REALTORS®, clients and even sellers be kept apprised of these ever changing figures.

While Realist can be used to auto-populate the Tax (Yrly) and Tax Year when you first enter the listing, it does not and cannot automatically update them for you when those figures change. It is very important that REALTORS® manually update tax data on their existing listings at the beginning of each year.

Important Note for Realist Auto-population: New Listings are auto-populated with the previous year’s tax data for several months of the following year (until the Realist tax roll update occurs).  Realist tax roll updates occur only once a year. This usually occurs around April or May for Franklin county, but can take much longer in other counties around central Ohio. The new listing will have out-of-date tax data in Tax (Yrly) and Tax Year for several months after the new Auditor tax data is available on the Auditor website.  This makes manual verification and update of tax data by the listing agent even more important. Please verify that your tax information is accurate today on the Auditor’s website.

Back To Top

03/31/2015

Realisthas reported that the issue with PDF’s while saving, printing or emailing reports has now been resolved.

Back To Top

03/30/2015

Adding or removing a contingency for your listing is actually quite easy within the Flexmls system. The process is a bit different than was with the previous MLS systems, but the idea is the same in the fact that you must provide what type of contingency is involved and the reason.  To add a contingency, a listing must currently be in the Active status. To make a listing go from “Contingent” to “Active” (or to remove a contingency), you use the same “Add/Remove Contingency” button to make it Active again by removing the contingency.

Below are some basic steps to the process:

1. First, click the “Menu” button. Then click “Change Listing”.

2. Next, find the listing needing to be changed and click on the MLS # for that listing:

3.  On the change screen for that listing, you’ll find available under the left hand side Status and Price Change section an option to Add/Remove Contingency.

4. Clicking on this option will present you with the following screen. From here, you must select the appropriate contingency status and then provide the reason. If you are changing the status from Contingent to Active (remove a contingency), select “No Contingency”. For Contingent Escape, “Sale of Home” will be entered in the Contingency Reason field for you. Once the options are filled in, you’ll want to hit NEXT to proceed:

5. You will then be asked to confirm the action. Hitting BACK will allow you to go back a step to revisit the entered information from the previous screen or hitting NEXT will process the status change:

6. After this is performed, you will then be brought back to the Change Screen for the listing. You are now done and can make further adjustments to the listing or go to another section within Flexmls.

7.  To REMOVE a contingency, you repeat steps 1-5, but you will be changing the Contingent field in step 4 back to “NO CONTINGENCY”. This will remove the reason and allow you to hit NEXT. Continue to step 5 and confirm the change. Once performed, this listing will be returned to a full ACTIVE status.

Original Post Date: 5/16/2014
Last Updated: 7/27/2017

Back To Top

03/23/2015

** Watch our new video on utilizing the new photo upload tool ** :

https://vimeo.com/user7213738/review/122443106/2d0638cf70

On March 9th, 2015, the photo upload page within Flexmls was updated. The new photo page will make it even easier for you to rearrange your photos and add titles and captions. To access the photo add/edit page, click on Photos under the Multimedia section on the Change Listing screen or the Change Incomplete Listing screen.

Add Photos
To add photos, click on the Add Photos button.

Then browse your computer’s files to find and select the photos you would like to add. Remember, you can select multiple photos by holding down the Control key (hold the Command key on a Mac) and clicking on the photos you would like to select. See the image below for what multiple selected photos appears like on a Windows based computer (note the blue highlight) Click Open to add the photos to the listing.

Edit Photos
Once you’ve added photos to the listing, you will see all of the photos at once on the photo editing screen. Here, you can edit them by rearranging their order, adding titles and captions, changing the primary photo, and rotating photos.

Rearrange Photos
The number in the upper left corner of each photo indicates the order in which it appears. To rearrange photos, click and hold on a photo and drag it to a new position.

Another option to rearrange the photos is to click the drop-down arrow by the number in the upper left corner of each photo. Then click the number of the position you want the photo to occupy.

Add Titles and Captions
Adding meaningful titles and captions to photos is even more convenient. At the top of each photo, there is a title bar. Hover over the bar and click on the Pencil icon to edit the title. Once you’ve changed the title, click the green Save icon to save the changes.

Adding or changing a caption for a photo follows the same process using the caption bar at the bottom of the photo. Hover over the caption bar and click the Pencil icon to add or edit a caption. Save any changes you make by clicking the green Save icon.

Designate a Primary Photo
To designate a photo as the primary photo for the listing, click on the flag icon. The current primary image is indicated by the highlighted flag icon as well as a blue outline surrounding the photo.

Rotate Photos
If you need to rotate your photos, click on the rotate icons. Each time you click on the rotate icon it will rotate the photo 90 degrees in the direction indicated by the icon.

Replace Photos
To replace a listing photo with another photo, click on the Upload Replacement Photo icon. You can then select another photo from your files to replace the current photo.

Remove Photos
To delete a photo from the listing, click on the Remove Photo icon.

When you are finished adding and editing photos, click the Return to edit your listing link in the upper left corner of the page. All updates that you’ve made to the listing’s photos will be saved automatically.

If you wish to use the old style photo upload tool, you can click on the wording “Original Photo Upload” that is available on the upper right side of the screen. This will change the view back to the older photo page.

Back To Top

03/17/2015

Realist will be completely inaccessible Friday evening into Sunday morning.  Please plan accordingly.  If you must enter a listing during the migration, it will be necessary to copy all tax data from the county auditor record.  Auto-population of Realist tax data will not be possible during this time.

MLS search and listing entry will not be directly affected.  Only Realist, including auto-population of tax data,  will be offline during this period.  You may wait until Sunday and enter the listing when Realist auto-population is available to enter any new listings if you wish.

Realist is being taken offline in addition to other CoreLogic software because CoreLogic is relocating their data center from Santa Ana, CA to Quincy, WA.  This move will require almost 2 days of downtime.  This will disrupt all Realist functions during the migration.  Please be aware of this planned outage. 

Migration Timeline:
Friday, March 13, 2015, at 9 p.m. – Realist offline and unreachable
March 15 at 10 a.m. – Realist functionality restored

Back To Top

03/12/2015

It’s that time of year again to update your listings with the latest property tax information so they are reflective of the 2014 tax year.    Most county auditors have updated their tax records to reflect the taxes owed for each parcel in their taxing districts for the 2014 tax year.   Voter approved school and bond levies impact those figures usually each year along with any auditor reassessments or owner appeals of property valuation.    Since most real estate taxes change annually, it is important that REALTORS®, clients and even sellers be kept apprised of these ever changing figures.   Remember, while Realist can autopop the Yearly Taxes and Tax Year for you when you first enter the listing, it does not and cannot automatically update them for you when those figures change.   Nevertheless, this routine remains an important manual operation for REALTORS® to complete the beginning of each year.

Back To Top

03/06/2015

The MLS committee and Board of Directors have modified current MLS policy.  The summary of these changes is below.

1. Current policy allows for up to 72 hours to add a listing to the MLS. This period was shortened to 48 hours.
2. Effective April 1, 2015 Data Maintenance Fees will again be charged for inaccurate Corporation Limits. This is due to the recent addition of FBS functionality that auto populates Corporation Limits.
3. Effective immediately the phrase “Curb Offers Only” will be permitted in the Property Description field and/or the Showing Phone Number field.

Back To Top

02/26/2015

CoreLogic will be performing system maintenance on the evening of Saturday, February 21 beginning at 11:00 PM through 11:00 AM Sunday morning.   Realist will be unavailable during this maintenance period.  This maintenance is related to the data center move which will be completed in early second quarter of 2015.

Back To Top

02/16/2015

A new “Notify” checkbox has been added to the contact manager for any contact that has more than one email address.  You may have read about this new notification option in the red headline at the top of the Flexmls window.

VERY IMPORTANT: This new “Notify” checkbox on the contact record currently only applies to ASAP auto-email.  Weekly and Monthly auto-email will only send to the primary email on the contact record.

This new feature allows ASAP email to be sent to multiple email addresses as long as the “Notify” checkbox is selected for any additional email address to which the auto-email should be sent.  The Weekly and Monthly auto-email events will continue to sent only to the primary email (the first, at the top, email) until they are converted to the new FBS email system.

This new “Notify” checkbox option is part of a major email system upgrade being installed in stages to Flexmls. The email upgrade for Weekly/Monthly auto-email is expected in March 2015.  That update will make the “Notify” checkbox work for all Flexmls email, not just ASAP and manual email as it does today. Currently, all ASAP auto-email and manual email are sent using the new email system, while Weekly and Monthly auto-email are still being sent using the old email system.  This is the reason for the discrepancy between ASAP and Weekly/Monthly email functions.  Since Weekly/Monthly email are on the old system, they do not interface with the new “notify” checkbox that is part of the new MLS system.

Workarounds:

If you need to have 2 email addresses associated with one client currently using Weekly/Monthly auto-email, there are 2 ways to accomplish this:

1) Create a separate contact for each email address.  For example, if a husband and wife prospect both have an email address, simply create a contact for each individual rather than one contact with 2 email addresses.  You can add both contacts (one email each) to the Auto-email event and the email will be delivered as expected.

2) If your client is willing to receive ASAP auto-email instead of Weekly (3 times daily) or Monthly (once per month), you could change their Auto-email Event settings from Weekly or Monthly to ASAP.  Since ASAP is on the new email system, the “Notify” checkbox will correctly deliver email to both addresses.  Make sure your client is willing to have ASAP email delivery, as this can generate a lot of email (potentially every minute) for “wide-open” searches with large amounts of matching listings.

Back To Top

01/28/2015

The MLS fields School District, Corp Limit Per Auditor, and Township will now be auto-populated from information collected by the MLS department for our primary counties. This auto-population requires that Realist first auto-populate Tax District. Only the 13 counties that are included in Realist tax data will be able to auto-populate these additional fields. Video Tutorial available at the bottom of this page.

Please review the information in these fields for your current listings. Although it is auto-populated from information that was tested and presumed accurate, there is still a possibility that incorrect information may exist. Please verify these 3 fields and if inaccuracy is found, please email techsupport@columbusrealtors.com to report any disparities from the auditor record.

REMINDER: You must auto-populate tax data from Realist to initiate auto-population of School District, Corp Limit and Township. These field selections are based on Realist-populated tax district. If the tax district is not auto-populated by Realist at time of listing entry, the School District, Corp Limit, and Township will NOT auto-populate. Therefore, just like Realist, only the 13 counties supported by Realist can be auto-populated.

Watch the Auto-pop Tutorial

Back To Top