By October 2015, commercial listings, currently displayed on ICX.ca, will find their permanent home in a new commercial section in REALTOR.ca. As a result, they will leaverage the power of REALTOR.ca, along with its substantial reach and lead-generation potential for REALTORS®. For real estate investors, access to all listing types on one site will offer not only a more user-friendly experience, but greatly enhanced visibility for commercial searches previously not offered on our most traffic-rich platform.
Key benefits of adding commercial listings to REALTOR.ca:
- More up-to-date commercial content. Because REALTOR.ca is updated up to 4 times per day, commercial listings can now benefit from more frequent updates as well.
- Market-driven, user-tested approach to integration. Metrics from ICX.ca and REALTOR.ca indicated audience overlap on both sites. We’ve market-tested a number of commercial investors and residential consumers across Canada, to ensure seemless integration with REALTOR.ca, but more importantly giving users what they want.
- Enhanced listing details. Not only do we feature REALTORS®, but now commercial listings can take advantage of additional content such as demographics and Walk Score®.
- Additional site-wide features such as keyword search allowing REALTORS® to position their listings as well as ability to collect enhanced analytics for commercial content.
What you need to know:
- REALTOR.ca will now have 2 sections:
- Commercial: giving investors the ability to search for and view all commercial listings
- Residential: allowing visitors to search for and view residential listings along with all multi-family properties, some of which have previously only been available on ICX.ca
- Visitors accessing ICX.ca will be automatically directed to the Commercial section of REALTOR.ca.
- Bookmarked links from ICX.ca will link to the Commercial section of REALTOR.ca.
- ICX.ca Board Test (test.icx.ca) will be redirected to REALTOR.ca Board Test site (test.realtor.ca). Impact on the release day is expected to be minimal.
- There are no changes to the dataload process
- REALTOR.ca for iPhone will integrate commercial listings as planned for Q1 2016; CREA will continue to support ICX.ca for iPhone until other commercial options are available.
No service disruption is expected on release day and there is no need for you to change your current practices.
Should you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact CREA Member Support.