Dear Subscriber,

When you ADD a listing into FLEX MLS, one of the first requirements is to define the Location.

Our FLEX system requires that we select a set of Parent/Child relationships from the text menus ZONE>AREA>COMMUNITY>SUBDIVISION.

(I wish we could populate these fields by just placing a map pin on the property, but even if we could, too many of us are very poor at placing map pins correctly. We forget to Zoom in fully before we “pin the tail on the donkey”.)

So, we are stuck with trying to guess which text name is appropriate for Zone, Area and Community. In order to help, we are starting a collection of shared Polygons available under the Overlays dropdown in the upper right-hand corner of the map on Edit Search and Map views.

The values available under the first three of the Location menus are fairly well fixed, at least for now. We will undoubtedly be creating more Communities as we grow. And we may reorganize the entire structure of Zones and Areas, at some point, but not right now.

The most dynamic of the menus is SUBDIVISION,. This category includes any land subdivision, condo project or group of villas or developer built homes. The list is constantly growing, by one or two a week. But the list does not grow automatically. We do not have communication from the Planning and Urban Development departments of the Municipal governments, or the statewide Public Registry. Those guys won’t even give us a single map! We must manually enter the names of new Subdivisions at the Admin office level as they are discovered, or reported by you! That means that if the Subdivision you need does not appear in the dropdown list, please ask Admin where it is! You may be the first to enter a listing there, and you need to notify us to add the SUBDIVISION. Or it may be present under a different Community than you have selected.

When Admin adds a new Subdivision, we request that the Listing Agent provide a map and a plan of the development so that we could eventually build a Polygon on the map, around its perimeter. And we ask for an official plan or document showing the officially recognized name.

The FLEX MLS system is set up to allow searches by Subdivision name, a great help when searching for ACTIVE listings, CLOSED comparable properties or statistics of various types.

Please help us keep things orderly within the MLS BCS FLEX system.

Thank you,

Douglas Christensen

Subdivision and Mapping Coordination