Regional MLS, who serves the greater Palm Beach county, has added recently added 3 public fields to IDX for web sites. They are as follows:

• Allow Address Display = allows the address to be publically displayed
• Allow Value = allows a value of the property to be publically generated
• Allow Comments = allows comments to be publically added

These fields are added to address issues arising from listings from the Regional MLS showing on public web sites such as Realtor.com, Trulia.com and Zillow.com.

The Regional MLS (and other MLS's across the country) have a terrible habit of changing items without notifying their constituents. This causes issues with web sites that use IDX, or direct feeds from the MLS. These changes caught us off-guard and caused a few hiccups with our IDX web sites.

Since there is no prewarning of changes happening, the issue becomes that we don't know there is a change until it actually happens. In our experience, Regional MLS usually has issues implementing these changes causing a disconnect between MLS and the IDX. The Regional MLS RETS server becomes unavailable for various reasons. It usually takes Regional MLS a few days to hammer out these types of additions.

In this case, the IDX went offline sometime on Wednesday, June 10 at night/early morning due to incorrect metadata (there was an error in the XML file). The RETS server came back online Friday, June 12 around noon.