In many MLS® IDX enabled regions, upcoming open house dates and times are synced up to your listings automatically. Due to how dates and time displays work, as well as the ability for our clients to override the default Open House displays on their OWN listings, there are some operation logics that are helpful to understand.
We display upcoming open houses on consecutive days, and same time of the day
Imagine if the MLS® system with open house dates in its feed shows the following open houses coming up for a listing:
- February 8 (Saturday) 2-4PM
- February 9 (Sunday) 2-4PM
- February 15 (Saturday) 2~4PM
- February 16 (Sunday) 10AM-12PM
Before the weekend of February 8th, our system will feed an open house display that looks like this:
Open House Feb 8th - 9th, 2-4PM
To avoid spillover of excessively long text breaking our neat and tidy website designs, the February 15th open house will NOT show up yet.
On February 10th, after our system flushes the open house fields (see below for more on this cycle) our websites will display the following open house:
Open House Feb 15th, 2-4PM
It is omitting the open house on the February 16th, as it is not on the same hour. This is by design to prevent excessively long text breaking the layout, should we force two sets of days as well as two sets of times at once.
We observed that most weekend open houses are the same time over Saturday and Sunday, hence the above algorithm was written. If you have different open house times that you wish to display at the same time, you need to update the open house label directly on your OWN listing.Open House Fields Resets On Sunday Late Night (Weekly)
To avoid displaying past week's open houses, the Brixwork system flushes out all open house fields on listings every Sunday night/early Monday morning, and syncs up fresh data for the upcoming week. This applies even to custom-set open house labels, not just MLS® Reciprocity sourced open house dates.
When You Need to Custom Edit Open House Displays Mid-Week
Imagine you have a mid-week teaser open house before the weekend open houses:
- March 13th (Thursday) 10AM~12PM
- March 15th (Saturday) 2~4PM
- March 16th (Sunday) 2~4PM
Assuming you had this set up before Monday (March 10th), as of Monday your website will display the following:
Open House Mar 13th, 10AM~12PM
Because our auto-flush system reset the open house fields until the end of the week (March 16th), you will need to manually update the open house field late on March 13th or early March 14th to have it display the weekend's open houses.
How to update the open house for your listingsCan This Not Be Automated To Purge When The Previous Open House Date is Stale?
Our system was initially designed to let Realtors® have full control over the open house displays, so that entering custom open house labels such as "Catered Open House" or "Don't Miss The Open This Weekend (2~4PM Both Days)" was possible. This means that our final open house display on each real estate website is not a true date/time format that can be easily processed for timestamp comparison.