Navica MLS Realtor and Association Tools

The Navica MLS is a Realtor tool that is used to market real estate in East Idaho for several Realtor associations. Navica provides a way for real estate agents to list your home and market it to other real estate brokerages, to IDX websites run by real estate agents, and to real estate listing aggregators like Realtor, Zillow, and Homefinder. Navica MLS also provides other tools to real estate agents to manage listings, maintain customer records, and share information about properties for sale. All of the homes you see for sale online are either listed on an MLS system or added as for sale by owner. The MLS system is the largest and most comprehensive real estate marketing system in the United States today.

Who Owns Navica MLS?

The Navica MLS software is owned by Systems Engineering, Inc, a private company in North Carolina. It has been in business for over 50 years. Since 1999 Systems Engineering has provided Navica MLS to real estate brokers and agents as an online tool to exchange information about homes for sale on the Snake River MLS a The data in Navica MLS is owned by the member brokers of each association. There are over 130 multiple listing services that use Navica to exchange real estate data, and it also connects to other MLS systems to give real estate professionals very broad exposure for the properties they list. So Navica is privately owned and the data is owned by the member brokers.

How Does NAVICA MLS work?

Navica MLS is managed and accessed by Realtors. When a Realtor lists your property for sale, they use NAVICA MLS to enter all the information about the property. This is called a real estate listing. The agent builds a listing by including all of the important information about the property. This includes, but is not limited to the price, property address, number of rooms and bathrooms, property tax information, utility information, a legal description of the land, and much more. This information is public-facing. There is also information about when the home can be shown, how other agents should arrange to show the home, and if there is a lockbox for the access key. 

When a new listing is created through Navica MLS, the listing receives a unique ID. This is the MLS ID. When information is exchanged between agents, this MLS ID makes it easy to find the right property. This is important because there are thousands of properties on the market at any given time in a region. And each property needs to be uniquely searched. Realtors search these properties inside of the Navica MLS software. Homebuyers do not have access to Navica MLS, but Navica provides a data stream to agents and brokers so they can share MLS data online. This stream is referred to as an IDX or RETS feed.

What Is A Navica IDX RETS Feed?

Because Navica does not allow the public to access its system, they have to provide a way for homebuyers to see listings. This is done through an IDX feed. IDX stands for Internet Data Exchange. This is a protocol for sharing information on the internet in a standardized way so that everyone exchanging information is exchanging it in the same format. This standard allows real estate brokers and agents to have their own website and display real estate listings for their clients to browse. EastIdahoProperty.com is an IDX website. It receives information from Navica MLS through an IDX data feed that is updated about every 10 to 15 minutes.

This website gets its IDX feed from a server at Navica called a RETS server. RETS is short for Real Estate Transaction Standard server. When a client searches our site for homes for sale in Idaho Falls, the website makes a request to the RETS server. The RETS server returns the results of the search through IDX and displays the results on the screen.

RETS and IDX allow the public to have access to all properties for sale in Eastern Idaho.

Closing A Transaction with Navica MLS

When an offer on a property listed on Navica MLS goes under contract, the listing agent updates the property and marks it pending. This lets all of the brokers and agents know that the property has been sold and should not be shown anymore. When the transaction funds and records, the property is considered sold. The listing agent updates the property with the price it was sold at and marks it closed. This removes the property from the IDX stream so people don't see the property on agent websites.