Select the Desired City for Display in Your Listings with New Add/Edit Listing City Field

Historically, the NorthstarMLS Add/Edit listing input system offered only the municipality and postal city fields.

The issue subscribers faced is that for some locations, municipality and postal city differ, causing the desired city to occasionally be displayed incorrectly on websites and other real estate systems when that data is pulled from the NorthstarMLS database.

Consider a listing at “123 Apple Street.” With a municipality of Lake View Township and postal city of Detroit Lakes, here’s what was included in the listing city field for NorthstarMLS Front End systems:

Matrix: Lake View Township

Flexmls: Detroit Lakes

Paragon: Detroit Lakes

When we looked at the listing on vendor sites, Realtor.com displayed Lake View Township while on broker sites two showed Lake View Township, one showed Detroit Lakes and four had issues finding the listings or required navigating a map to find it.

Adding Choice in what is Displayed

To improve data integrity the NorthstarMLS team implemented a new radio button field called “Listing City.” Approved by Real Estate Standards Organization (RESO), the field is where NorthstarMLS points vendors to pull the data from when syndicating listings.

This new button allows NorthstarMLS subscribers to select the desired city to be displayed on their listing across websites and other systems when the municipality and postal city differ.

The Desired City Selection in the Twin Cities

For example, in the Twin Cities Metro, a property may have the municipality of Arden Hills and the postal city is New Brighton. Using the Listing City radio buttons, the desired city can be selected to be displayed on the listing. If the municipality and postal city are the same, the Listing City radio buttons will not be available.

A More Familiar Municipality Selection for Rural Areas

In rural areas where townships are more common, a property may have the municipality of the Detroit Township and the postal city of Detroit Lakes. Using the “Listing City” radio buttons, the desired city can be selected to be displayed on the listing.

What Subscribers will See

The field is now live! In this video David shows how it works and optimizes listings for both Twin Cities and rural listings.

If you have any questions, please contact the NorthstarMLS Help Desk.