Why Are My Listings Not Showing?

There may be times when you search a specific location/shape on your website using rIDX or Spatial Match 2.0 and you think that either the shape is wrong or that there should be more listings in the result. Or maybe listings that should be there aren't. There are many reasons why this might be the case and this article explains why.

Why is the Area Shape Wrong?

There are usually 2 reasons why the area shape might be "wrong":

1. The shape might actually be wrong. Our GIS team makes every effort to create accurate polygons for cities, zip codes, neighborhoods and subdivisions using cross-references of local public information and consensus. While our process results in a highly accurate geo location shape database for 99% of areas in the United States, we are human after all and have been known to get things wrong from time to time. If you believe this to be the case, please contact our support team to let us know. It is helpful if you can provide any supporting documents or links to help us research the problem.
2. The reason that you might think our shape data is wrong is because your particular location uses a different version of the shape. "Different version?!?" you might be thinking, "what's that?!?". There are 2 different types of shapes in our database: Postal City and Census Places. Which shape layer is used for your website is controlled by the "area bias" and defaults to Postal City. For more information about the bias, please see our  Area Shape Bias documentation.

The shape is fine, but some of the listings are missing or shouldn't be there.

If you search a city, zip code or neighborhood and don't find correct listings or don't see the listing that you believe should be there, it could be the result of an incorrect or unexpected shape. It could also be the result of incorrect Geo Location mapping of a listing or listings.

Home Junction IDX search products use location data of listings to position them within search results pages. We don't simply filter listings based on the location data entered into an IDX system. Instead, HJI systems locate listings and data based upon the shape of location. For this to work as intended it means that our system needs to accurately locate the latitude and longitude of the IDX property listings. Sometimes the data entered into the IDX system is inaccurate and sometimes we geolocate the listing in the wrong coordinates. Either way, if you think something is wrong, please contact our support department and provide as many details as you can about the situation.