Four settings at the top of Import Parameters decide how each imported property is presented rather than which listings arrive: Title Format, Select Agent, Select Property Status on import and User.
They apply as each property is written, so changing one affects the next run and leaves existing properties as they were.
Title Format
MLS feeds carry no property titles, so the plugin builds one from the fields you name. Write the format as tokens in curly braces, separated however you want the title to read.
New tasks start with this format:
{Address},{City},{CountyOrParish},{PropertyType}The available tokens are {Address}, {City}, {CountyOrParish}, {StateOrProvince}, {PostalCode}, {PropertyType}, {Bedrooms}, {Bathrooms}, {ListingKey}, {ListingId}, {StreetNumberNumeric} and {StreetName}.
Anything outside the braces is printed as written, so a format of {Bedrooms} bed in {City} produces titles such as 3 bed in Miami. A token whose field is empty in the feed contributes nothing, which is worth checking before building a title on {Bedrooms} in a market with many land listings.
Titles become the page URL slug on most themes. Include enough to keep them distinct: a format of {City},{PropertyType} alone gives hundreds of properties nearly identical titles and near duplicate URLs.
Property status on import
Select Property Status on import chooses the WordPress post status for everything the task writes: publish or draft. Published properties are live immediately. Drafts are visible only in wp-admin until you publish them.
Drafts have one consequence worth knowing before you choose them. The daily reconciliation pass skips draft and trashed posts entirely, so a listing imported as a draft is never removed automatically when it leaves the MLS, and never counted when the pass compares the feed against your site. Importing as drafts is a review workflow, not a safe long term state.
Agent and owner
Two different settings sound alike and do different things.
- Select Agent attaches a theme agent to every property this task imports. The list comes from your theme’s agent records, so it is populated by the theme rather than by the MLS feed.
- User sets the WordPress post author of each property. That is who owns the post in WordPress terms, and on several themes it decides whose dashboard the listing appears in.
Setting them per task is what makes one task per agent worthwhile. Each task stamps its own agent and its own author on the listings it owns, which is why two tasks matching the same listing produce inconsistent agent pages.
Standalone mode: showing each listing’s own agent
In standalone mode the task carries one more control, Which agent shows on these properties.
- Off: every property from this task shows the agent selected above.
- On: each property shows its own listing agent from the MLS feed, meaning the name, phone, email and office that arrived with that listing, and the selected agent is ignored.
No agent profiles are created either way. The listing agent details are stored on the property itself and displayed there.
Turning on the listing agent option is usually what MLS attribution rules require, since the listing has to credit the brokerage that holds it. Confirm the wording your MLS requires before switching a live site to a single site wide agent.
Frequently asked questions
I changed the title format. Why are existing titles unchanged?
Titles are written when a property is imported, and the hourly sync updates content and fields rather than rebuilding the title. To apply a new format to existing properties, delete them from the Tools tab and re-import.
Can I edit an imported property’s title by hand?
You can, and it stays until that property is deleted and imported again. Fields that the MLS keeps updating, such as price and status, are overwritten on the next sync, so hand editing them does not hold.
Which fields can I put in a title?
Only the tokens listed on the screen. The format is not a general field picker, so an arbitrary RESO field name in braces is printed literally instead of being replaced.
What happens to properties if I delete the WordPress user set as the owner?
WordPress asks what to do with their posts and reassigns them to whoever you choose. The import task keeps pointing at the deleted user, so update the User field on the task as well, or the next run writes properties with no valid author.
Related
- Controlling which listings are imported
- Filtering by agent or office
- Manual category names like FOR SALE and FOR RENT
- What an import task is
Tell us the title you want and which MLS you are on, and we will write the format string for you.