Area/Region Codes Outside the City

Among the major goals of the NORCAL MLS Alliance was the desire to create a common language among real estate professionals of the Bay Area. One part of that is learning the various selling areas from other Associations and incorporating them into our new Area/Region information that has data from the partner MLSs.

In the City, we are very focused on District 1 through District 10. Outside of the city, maybe not as much, but that's going to change. Our neighboring MLSs use a combination of city name, zip code and their own independently designated selling areas. They use their own formats.

During system consolidation, our "District" information was evaluated to have the same level of meaning as their "Selling Area" information to form the field we are using now called Area/District. For historical reference, they used to call that field "Area/Region" and we used to call it just "District" so the compromise in the new system was to name the field Area/District as we have done. The value list contains all values from all MLSs who are part of the NORCAL MLS Alliance.

In our system, we have prioritized the list putting our ten primary districts to the top, followed by some common codes, after which you find all of the selling area names and codes loaded from our reciprocal partners. It takes some getting used to but it does mean that you actually know the selling area numbers and zones used by your counterpart Agents all over the Bay Area. You speak the same language.

PUTTING THESE TO WORK

Let's see if we can create a useful example that turns this into an advantage. Would you like to replicate the old D1-D10, plus our old D11, D12, and D13 search? Can that be done easily? Yes, you bet. The trick is to setup your search like this:

You can even put these values in your 24 Hour Market Watch defaults, and it works.

Use these values: FIELD 1: 1-10 FIELD 2: 900524-900534

FIELD 3: 900660,900662,900680,900681,900682, 900686,900687,900688,900690,900691

Get this awesome result:

If you make this a Saved Search, and name it "SFARMLS Territory" then you can reuse this search over and over, you can save it as another name and then customize it. You can have full control over removing one particular area, should your client say they don't want anything facing the inner bay, or the outer bay.