Your Search Restrictions settings allow you to limit the areas that are searchable on your MLS search pages. Unrestricted, your website searches will use all the possible data from your MLS. You can choose to restrict the data to only find listings from certain locations, and to exclude certain types of listings.


To access your Search Restriction settings, log into your the iHOUSEweb admin menu, click Settings, then click Search Restrictions.


Include Search Restriction

Start by selecting the county or counties that cover your area, and further restrict your search page to individual cities or areas you want to focus in on.


For example, this is an include restriction that will ensure listings only appear in the cities of Sacramento, North Highlands, and Fair Oaks, in the state of California.


Listing Status Restrictions

Values selected from the list will be filtered out of your search results You can choose to not have your clients see listings with certain Listing Status values. Select any that you do NOT want them to see. If no listing status is set, listings with all status values will be available to your clients.

  • Active
  • Contingent
  • Pending Sale


Exclude Listings

Choose the types of listings (if any) that you would like to exclude visitors from seeing in their IDX searches. It's best to set these to display what types of properties you'd like to focus on. For example, if you only want to show your website visitors homes, you would exclude all the commercial options and business opportunities.


Listing Types to Exclude

  • Homes For Sale
  • Homes For Rent
  • Homes Sold
  • Commercial For Sale
  • Commercial For Lease
  • Commercial Sold
  • Business Opportunities


Property Types to Exclude

  • House
  • Condo
  • Multi
  • Mobile
  • Land
  • Apartment
  • Commercial
  • Commercial Land
  • Commercial Lease
  • Business
  • Other


You may also choose to exclude pending listings.


When you're done, click Save Settings.


Why Restrict Searches?

There are two main reasons for restricting your search area:

  1. MLS data often covers a wide range of territory and you may not want to travel to show homes that are sometimes hundreds of miles from your location. By restricting your search area, you are limiting your website visitors to the area in which you specialize and can offer the best service.

  2. To improve your website performance. Loading all the data in your MLS takes time. The more data there is to load, the longer it takes. This issue is more pronounced with large a MLS and on the Map Search page. Restricting your data will speed up your searches and page load times.