Overview
If you will be sending HotPads a lot of listings, you may want to create an automated feed. (Otherwise, you can create them one at a time) There are many ways of doing this, but the most common is for you to run through your listing database every night and save all the listings in a big xml file on your web server. Our servers will download that file at a time when it's guaranteed to be finished.
Similarly, if you'd like to automate orders of Featured Listings you can create a daily data feed or contact us to discuss other options.
Steps
Here are the recommended steps. Please contact dpeters@hotpads.com if you have special requirements.
- Take a look at the sample HotPads XML document that applies to you (if you have a different format already set up, let us know):
- Houses, condo units, land etc. (one floor plan per listing)
- Apartment communities, new housing developments, new condo buildings, etc. (multiple floor plans per listing)
- Featured Listing Orders
- Create a cron job that iterates through each listing in your database and writes out the XML to one big file.
- Send the URL of the file and the time we should process it to dpeters@hotpads.com
- If you'd like to send it over HTTPS or protect it with a username/password, make note of that in the email (generally not necessary since we will be publishing the data in the file)
- Tell us if you'd like a report emailed to you each time the feed runs
Please note
- Do not include HTML in your feed.
- the XML tags are case-sensitive
- listings with required fields missing will not appear
- the following are reserved characters in XML, so they need to be escaped
- quote (")
- apostrophe (')
- ampersand (&)
- less than (<)
- greater than (>)
