Your buyers can now create their own searches and get auto-notifications. You as an agent can choose to turn this on for your buyers on a one-by-one basis or for all your buyers going forward.
Giving your buyer’s the ability to search within Collaboration Center, keeps your searches and theirs together under the same system. This helps you to know what they are searching for and if their criteria have changed, keeping you in the loop.
The following article will cover:
- Agent Searches vs. Buyers Searches
- How to search on the Collaboration Center site
- Agent Notifications
- How to turn on Search Options and Agent Preferences
Agent Searches vs. Buyers Searches
The search options for your buyers are scaled down to allow for simplicity, whereas the tools in Paragon are for professional agents.
- Your buyers can only create new searches and edit their own saved searches but not the searches you created for them. They can also only search for Active Listings.
- You, the agent, can edit both your created search and the buyer search. When editing a buyer search, you will be redirected to the Collaboration Center search. This allows you to edit the search with the same tools and fields available to the buyer.
Between you and your buyer, you can have up to ten saved searches. So, if you already have five saved searches, you or client can create up to five additional searches.
Searching on Collaboration Center
To help promote the property search feature in the Collaboration Center for your contacts, Property Search is a tab on the dashboard. This will allow the search feature to be more visible to your contact. It is only found on larger resolutions (PCs, tablets), and has no impact on mobile users.
To edit or remove a saved search, click on the menu icon on the top left corner.
Map as Criteria
The map is displayed by default. However, the most important thing to remember when using the search is that the map boundaries are used as part of your search criteria and will be saved to the search. The map and saved search will only display/save 500 listings.
Search Criteria
The top search bar contains search fields that are common in almost any consumer search. The fields are:
- Address, Location...
- Price
- Beds
- Baths
- Property Type
- Status (only Active is available)
- More
Address and Location
Searching by an Address will center the map to that location. To narrow results, enter a radius from the location entered. Clicking submit will draw a radius around your location and display any listings found.
The location search will allow you to enter a location on the map based on lookup location values from your Paragon (ex. Region, Area). So, as you type a street, city, etc., it will auto complete and start showing you values from Paragon.
More Button
Of course, having only five search fields is pretty restrictive, click More to view additional search fields.
Reset
This reset option will allow your client to reset the property search back to the default criteria as to when first opened. This way if they want to start their search over they can click the reset button.
Save a Search
To save a search, click Save, then give the search a name.
You also do not have to save a search to collect listings. Simply click on any listing and if you like that listing you can mark it as a favorite, possible, or rejected. You can even add them to your own custom folders to keep track of.
Agent Notifications
There are four different ways to find out your client has created their own search.
1. You will receive an email notification that looks like the one below. Note, this is on by default, but you can turn off this notification under Collab Center Preferences>Notification Options.
2. A new Searches tab has been added to the Contact Activity widget on the homepage.
3. On the Paragon Connect dashboard, a new badge will display on the Contact and New Searches will display the total number of new Buyer searches for all your contacts.
4. When viewing your contact record, a client icon appears next to Client Created search so you can quickly identify them.
Turn on Search Options
You can turn on the searching option for all your clients or on a client-by-client basis.
Under Preferences > Collab Center > Search Options, choose New Only in the drop down under Search Options. This will enable searching on Collaboration center for ALL clients going forward.
If you wish to turn it on a client-by-client basis, leave the above option to Disable. To turn on for a contact, option the contact record and click on Contact Information. Click the drop down for Collab Center Search Options and select New Only. 
Additional Agent Preferences
You can also choose to only let your clients search by specific classes. By default, they can search for all four classes.
Notification Options
You and your client will be auto notified by the preferences you select under Notification Options.
