There is a movement within WordPress and its growing fast. Their is a growing community of Estate Agents and Realtors that are beginning to use WordPress to power their sites. This is likely to have been encouraged by some of the early players such as R&W Mosman and Neutral Bay Real Estate in Sydney and Harcourts Luxury who were both featured in the WordPress sites Showcase.
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Why Realtors and Real Estate Agents need to try WordPress?
The move to WordPress can only be encouraged by the relatively recently introduced Widgets and Modules that have been specifically designed for WordPress, the wide variety of themes now available and the upcoming WP Plugins due for release soon, read on to find out more about what I know on that.
Tasked with developing yet another Real Estate site I have decided to check the feasibility (in fact on the subject of Real Estate web sites a I am currently working on four, this is a hot market right now) of doing it in WordPress. With a little research I realized it is certainly possible. To get the site right I wanted to thoroughly understand what was available and what they could do, so I set about doing some intensive research on the subject.
The Research
I was left feeling positive very early on, finding Justins post
“I was able to turn WordPress into a real estate Content Management System and property listing application.” My suspicions were further confirmed when he went on to say
“Their previous site wasn’t getting much traffic … Now with WordPress as the backbone of their site, it’s ranking extremely high under multiple very competitive keyword phrases”
You can see the results of his work here: http://www.NWColorado.com
I then cam across Travis McAshan’s blog where there was a great post explaining the combination of plugins that they use titled “5 WordPress Plugins for Real Estate Listings (IDX/MLS)”. You may check here.
Now I knew I was on the right track, but I wanted to see what was out there currently and what I could do. So I set about finding some dedicated resources for WordPress and Real Estate theme designer. Not surprisingly I found two which are worthy of a mention. The first one is “ Visual Composer ”. Using visual composer you can easily create your website. Their drag and drop function is great because you don’t required to know coding. Just awesome, isn’t it.
The second was a Realtor WordPress Theme Site ThemeMyShop.com and there are some great themes there, however they are all Premium themes that you have to purchase at a price. If you are prepared to spend money on a theme then you should really take a look at the theme that was only released this week ‘Real Estate – List, Rent, and Sell Properties Like a Pro’ a highly customisable Real Estate WordPress that features 5 different colour schemes, Google maps integration, custom plugins and scripts to easily add and manage property listings, a financing calculator among other things. You may like a discount. Take it from here.
The Plugins
There are a number of plugins that a Realtor could utilize, however here I will deal with Real Estate specific plugins.
The plugin was developed to enable real estate agents, brokers, and realtors to display and manage propertly listings in WP.
WP Real Estate Pro is a powerful WordPress plugin that can help you create a real estate listing website. It’s fully customizable, has Google maps integration, and IDX and MLS integration as well. It is compatible with all WordPress themes, and its premium features will enable you to create a feature rich, high performance, and customer pleasing real estate listing website.
The Themes
HomePress is a premium Real Estate WordPress Theme from StylemixThemes featured by powerful uListing plugin. Use HomePress to create amazing Real Estate listings website or Real Estate marketplace that your customers will love to surf. HomePress theme is easy to use on frontend as well as in admin’s perspective. This gives a fresh breeze to the Properties management website.
Zoner It’s a new Real Estate WordPress theme with unique functionality, design and features. Perfect for agency owners, personal or standalone Real estate agents, who want to receive personal, regional or global Real estate WordPress website. You can watch videos try Zoner lite on wordpress.org check pages on PSD mockups.
Homine is a premium WordPress theme for Real Estate websites. It has a purpose oriented design and It offers decent design variations with flexibility and customizability to fulfill various requirements. This theme comes loaded with tons of useful features related to Real Estate and you can learn about those features through live preview and details provided below.
BEYOT WordPress Theme is a premium theme designed for independent agents and agencies or on front end as well as on admin-side and makes properties managements a breeze, but you can also use it to allow users to submit their properties for free, for a fee or based on a subscription.
Nexos is an another premium theme designed for independent agents and agencies or on front end as well as on admin-side. You can show different custom fields for different categories in the submission form. In the case of “Land”, you don’t need a floor. Visually manage submission form fields, search form, property details, result item, pages, design colors, etc. Almost anything! All world languages, currencies, RTL and multilanguage via WPML. Automatic translations via MyMemory or Google API. Populate your website with your own data! It’s easy to do with “WP All Import” plugin! You can visually define a field’s mapping for any XML or CSV file. Free OpenStreetMap, Google Maps, Google Places, even SVG regions and GEO maps are supported with filtering features!
Conclusion
Real estate websites often have many moving parts. For example, you need to figure out the best way to display your listings and ensure that you keep your information up to date. WordPress enables you to do much of this out of the box, but you’ll need to tweak your site by adding a few extra features to make everything work just right.
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That’s all, thanks for reading “Realtors and Real Estate Agents definitive guide to WordPress”