Building Broker Web Sites in Wordpress
Wordpress is a remarkable piece of software that only grows more powerful every day. Case in point - Premium Wordpress Themes can take a blog and transform it into a online magazine. Choose an even more specialized theme and Wordpress can become a Contact Manager too.
Many agents I talk to are starting to use Wordpress to build single property web sites for their listings (see Do Single Property Websites Sell Homes?). This is especially powerful when it’s done with a one-click install and 100 site (unique URL) hosting limit with a MediaTemple Grid Service account. Only $20 a month! And companies like Realivent have even designed plugins and templates to help make this easy to do (see Using Wordpress to sell Real Estate).
AgentPoint is a web development company based in Australia, that’s taken the idea to a whole new level though.
They’ve built a series of complete custom web sites for broker Fruit Property in Wordpress. And, while not a radically new idea; I think you’ll agree, the results are pretty impressive.
Check out the branch office sites for Fruit Property Geelong or Fruit Property Applecross.
On the whole, the site doesn’t look much different from any other broker website, but as you start diving into property searches and viewing individual listings, your realize the enormous amount of customization that went into transforming these sites from a typical Wordpress install.
In order to accomplish this; they built a number of custom plugins. From the email sent to me:
- Real Estate Plug-in: This is the main plug-in and works without our Agentlog System and displays all of the agents property listings. It also controls search results, pagination, property pages, print pages, email listings, email to self, mortgage calculator and many more features. Also includes Lightbox image gallery for individual photo galleries. The plug-in uses many settings such as company id’s and office id’s from our agentlog system. (we can have thousands of offices added), it also includes how many listings in search results, google analytics code, google maps codes and other basic settings.
- Featured properties: Allows user to create featured listings or have this automatically load from database.
- Latest Listings: Brings in latest listings (6 of each). The plug-in has a number of controls such as whether to display sales, lease or both types.
- Property clouds: Brings from database all suburbs, and suburbs grow in size if they have more and more listings within a particular suburb.
- Email subscriptions: A site user can subscribe to sales or lease email subscriptions, this sends them latest listings added to system. The plugin has a number of settings such as back days, html, text formats and send times and dates.
- RSS feeds: for sales and lease listings.
- Team Pages: We also developed a plug-in that allows all team members to have an individual page complete with all of their own for sale lease, under offer, sold and leased listings.
Now, these installs still rely on AgentPoint’s proprietary Agentlog listings management software to manage the properties on the backend, but as you can see, all the display on the front end is done through Wordpress. Pretty cool stuff.
The upsides to the building your broker site in Wordpress are numerous; for the same reasons it’s caught on as the blog platform of choice for most bloggers. You have a vibrant, active community of developers constantly creating new features, and a codebase that generates standards compliant web copy which is naturally optimized for Search Engines.
I’d love to see AgentPoint release (or even sell) some of these plugins to brokers in North America. Or, at the very least, for more brokers (or enterprising developer) to pick up the torch and try and duplicate what they have accomplished.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
23 Comment(s)
5 Trackback(s)
- From Building Broker Web Sites in Wordpress | The Long List of Odysseus Medal Nominees | Realtors and real estate, mortgages, lending, investments | Feb 7, 2008
- From Real Estate Roundup - Week 6 | eCommission Blog | Feb 8, 2008
- From Agentpoint Features on Future of Real Estate Marketing | agentpoint real estate agent realtor wordpress web designs developers australia | Feb 13, 2008
- From The Future of Real Estate Marketing | Agentpoint Real Estate Agent Website Design Development Australia | Feb 28, 2008
- From Blogsites Focusing on the Community with Diverse Solutions IDX MLS Search » Realivent Real Estate Technology Blog | Mar 5, 2008
Andrew Mattie | Feb 7, 2008 | Reply
For my personal hosting needs, I use and highly recommend Dreamhost (http://dreamhost.com/). They give 500GB of space (increases by 2GB every week!), unlimited domains, one click installs, and so, so much more. I absolutely love ‘em!
Andrew Mattie | Feb 7, 2008 | Reply
…oh yeah, it’s only $10 / mo if you pay for a year at a time.
Drew Meyers | Feb 7, 2008 | Reply
Joel-
Great topic. Frankly, I’m surprised I haven’t seen more agents/brokers build their entire website on wordpress given it’s flexibility. I believe the Incredible Agent team has done quite a bit of work with wordpress and would be interested to hear what Damon has to say on this subject.
I’ve got several ideas for neighborhood wordpress plugins that I’d like to see developed - I’m not going to champion them here since they involve zillow data, so I’ll try to put together a post on Zillow Blog sometime in the next couple days.
loren nason | Feb 7, 2008 | Reply
WOW! WOW! WOW!
Damn that is nice
Andrew - I’m not a fan of Dreamhost
If I was doing a broker site then I would want extreme stability and Media Temple would work and I also like bluehost. Media Temple is better for their gridserver platform
Loren
Peter Ricci | Feb 7, 2008 | Reply
Gday all, thank you for the great comments in relation to our software and systems integrating with Wordpress.
In the future we will of course be opening up all of our plug ins and quite possibly our systems (if we can find the right Angel investor)
As for the plug ins for now, we want to keep refining them until they are perfect and then provide great documentation for them so that others can easily work with the tools we provide.
Hope that answers some of the questions and thanks for the write-up Joel.
Ron Ares | Feb 7, 2008 | Reply
Joel,
Is this a de facto FOREM endorsement of Media Temple?
Looking for a new host after a 3-day(!) outage from our current vendor.
Jack A | Feb 8, 2008 | Reply
I am building a new site right now and have gone far enough down the road that I just want to integrate the blog into my site and have all of the sidebar menus and feedburner (recent posts boxes and the like) promotion. Is there any advice out there for integrating wordpress into my site?
Great post… You have the best RE blog!
Congress Realty | Feb 8, 2008 | Reply
I don’t totally understand single property websites. How many people driving by remember the address? And isn’t it better to point them to your site in this fashion: yoursite.com/houseoncamelback
Josette Skilling | Feb 8, 2008 | Reply
I just found an interesting premium theme that will work for me to put my website and blog together on a Wordpress install hosted on Bluehost. I love the flexibility of static pages, with a menu system, and the dynamic content capability of the blog pages. I’m surprised more aren’t doing the same as well since it seems to be such a perfect fit.
How interesting to read this today when I’m just about to start setting it up.
Peter, I will happily beta your plugins in the US!
John K | Feb 8, 2008 | Reply
I endorse media temple. I have been using them for over a year - they do a good job. Their interface is acceptable, not great, but easy to understand.
I did find that I kept getting timeouts whenever I posted a blog entry, but I think this was more a result of size of my database (I have 4400 blog entries) than a weakness on their size.
I spend $20 for my blog; I get all my business from it. Think about the return on investment on that!
They do have some one-click applications, which are easy to use, plus a web-mail interface if you don’t have email (pretty basic, though).
They will also upgrade you for only another $20 I think, if you get so big as to need more space or faster servers.
Mary Pope-Handy | Feb 8, 2008 | Reply
I must need “Wordpress for Dummies” but my experience with it is that it’s just not intuitive (even if it can do wonderful things). Adding pictures is not a lot of fun with wordpress, nor is changing the font style or size. It is all the rage, but my own opintion is that it’s not ideal unless you’re really tech saavy.
Peter Ricci | Feb 8, 2008 | Reply
Congress Realty: The reason for the sub domains is simple. We built a main website http://www.fruitproperty.com and then other websites are sub domains off that main website, you can access these easily by just visiting the main website.
In my humble opinion the importance of a single agent website is all about brand and getting vendors first. Agents have no control on how they are presented on big real estate portals, but they do have control on how they are presented on their own websites.
If built/designed correctly I feel that the future will all be about the agents/brokers own website. This is because sites like Craig’s list, Google base, Properazzi and others are building search engines around only a small amount of data and then redirecting the user to the main property page on the agents website for further information.
It is important for agents/brokers to be on the major portals, but just as important is the way they portray themselves and their brand on their own website.
Agents/Brokers are always attempting to separate themselves from the competition is this is just another way to do this - and an important one.
In Australia we have a different style market. We do not have buyers agents (or less than 1%)Agents generally charge a stepped commission as set out by their Realtor associations (we have one in each state) which is quite a deal less than the US market but still lucrative to the good agent/broker.
Josette: On the plug ins side of things, it will be a while before we do this, we still find little things that we like to clean up. We also want to make sure that when we release these plug ins we clearly mark in the code where it only relates to our systems, we would like to make it easy for other web designers to use.
Obviously we would love them to join an affiliate program which we will launch in the future, but Wordpress is all about choice and I just love the stuff some people come up with for uses with Wordpress.
We have benefited tremendously from the community and use a number of plug ins such as the amazing Cforms.
Thanks for all the comments, hopefully we can continue to bring out new and inventive realk estate plugins for our systems and then one day soon sahre these.
Regards Peter
Chris Heath | Feb 9, 2008 | Reply
Web 2.2 is definitely the way to go, but for each property maybe to much work huh
Matt Gentile | Feb 12, 2008 | Reply
How to bypass the Business Prevention Department (Legal) and seek out a marketing strategy using Social Media 2.0. Visit http://cwcfprablog.typepad.com/weblog/2008/02/working-around.html
Nick | Feb 12, 2008 | Reply
I agree with Loren on this one.
I also have used Dreamhost and my account expires on Thursday and I will be so happy to be done with them. They have had terrible uptime for me.
Chris Heath | Feb 13, 2008 | Reply
Yes, it’s a great medium for listing individual sites although it would take ages to do a number of listings. Msn seems to put a high regard for blogs although Google doesn’t.
Brad Nix | Mar 5, 2008 | Reply
Wow, impressive stuff here. I thought I was doing good using wordpress as my brokerage site (until I saw fruitproperty.com).
Layla | Mar 7, 2008 | Reply
I’ve never thought of using a unique page for each property listing that seems like fairly lucrative idea that I must have overlooked.
Brad Coy | Mar 12, 2008 | Reply
Thanks for pointing me (via twitter) back to your post Joel. I have been weighing the option of changing our company platform to WP. The Aus example here is great with the plug-ins but I am still having a hard time finding a great local example to show my team.
Jason Rose | Aug 17, 2008 | Reply
I have just changed my website over to a wordpress platform.
I would have to say that I am very impressed.
Easy to use. Search rankings are inproving and so is traffic.
Keep up the great articles. They are totally relevant even down here in Australia
Mike | Sep 22, 2008 | Reply
Hi
Maybe there people here interested in a real estate plugin for wordpress, which brings search, searchresults and listingview directly into wordpress
http://www.wprealestatelistings.com/realestate/wordpress
Hawaii Relocation | Sep 26, 2008 | Reply
A website per property is going a bit overboard.
Jack M. | Oct 6, 2008 | Reply
Mike is that site from the link for real? Those are real mls on the site? How can I get a site like that?