Real Estate Widgets for your Website
2007 is going to be the year of the widget.
What’s a widget, you say?
A web widget is a chunk of code than you can easily cut and paste and drop onto any web page to add additional features or functionality to your web site.
Using widgets, you can easily decorate your MySpace page, blog or web site. Entire communities have sprung up virtual overnight to begin to aggregate all the different widgets available to the budding web page author these days. (My personal favorite being Widgetbox)
For the real estate professional however, using widgets can mean anything from embedding a Youtube video virtual tour (see Tip Tuesday: Creating a Killer Listing Presentation), to placing a simple Flash-based slideshow (see Splash Some Flash On Your Site) on their site. Another popular widget amongst real estate bloggers right now is the MyBlogLog community, which displays thumbnail images of recent readers in the sidebar. (For more, see MyBlogLog Blogger Community at sellsius° real estate blog)
Some Realtors have even adding real time chat widgets to better communicate with their clients - to see how Kevin from 3Oceans has incorporated it into his business, check out Meebo: Web 2.0 “Floor Time�.
So, if you’re looking for some real estate specific widgets, have a look at the following:
1. Altos Research’s AltosCharts. An amazing tool to give your visitors a quick overview of market conditions. Unfortunately, they are only live in a number of markets.
2. Zillow Search Box. Lets you site visitors quickly find Zestimates on an address. It seems to me there could be a ton of Zestimate-related widgets you could put together, and I’m surprised there’s not.
3. Trulia’s TruliaMap. Allows you to customize a Google Maps mashup to display Trulia’s listings on your site.
4. Likewise, Nestoria, the UK based property search engine takes gives you DropIn maps, property lists and search boxes; and they just released a co-branded property search tool
5. Finally, Mapwing lets you add floor plans to a virtual tour and blend them with photos and comments, given a user a much better spatial perspective of what they’re looking at.
These are just some of the thousands of widgets out there. What are some that you’re playing with?
One word of caution however - anytime you add a widget to your site, you’re pulling data from another web site’s server. This can slow the load time of your own page dramatically, so be careful with the number of widget you install.
Update: Get a FoREM widget for your blog.
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14 Comment(s)
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Steve Jagger | Jan 29, 2007 | Reply
There are quite a few great widgets. Google has a ton that you can use here - http://www.google.com/ig/directory?synd=open&num=24
Nathan Justus uses one from http://www.rockyou.com that allows him to create flash movies - http://www.soldbyjustus.com/
Widgets are a great way to customize your website.
Las Vegas Bill | Jan 29, 2007 | Reply
Thanks for all of the great tips. Can’t wait to start using them. Keep up the great work. Cheers.
jf.sellsius | Jan 29, 2007 | Reply
Great post Joel. We love widgets. We even created one (w/Blogging Systems), the Blog Surfer, to help your archived posts see the light of day again. It’s based on stumbleupon and works like a remote control. Just click the Surfer and random posts from the past appear. Our page views shot up once we installed it. We hope to improve it to allow you to pull posts by tags. The code is here if anyone wants to try it:
http://tinyurl.com/y56cpv
Your point about the increased site load time has caused some blogs to drop the MBL widget.
Joel Burslem | Jan 29, 2007 | Reply
I dropped MBL because it was sucking a lot of resources. Plus, after a while it was kinda eerie in a way to see who’s reading your blog. I think I prefer the anonymity on my site without that widget.
Christoph Schweiger | Jan 30, 2007 | Reply
Thanks for pointing out these great resources!
Mario | Jan 30, 2007 | Reply
Trovit Homes also has Real Estate widgets, we have a Google Gadget and also another version in Javascript
John_F | Jan 31, 2007 | Reply
Great list. I never heard of Mapwing before…at first glance, it looks really useful for my listings. Now I’d just like to see a mashup of it with Google Maps!
amber | Feb 1, 2007 | Reply
Check out the new embedded version of Kool IM.
http://www.koolim.com
Ioan | Mar 25, 2007 | Reply
That post inspired me to create a mortgage calculator widget for fun. http://www.mortgagesum.com/mortgagewidget/
Owners Corporation | Nov 6, 2008 | Reply
The Strata Agency is a boutique strata management business, with 15 years experience in the Property Sector.
Jonathan Cardella | Mar 30, 2009 | Reply
Most widgets are designed to traffic or PR to the issuing website. Very few widgets provide the Realtor® with value beyond the functionality of the widget by helping them to actually convert their website visitors into clients.
This mortgage calculator widget is different - it’s updated daily with fresh interest rates, it’s easy to use and designed to generate more leads for Realtors and mortgage brokers, from your existing website traffic.
Jonathan Cardella | Mar 30, 2009 | Reply
Sorry, that was meant to say “Most widgets are designed to siphon traffic or page rank(pr) from the Realtor/broker website back to the site that issued the widget”.
real estate in philippines | Apr 6, 2009 | Reply
Whew! what a list! I never thought there are number of widgets that i can use to help me in this real estate business.. Thanks a lot for this post and more power..
-david
Jamie Colucci | Apr 29, 2009 | Reply
There are tons of widgets out there; some are really useful and some are just decoration and end up cluttering a site. You have to maintain a good balance. A truly useful widget will do something helpful for your business like help literally connect you by phone or e-mail to a potential client. (I may be just a little biased, but I think my klick2kall tool is the best!)