Open-Realty 2.4.1 Templates

Posted on June 11, 2007
Filed Under Real Estate News |

Open Realty 2.4.1 Released

Transparent Technologies, developers of Open Realty did a security release of this popular real estate listings script. This release is a suggested update release as it addresses security fixes discovered in the previous version 2.4.

2.4.1 also features a patched search.inc.php file which should make the creation of more customized search functionality a bit easier. A contribution by Al Smith from www.heretohost.com is a regular supporter and contributor to Open Realty in terms of addons and coding. No changes to template structure was noted so upgrading should be a painless effort for those who possess custom interfaces.

Open Realty Site Rankings JUMP overnight from position 88 to 11

One specific addon that should be included in any Open-Realty site bent on ranking is the addon developed by Al Smith called “SiteMap for Open-Realty”. This addon is absolutely one of the most effective addons I’ve witnessed in action that actually benefits the site owner extensively. Many addons available for Open Realty tend to me more trivial in terms of real world feature enhancers and should be avoided unless you absolutely need them. Toys are nice but customers rarely care them when it comes to actually looking for a home.

The SiteMap tool however took one particular site recently from #88 in the goolge search to position #11 in under a week after the site owner published the XML file using google’s web developer tools. The site had 4,000+ MLS listings put in using the vieleRETS tool and once the sitemap was generated it took the Realtor just days to realize how effective it was. Yesterday, the Realtor advised me that he receives on average, 1,200 contacts a week via his Open Realty / WordPress site of which he can attribute more than 80% as a direct result of his listings being indexed by google more effectively. This coupled with his print advertising in local Real Estate rag sheets and radio advertising, has given me for the first time in the past two years a full time look at how effective Open-Realty is in handling traffic. This sitemap tool from Al Smith was able to get th domain from a PR1 to PR2 overnight and the relevance in content is increased by the way we employed the property listings details page. No secrets revealed here, I’ll keep you posted at a later date but the traffic has been steady at 350 hits an hour on average.

So whats the reason? Ideal market? Good marketing? Genius Web Designer? I say designer but I’m biased having built the site, but the jury is out on the entire reason as to why the increase was exponential and as it stands I’m saying sitemap and good google rank. I can back this up too and I’ll post charts as we monitor the traffic for those interested in seeing how Open Realty performs.

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