Open Realty For Realtors

Posted on June 22, 2007
Filed Under Real Estate News |

Open Realty - Listings Manager - Version 2.4.1

In the time I’ve been building sites for agents and brokerages, literally dozens of drive by short lived solutions surface on web application front only to vanish and never be revived again. From the very beginning, most web based real estate applications sought to provide some means of providing an intuitive way of publishing and displaying real estate listings. Although most freely available real estate listing scripts are little more than gallery tools, some seek to provide the kinds of features worthy of being considered professional grade solutions. With these professional grade solutions comes complexity in use and usually require extensive knowledge in things like server administration, dns, database design, and certainly a fundamental working knowledge of the scripting language used in its production.

Design and modification in most instances is a lofty chore for anyone not familiar with general programming and this keeps a good percentage of applications solely in the hands of well versed professionals. Design for the most part with many commercial solutions is quite literally a hard coded venture not unlike that required by osCommerce or early versions of many popular forum engines.

Hard coding, for lack of a better term, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The absence of a template engine can increase the parsing speed of the code for greater performance. Our own UltimateIDX for example is about 90% inline coded layout and does require that we map each MLS individually before data mining can be used to provide MLS listings directly into Realtor sites. From my perspective, although I’d love something with a bit more form based control on the setup, is essentially very effective. Since our objective is to provide clean and seamless integration, it does take tenacity and great attention to detail to achieve this on a per site basis.

Applications that can provide an intuitive template engine, mission critical search engine features and an effective medium for presentation and management of listings are usually the realm of custom solutions. I’m certainly a fan of WordPress and Joomla among others that can be made to dance with finesse and elegance in ways that can win awards in real estate website design. Only one in the open source realm of real estate scripts comes armed and motivated to provide turnkey solutions with relative speed; Open Realty 2.4.1!

Template Design Engine

Template engines by ground level definition are little more than clever ways to parse code. PHP or PERL for instance are noted for being excellent handlers of text and are quite effective at text manipulation. PERL was specifically built with this characteristic in mind as its name depicts, Practical Extraction and Reporting Language. Template engines are text processors as the template engine produces output by replacing text with parsed code variables with specific values.

The Open Realty template engine is one of the more common types and is usually taught in most entry level php courses. Open Realty, like many similar applications, replaces what are called template tags with actual renderings of the applications core process. For instance a template tag that produces the browsers page title looks like this; {site_title}. When this tag is encountered, it is replaced at runtime with the contents specific to that tag. Open Realty has many dozens of such tags used to provide flexibility within reason to the designers vision of how the coders intention should look.

Its a common cliche that coders and designers rarely see eye to eye, not always for good reason naturally. Thus, template engines bridges the gap of reasoning between designers and coders by allowing the code developer to develop the application to function like it should and provide designers the means to make the application look like it should.

Open Realty templates are then simplified on the surface as any designer with entry level skill can quickly learn to adapt to this methodology of design and produce results that are effective as well as impressive for the Real Estate professionals.

Search Engine Benefits

Since I’ve already introduced the template tag, {site_title}, I’ll expand on this to a degree to explore the search engine benefits of using Open Realty for agent web sites. A truly impressive feature in Open Realty’s latest releases is the addition of variable and quite literally dynamic content for both meta descriptions and page titles. Each able to be defined from actual field contents in the Open Realty database, this feature opens an entire world of possibilities and control in building SEF SEO capable websites.

Are Meta Descriptions That Important? Its true that although search engines are downplaying meta tags to an ever decreasing level of importance, some older and more stubborn SE’s continue to include them in their algorithms. I decided to take middle road on this as do many who build websites and I still use key word tools when time and budget permits to produce meta descriptions. The mere fact that you have the option in Open Realty render arguments pro or conn moot since the use is quite literally discretionary. Your not required to use the feature for meta description but take comfort in knowing its available.

These key features in Open Realty coupled with SEF URL’s make ranking Open Realty sites a relatively deliberate act. Such gives you control over what you rank for in terms of terms and content. Well, sort of; the truth of the matter is no one controls what search engines index, it just sounded good to think that we as site owners and designers were in the control seat and not the assistant seat. Regardless of semantics, Open Realty features allow you to assist Google in ranking your site with these flexible features.

Only one characteristic stands out as confusing about the entire SEF features of Open Realty and that is the use of page titles with plus ( + ) sign separators. No other application I’ve encountered uses such methodology and quite honestly its a bit baffling. Most if not all SEF tools allow for the URL link structure to be presented in the more familiar format listing-title.html in lowercase and with hyphens as opposed to other symbols.

There is however a solution for the determined and that is to add a second listing title field in Open Realty’s Listing Template Editor where you would display the human readable title of the listing while reserving the default one for inclusion of-a-more-friendly-title.html Although beyond this post, I’ll be sure to document the process as time permits.

Listings Manager

Open Realty as I’ve said many times is essentially a gallery script with additional features for search and presentation of content items. Unlike the plugin now in beta for WordPress, Open Realty is a stand alone listing manager that can be easily adapted to suit other types of websites in need of an effective way to present a gallery of items.

The most common way Open Realty is used based on experience is in the area of agency opens or agency exclusive listings for example. Although Open Realty can be coerced to incorporate large data sets such as MLS inclusion via RETS or IDX; its not ideal for databases that number in excess of 10,000 listings on a shared hosting platform. To Open Realty’s credit, server resources do dictate in some part the outer limits of its ability to perform as MLS imports have exceeded 50,000 listings in a few instances I’m aware of.

As a listing manager Open Realty is as turnkey and effective as any application on the web can be for rapid deployment of real estate web sites. Contributions to the code base by third party developers keeps Open Realty ever evolving and ever climbing to new ground.

Given the fact that this new release of Open Realty features effective elements of design coupled with reasonably good search engine friendliness; Open Realty as a listing manager is an ideal tool for entry level to mid range real estate websites.

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