Realtors use Joomla and OpenRealty

Posted on May 31, 2007
Filed Under Real Estate News |

Beautiful and Impressive Real Estate Web Site Design Solutions

If you’re a Realtor or real estate professional, the trio of applications that always comes to mind when I suggest products for successful entry to mid range level sites is Joomla, WordPress and OpenRealty almost exclusively. The reasons for considering these three apart from the obvious short learning curve time and relative ease of configuration is that each of these applications are so widely used and supported that even a novice can begin an effective corporate level site. The fact that literally thousands of people across the globe support these applications when compared to other products pale in comparison on this single facet.

Lets take a look at a few features regarding each application to give you a better perspective and we will go in order of relevance to from real estate listing manager to marketing and promotion;

Open Realty Real Estate Listing Manager

Now previously Open Realty has had its ups and downs in terms of quality since its conception but the developers at Transparent Technologies have done a great job in keeping Open Realty open source and freely available as to allow input from other developers to always improve its quality.

In recent weeks, I ported and repackaged Open Realty 240 with a pair of commercial grade default templates while still honoring the original license by still making it freely available. The motive behind this is solely from a design and marketing point of view and not to Fork per se Open Realty but to provide a different packaged solution that is more inline with the typical Realtor we encounter. Does this change Open Realty? Not at all! Open Realty is a quality application and those backing it are just as dedicated and professional as any commercial application developers.

Open Realty as an application is certainly up to the task for any entry level or moderate sized real estate office and has the kinds of features that make it a worthwhile development foundation for many types of sites including those of the FSBO and rental or condo type listing sites. Technically, Open Realty is essentially little more than a gallery script with some additional features that aid in organization and searchability of listings, “regardless of type”. I’ve used Open Realty in one fashion or another over the years for everything from Automotive trader sites to pet stores and even photography galleries for an sportsmen outfitter and guide service.

Benefits? Open Realty has a very nice set of features that permit the site owner to provide registered user advanced new listings notifications along with RSS, decent search features, categorization of listing types like rentals, residential and so on, and a lofty inventory of other features capable of humbling some commercial applications in use today.

Open Realty and The MLS

Integrating Open Realty with RETS and or IDX does take a bit of skill, knowledge and finesse but many like myself have managed to get Open Realty to successfully house almost 50,000 listings. My greatest achievement using a modified version of Open Realty involved just shy of 50,000 listings and included a custom Google maps feature developed in Romania by an associate developer. Web sites of that size usually require a rather custom and commercial grade solution like the UltimateIDX which isn’t really a competing product to Open Realty but rather a dedicated IDX utility where tens of thousands of listings are in play. I’ll get to more on the UltimateIDX later but for now Lets look at RETS real quick.

Open Realty with RETS MLS using vieleRETS

vieleRETS and Mark Lesswing are synonymous as Mark is the current acting president of Realtors.org and the brain child of vieleRETS. vieleRETS is essentially an application used for connecting to, downloading from and populating of your local websites listings database with listings from the MLS. Real Estate site owners wanting to provide thousands of real estate listings for on their websites can do so using the vieleRETS as the solution providing the MLS provider has a compliant RETS server. I’ve performed so many of these RETS / Open Realty integrations that I routinely now provide tech support for users of the application. Mark Lesswing, the developer and other tech support associates can be reached by visiting this link http://www.crt.realtors.org/projects/rets/viele/support.html

But what of IDX and Open Realty? IDX on the other hand is an entirely different animal with the same motive. Unlike RETS which is essentially an XML wrapper that provides a means of bringing together two or more databases; IDX is almost exclusively a technology born of the Realtors MLS. The idea behind it was to bring MLS board members a means of displaying each others listings across many networks. IDX literally means Internet Data Exchange and although I’ve over simplified it extensively there are resources and articles about this technology on The Brokers Edge.

Now using Open Realty with either IDX or RETS in and of itself is not a drop in ready in 10 minutes solution. I’ve been able in the past to use a custom script from FNIS Fidelity to populate the Open Realty database with listings from the MLS and I’ve used a Java solution called OPEN RETS as well. Regardless of your MLS’s solution they provide most of those that are not in the business of controlling its members do provide means for Realtors to access and publish listings. RETS is also not the ideal solution where speed is required for updates as RETS is quite literally a download and populate one at a time solution while IDX is usually a technique involving bulk daily archives.

Joomla For Realtors / Real Estate

Joomla is a product that has grown so popular and powerful that publishers the likes of CNN, MSNBC, Ziff Davis, and even conglomerate giant AOL Time Warner have given this rebel application some serious press. Joomla is so popular and powerful in fact that many people who have used commercial applications for years have switched or migrate their solutions to Joomla after exploration of its popularity.

Mentioned frequently in PC Industry Magazines, Joomla is never spoken of in terms of negative reviews and I’ve yet to find any example to correct me on this.

Joomla is a product I call a rebel because it was born in a whirlwind of attitude, anti open source and some opposition. Motivated by a unique global agenda of dedicated professionals, Joomla is the offshoot of the mega popular Mambo CMS. Joomla, eventually forked in early 2006 and has grown to become not just a phenomenon in the way web sites are built but stands in my professional opinion the largest single motivating factor for the explosion in QUALITY CMS driven web sites. CMS means “Content Management System” not to be confused with client management system.

Rather than try to compress all the things that are possible with Joomla lets just articulate its power for Realtors and the Real Estate professional by boldly stating the types of people and industries using the product. Here is a short list; City Governments (many), Police Departments, City Chambers of Commerce, School Districts, Corporations, Magazines, Commercial Technical Sites, US Military specifically the US Army, British Parliament, Indian Parliament, African Counsel of Foreign Affairs in Liberia, Professional News sources, countless professional services sites, legal firm sites, insurance agencies, product distributors and manufacturers and it goes on and on. I could list the uses for weeks and still be just scratching the surface.

To understand Joomla is to look at it as more than an open source website application and see it as designers and developers see it and that is as a development and design “PLATFORM” not unlike in many comparative ways to that of commercial development applications like DreamWeaver, Cold Fusion, or even Microsoft’s web development platform. I don’t say this lightly because Joomla is open source and licensed in such a way that customization and commercialization of expansion components has driven an industry all of its own.

Now there are applications specifically designed to integrate with Joomla for the Real Estate professional and of all those we have installed, used, reviewed, administered and developed with only two outside of Open Realty can I really consider mention of. HotProperties and EZ Realty, neither of which are at all simple to use or customize at this current time. Because of this, Open Realty stands as the largest motivator for our suggesting it to Real Estate Professionals in conjunction with Joomla for Real Estate sites.

How to bridle and dictate to search engines with Joomla

The single most important facet of using Joomla as your CMS solution is the simple and liberating fact that Joomla is a search engine capable product seated in the commanders chair. Its truly and quite literally a benefactor to site developers and designers wanting not only power but flexibility in the way they get indexed. Am I a bit too arrogant on this one? Let me explain before you jump to conclusion. Joomla by way of third party components and tools, gives you, the site owner, the power to take control over the way your site title, meta, and url’s appear to search engines. Going even further Joomla was engineered by a foundation of geniuses who just happen to be occupants of three camps, that of developers, that of SEO professionals and that of designers and because of this the development team kept in mind something I preach over and over and over again. Guided intuitive navigation. Quote it, remember it, design and live by it.

Joomla features and benefits are spoken of exhaustively in the new online resource and magazine over at The Brokers Edge along with introduction to proprietary solutions.

WordPress for Realtors and Real Estate

I can summarize a WordPress blog for the real estate professional in one sentence; “WordPress blogs are search engine food” end sentence.

No other single application has been used more profoundly in concert with the apparent marriage made in heaven between search engines and blogs. What I mean by that is this; I rank blogs specifically WordPress blogs as being more effective overall in terms of bulk availability of content for search engines. WordPress can quite honeslty in many ways can easily and effortlessly rival the search engine effectiveness of Joomla and other CMS’s with little effort. WordPress as a blogging tool is more powerful, more flexible and more widely used than any other blog solution on the internet. I can back all of that up without flinching;

WordPress Blogs are a one sided victory

To begin with big names; The Steven Colbert Report, Rosie O’Donnell, Bill O’Reilly, Microsoft Developers Tech Centers, Countless celebrities and syndicated journalists, political candidates, legal professionals, government agencies, churches, any University worthy of mention, thousands of educational institutions, countless Realtors, and it goes on. This is a dismal and trivial attempt to list the broad estimated 1.1 million WordPress blogs in use today.

I can go on this rant forever when it comes to WordPress and how Realtors are finding that a quality real estate template and WordPress can go a long ways to improving a sites ranking and indexing.

Bring em together, Joomla, WordPress and OpenRealty

Each of these applications does require hosting on a LAMP system aka Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP and although there is the possibility for hosting on a Windows server the benefits can be tragically diminished. Although a server using WAMP or Windows Apache MySQL and PHP is being done, most opt instead to use MS SQL and Postgre SQL as the database. This is certainly true of government and educational institutions.

For bringing these together I’m going to refer you to my blog on The Brokers Edge to explain in some detail the benefit of using WordPress, Open Realty and Joomla in concert with one another including the integration of Template Design and features.

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7 Comments so far
  1. Soren Beck Jensen June 2, 2007 8:16 am

    Very interesting reading. I might try open reality for my next real-estate solution. I have so far only used Hot Property.

  2. Eddie June 6, 2007 1:41 pm

    if I must use joomla, how would you suggest bridging openrealty into it?

    i read in the OR forums that you’d post the code for joomla and OR user database bridge. would you mind sharing the updated version of the code?

    thanks

  3. brad hein October 30, 2007 8:05 am

    I want to use open realty for my joomla real estate site. I am by no means a coder though.

    I have a few questions, I have been told conflicting info.
    My first question I guess is, do I use open realty with ez realty or is this basically the same thing?

    I want the best options available at this time. I want google maps for listings and neighborhood pages. I want good forms for my pages. I was told to use the Joomla platform, use OR 2.4, and use EZ realty.

    Everyone that says that they know how to code this, seem to be very confused and don’t really show confidence that they have ever done this type of install and integation.

    What do you recommend? Do you or anyone you know do this kind of work?

    Brad H.
    ^^ edited to remove phone number ^^

  4. Jared Ritchey October 30, 2007 9:12 am

    Brad, ezRealty is a great product that works natively with Joomla and provides many countless options not unlike Open Realty. I have a demo of ezRealty and Open Realty in many variants running on my demo site located over at http://www.livedemosite.com Since it appears you could be getting some bad or unreliable information I’ve taken the time this morning to just outline a handful of details for your better understanding. Please find the outline contained in this link;

    http://www.jaredritchey.com/openrealty-ezrealty-joomla.html

    Thank you sincerely;
    ~ Jared Ritchey

  5. Open Realty - ezRealty - Joomla - WordPress - Template Design Integration » Jared Ritchey Design October 30, 2007 10:47 am

    [...] made an error that someone will graciously correct me where I’m wrong and you can review the Realtors Use Open Realty with Joomla article as [...]

  6. mariano February 6, 2008 3:17 pm

    I have a web site running open realty and now I want to switch to ez realty because I think is more complete, does someone knows if there is a way to import the listing from open realty to the ez realty so I don’t have to type each listing again

    thanks

  7. Jared Ritchey February 6, 2008 4:11 pm

    Yes we usually use a PHP script to do the populate of the DB. Since each person sets up their fields differently it can take some time. The usual fee though is about $50 per class.


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