FREE WordPress Real Estate Listings Plugin

Posted on February 16, 2008
Filed Under Real Estate Websites |

Add Real Estate Listings to your WordPress posts and pages

Looking for beta testers this week who have Open Realty and WordPress installed to try out this new 100% Free Plug-in for WordPress. The release date was bumped up to next week then we discovered a small bug where users could mess up their layout if they attempt to link to the listings template on a PLESK server.  Although the fix was essentially simple, such errors can be annoying and troublesome to contend with.  So the basic criteria for beta testers is as follows;

  • Open Realty and WordPress must be installed on the SAME server with the SAME account in the SAME domain.
  • Open Realty should be version 2.3 or above
  • WordPress should be the latest security patch release or above.
  • Users should have a standard Open Realty class setup (nothing exotic)
  • WordPress can be in a sub domain on either PLESK or cPanel at this point. Other configurations welcome.

We ask that the following details get reported back to us in order to publish the WP Addon FREE by months end.

  1. Describe your domain setup and configuration
  2. Test display of featured listings by City, by State, by Agent, by Class and report back any issues.
  3. Describe Issues with binds that use multiple spaces or hyphens, underscores and ampersands.
  4. A link to posts for each of the configurable featured listings details would be ideal for us to examine.

WordPress Featured Real Estate Listings Plug-in Features

I’ve gotten about 75+ emails in the past 4 days regarding this plug-in and of all those I’ve received better than half ask the same question that I have apparently forgotten to list as one of the features.  People have asked "will the listings rotate or animate" and the answer to that is YES!  Some other common questions are as follows;

  • Can I display featured listings from my Open Realty install on each of my agent blogs?  = YES!
    I was designed with this purpose in mind.  You operate Open Realty as the main listing manager and your agents should have a WP blog either in sub domains like http://agentname.yoursite.com or http://www.yoursite.com/agentname/  Either way, we have tested and it works flawlessly.
  • Is there any cost at all EVER? = NO!
    I built it because I needed it for sites and clients and I think its the type of thing that would prove beneficial to end users regardless of payment.
  • Are there credit links to your site in the featured listings? = NO but sometimes YES!
    Anyone reading my blog or blogs knows my attitude about offsite links on the front page and offsite links related to credits in some plug-ins.  There are NO requirements for you to link back to me and there are no hidden links in the plug-in at all.  I would hope that people find this plug-in interesting enough to discuss openly in blogs and forums, but there are none I put in that the user or the search engines would see.
  • Is it encrypted like your other plug-ins? = NO
    use and modify as you see fit, just please leave the commented credits in the source code and please do not redistribute without first getting permission to do so.
  • Can I use this for my SEO clients ….. et all? =  YES!
    People have asked me several times about use in different situations and I’ve basically said you can use, include and customize for use in your client projects providing that you DO NOT alter the WordPress Plug-In Update and Source Links.  These links are the ones that you may notice in the WP Plug-in configuration.  One link will go to WordPress.org for download and the other will go to the developers site, here. If you’re still not sure then you can always email me with your questions.
  • LAST: Can I display listings on a blog if its not on the same server? = Yes and No!
    This has been tested and it works most the time yet on some servers it simply tosses an error.  I did however create a hard coded alternative that was going to be sold for $10 on this site which I’ve decided to make available for FREE once this is released.  The secondary option will provide you with essentially the same effect  to a limited and more complex degree and does require you to get a plug-in for parsing PHP in your posts and pages.

I have several features that will be added in the near future once this version is released and providing you don’t alter the code in the wp-admin panel you will be notified when to update your plug-in as you see with all plug-ins.  Some of those features I’m keeping confidential but two of my favorites I can tell you about is the ability to include a single property slide-show feature.  This will provide you with a way to write a WordPress blog post about a property you are featuring and have that properties photos rotate in a slide-show.  Then, the other feature is to have that same concept above also include a listings mortgage calculator directly into your post content. Now, I can do that already and have the starting fields "price" and "rate" auto fill dynamically from an offsite source (I’ll explain later) so the visitor enters the other elements of the formula to get an idea on costs.

WordPress and Search Engine Optimization - Google Loves WordPress

Now it should be obvious why this plug-in was developed. In my post on the other blog (link in the link section) I wrote about how SEO Experts (many are self proclaimed) are making a spank of $$ simply by installing WordPress and billing you for an effect that is none of their own doing.  What is working is WordPress and this plug-in was specifically designed to take Realtor Blogs and help them get listings sold and marketed.  Why? Because according to sources all over the web, some claim that as many as 90% of all home purchases are initiated on the internet. To me 90% is amazing.

If Realtors could get just as much attention to their featured listings as they do to their blog that the Search Engines afford them currently they would have a substantial advantage over run of the mill listing display methods in my opinion.  Could you imaging how well a site would do if Realtors wrote about the listings they intended on selling  that included dynamic features that WordPress offers? Now you see why it was created.

SIMILAR POSTS:
http://www.jaredritchey.com/wordpress-real-estate-plugin-new.html
http://www.jaredritchey.com/open-realty-featured-listings.html
http://www.jaredritchey.com/wordpress-real-estate-listings.html

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3 Comments so far
  1. Johan February 17, 2008 11:26 am

    Hi I am looking forward to this plugin. How can I help testing it? Regards Johan

  2. david windham February 22, 2008 10:35 pm

    ok.. where’s the svn? i’ll help as i have a been working on a similar plugin

  3. Jared Ritchey February 23, 2008 9:05 am

    There is no SVN per se, I’ll send anyone who requests a copy a zip version for your beta testing. I’m ONLY sending to beta testers at this point though because I have way to many people using the demo and yet very little feedback on bugs or changes desired.

    Then again, this plugin does perform a simple task of taking featured listings and displaying them in posts. This coupled with the pre-defined search plugin should help real estate blogs market properties a great deal faster.

    Someone asked in an email about private labeling for commercial services. Yep the fee in that regard is $100.


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