Real Estate Website Standards – As if there were any.

Here it goes; To build what I believe to be a “Modern IDX/RETS Real Estate Website” the following features must be “standard”. Assuming that things like ease of management, ease of content publishing and basic design considerations are obvious goals when building pretty much any website I’ll not waste time on elaborating what should be the obvious.

I will also elaborate further on each product on a dedicated post for each as not to miss anything. So with that in mind, a real estate site should have;

• Features to take advantage of social networking.
• Options for featuring properties in multiple formats. The more flexible the better.
• A way for publishing content relative to the listings. However not limited to such.
• Some means of lead generation if not lead management. The latter is the ideal.
• A wide variety of design options. After all, who likes cookie cutter sites?
• Maps which are a given and should be expected while map search although not required but certainly wouldn’t hurt.
• Mobile! Its got to have a mobile option.
• Built for search engines!

That’s the short list just to keep it simple. The criteria I’ll be assessing products and services by will be in that list but additionally a few features that push any solution over the top will certainly be included. First of all, if a modern real estate website doesn’t provide some means of journal or blogging then it takes a hit in my opinion. I also believe that a modern real estate website must have some flexibility for integration with third party solutions. I’ll expand on this in each products extensive review but in summary what I mean is this; There are so many services available for marketing, list management, blogging, featured tours, video production and the like that if a solution doesn’t provide options its going to take a hit in my opinion. So there it is, lets begin.

Worpress Real Estate Plugins:

WP Realty 3x

This is probably the most exciting RETS product currently available. Chad Broussard, the owner and chief developer of the application has spent thousands and thousands of dollars on the product to get it where it is. In version 1 and 2 the product was based on the Open-Realty® fork which certainly wasn’t without its issues. When he opted to build version 3 from the ground up they started with the new database structure that I was fortunate to have played a strong roll with suggesting how the new DB should be setup so that it could be as robust as possible. WP Realty was the first and is currently the only application of its type that allows for a developers license similar to that of software products like Dreamweaver or Photoshop. You purchase it one time and you can use it to build any number of websites without additional fees.

If someone were to ask me which WordPress Real Estate Plugin is by far the best on the market; I’d say its hands down WP Realty for the following reasons:

WP Realty has more strengths than it does weaknesses. From a website developers point of view there is no rival and I’ve built no less than 30+ sites to date using WP Realty 3x and truly love the products flexibility. What you will discover is that WP Realty is quite literally a developers tool. In the hands of a developer you can save thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars in development time because all the hard stuff is already done for you. Your time ultimately comes down to customization. Even though WP Realty currently lacks a CRM feature, as do most plugins, it doesn’t eliminate this plugin as an option as I’ve built several that bridge with ZoHo, SugarCRM and others just fine.

The new WP Realty foundation takes advantage of things no other product on the market has ever sought to offer and that is a fundamental understanding of RETS and IDX integration. No two MLS’s or databases are ever alike and version 3x takes many of these considerations into account unlike anything else out there. So do I think WP Realty is a good product? Absolutely! If you are a website developer, buy it, if you are not, then don’t, its that simple because if you are not capable of handling basic HTML/CSS , you should hire them or someone who can assist you or pick a different solution.

WP Property

WP Property is a product created by Usability Dynamics and out of all the products I’ve either used or been privy to examining in detail, this one is certainly a contender for top honors. WP Property takes advantage of the custom post feature in the latest versions of WordPress to publish Real Estate listings. They use a modified version of PHRETS (Troy Davisson’s Open Source RETS product) to handle the loading of MLS listings directly into your blog. In the test I did months ago using my own data loader, I was able to get 43K listings into the site without any real noticeable slow down in speed or performance of the blog. I’ve had several people contact me though about certain issues with their RETS importer and how it handles images as well as trying to come up with ways to automate nightly updates etc. I’d highly recommend that prior to purchasing this product that you first contact them to find out about any known issues with your particular RETS provider because unlike WP Realty their product apparently does NOT work with 100% of all the RETS providers out there.

Having only limited experience with this product I must rely on part to information I found in their forums. Even so, I still find WP Property a top contender.

IDX Broker

I like IDX Broker and the new Platinum is even a bit better. Although Platinum at the time of this post is still in development it has new features that make it ideal for Mobile versions of the listings search and properties. I’ve built a handful of IDX Broker sites using WordPress over the past year and although the learning curve is a tad hefty, its none the less a good solution.

Developers and designers can take advantage of a special reseller feature they offer which is also nice. If you build real estate sites for a living and don’t have a solution that you can suggest and easily implement, then go with IDX Broker before all others. Its less work in the long run, its less stress and although no product I’ve ever used is 100% they are very close.

Two key things will keep you on your toes. IDX Broker mobile version uses the jQuery Mobile Library. Google it! You will find no shortage of bugs and issues this presents. The second thing isn’t really worth mention…. however, at the time of this writing, IDX Broker has not yet finished the feature allowing for multiple dynamic wrappers which leaves some design features a tad behind. Other than those two items, its truly a Platinum product.

From the SEO perspective on this one, well they use subdomains to structure your listings paths which is user definable even though semi complex to setup initially if you are not well versed in these types of configurations.

Joomla Real Estate Components:

Galtline Design

For Joomla, there is simply no other solution that holds a candle to this one. Galtline Design, built by Damian Henery is a full blown real estate power house for Joomla. If there is a feature missing I’d doubt you would notice it because their solution is built on a solid foundation and uses the worlds number one high end CMS solution as the primary interface.

Built over the course of several years, the latest version is a full blown rewrite of the original code with key emphasis on speed and flexibility. Although Galtline’s product is a commercial product it is still competitively priced. Given the unique features in the application the price is well worth it if it generates leads and most important if it converts those leads to clients.

The developers essentially looked at every product and service on the web and got fed up. They took the best ideas and the best solutions and used that as the starting point for development.

As I’ve stated in other posts around the web, there really isn’t any solution on the web that has their act completely together. I wont name drop to articulate this but I will say that no matter the solution, there is some shortfall in features that makes the products not quite there. With the Galtline product, they are as close if not closer than any other available which is an achievement in and of itself given the caliber of the competition.

If someone were to ask me which Joomla product is by far the best on the market; I’d say Galtline Designs Joomla Component.

iProperty

iProperty is one of those products that is very simple to setup, use and even administer for even the most novice of users. This is one of the reasons for its strong appeal. Affordable, easy to implement and an endless supply of templates available for Joomla leave it far from bottom of the barrel when considering the competing solutions. Joomla is jam packed with plugins and components from thousands of developers and real estate plugins has always been buggy and often ridiculous for the most part. iProperty is certainly the top contender in turnkey real estate website components in recent times.

I’m no fan of most of the Joomla components out there and I wont bother to mention names but I’ve used or have examined most of them. With iProperty I’ve now built no less than a dozen iProperty RETS packages in the past few years and must say the product is solid. Support is second to none and the development is actively maintained which is reassuring. The products signature feature and most appealing characteristic is the user defined map search. Even those big dollar WordPress plugins struggle to compare with the iProperty map search and in my opinion iProperty is currently the only one that gets it right in this regard.

If anyone were to ask me today, what product would you suggest for Joomla to get a site up and running in under a week for cheap; I’d say iProperty.

“Other” RETS Solutions:

UltimateIDX

UIDX is way down on the list so I don’t appear biased because I’m employed part time by them. So, with as little bias as I can muster I’d like to say that UIDX and its RETS package are in the top 5% of solutions, and I honestly mean that. Why? Well for a few big reasons. UIDX (although more expensive) is the ONLY product on the market that works with just about anything, that is, Joomla, WordPress, Drupal, vBulletin, BuddyPress, you name it, it can be integrated. UIDX works from a different perspective than all other solutions; so I need to make a side note before I continue.

Side Note: I haven’t done my review on Agent Image, Z57, Diverse Solutions and the like but those are coming but I need to make mention of them for this comparison. I like Diverse Solutions and IDXBroker which work well with multiple solutions such as the above mentioned.

UltimateIDX integratiton into your website is similar to IDXBroker and others where you use a web based HTML editor to build a wrapper of sorts around the listings but that is where the similarity ends. UIDX listings use a method known as MOD PROXY for the actual real estate listings and features. Using Mod Proxy makes it so listings appear as if they are relative to your domain for full blown SEO control. By comparison IDXBroker as mentioned above uses subdomains to structure your URL where as UIDX uses relative URL paths. A way to articulate this would be to simply examine these pseudo URL’s

THE IDXBROKER URL

http://subdomain.yourdomain.com/idx/details/homes/ACCOUNTNAME/MLSNUMBER/2900-NE-37TH-ST-Fort-Lauderdale-Florida-33308-F1171286

THE ULTIMATEIDX URL

http://yourdomain.com/listing-Del-Mar-mls-120059628.html 
Its important to note that the UIDX URL can include address or any field data to structure the URL for your SEO efforts.

I’ll elaborate on UIDX in greater detail in the full post dedicated to the product.