WordPress as an estate agent CMS

I’m sure you’ve looked at other CMS options and the documentation here and around the net for using WordPress as a CMS already. It may or may not be the right tool for the job.

I recommend that you create categories based upon price range. This will group things together nicely so people could click on the price range. As for ordering things by price, and having our family business be in real estate (for over 35 years), if you have customers who are shopping by price, you have just lost money. Giving them a range, and the order by price not set, someone who would only think money might pick a 200,000 over a 150,000 property because they weren’t influenced by the numbers. Better commissions ?? come this way. Always think bigger.

Sort by category, and the fact that WordPress already sets the newest item on the list first, you got a great promotional tool. Those consistently looking but not finding won’t have to scroll through the long list on their repeated visits to the site because the newest is at the top. Convenient. It also helps agents to quickly spot which sites move to the bottom and get in there and edit things and jazz them up and maybe change the post date to more recent to move them up to the top again for a fresh look.

I hope this helps.

You could always use the post_meta fields, and create a custom output ordering based on the values there.

I’d definitely do the category thing, as it’s built right in. You will also likely want to include the pricing as a meta/custom field, and either a customized template with the_meta tags, or use something like CG-Inline so you can embed the meta-tag values in the body of the post (I assume the former is more useful, but wanted to offer the latter as another option…).

-d

I can foresee two problems with using categories for price bands is that if you want to change the price bands you use you will have to re-categorise everything.

Secondly, if you change the price of a property you need to remember to check if it needs to be re-categorised and people WILL forget.

On the other hand custom output orderwing will let you do things like order by price within a price range, show custom price ranges etc.

Custom output ordering is not that bad, I recently did it on this site:

https://moneyterms.co.uk

to have the front page to show all posts, ordered by by category and in alphabetic order within categories. It was not all that much work nut you would need to be a little PHP to do it.

I think if I were using WP for real estate, I would be tempted to use the categories to sort by accommodation type, instead of price. That way both of the objections noted in the previous two posts are taken account of. You get the newest additions in each category and price is an irrelevance.

It would also depend on just how many properties there are to advertise. Might be better to go with one of the free real estate scripts around on the net. (check hotscripts.com for those)

There are around 500 properties, and sorting them in order of price is of paramount importance, at least to my employer.

The category thing I had intended to use to group the properties into the correct price, but it’s the listing of the properties in price order (lowest to highest) that I have some confusion with.

Is there anyone who can flesh out the answers of Skippy or DavidChait as to how to actually introduce the option to capture the price, and general advice on how I might sort them in order.

If there are decent, viable real esate CMS packages out there, I’d check out those to get an idea of how they compare. If you want to use WordPress, you might try checking out my “custom fields” modified WordPress 1.5.1 zip file. It adds the functionality of multiple extra inputs/fields like the existing excerpt/content. I have yet to go in-depth on sorting based on the inputs values, but I’m sure there is a way to query the database to find all properties in category A with a price of 150,000. Or if you wanted the range, enter the lower bound for one custom field, and the upper bound for another custom field and query the database for all properties in category A with a custom field value between two bounds.

I have no idea how to go about doing any of that really, but if you want to check out the custom field enabled WP, you can download it from this post.

Another thing to think about… Couldn’t you setup categories for all of the different types of properties and subcategories for the price ranges? Selecting both a category and a subcategory/price range for each new posting? That would be a lot simpler.

Possible open source real estate script options:
https://www.open-realty.org/
https://www.stevedawson.com/propertymax/

You are not alone. There is a plug-in for Mambo CMS called Hot Property but Mambo’s admin sucks so bad in every browser I try that I can hardly appreciate it.

WordPress has been the best CMS for every project I’ve done so far and I believe the Real Estate Broker and Mortgage Broker market is ripe for the picking.

A set of WordPress Real Estate Plugins would sure be a hot commodity, but it wouldn’t be simple enough to use the existing wp tables. You would need to create a plugin that would use its own tables, like Ultimate Tag Warrior does.

Guess since nobody else has yet I’ll do it…

I’m doing this on a much smaller basis.

What I’m doing is manipulating the order based on the dates. It will take a bit to lay out a cheat sheet, but you can go all the way back to 1980 I believe so you have lots of room to manipulate the data entry.

It works well for me since as I said I only do a few dozen, and I have the date not displaying on the site.

I would love to see some real-estate related plugins.