Woo Themes announced that they are coming out with a new Real Estate theme in the next 6-8 weeks. I’ve built multiple real estate sites for clients, so I know there’s a strong demand for this. In fact, I recently built one of my own based on Woo Theme’s Canvas (affiliate).
How a Real Estate Theme Might Work
Any new real estate theme in WordPress will be taking advantage of custom post types for property listings and meta boxes to list the property details. Here’s a walkthrough of the real estate theme I built, and my speculations on how the new Woo Theme might work:
The service this theme was built for will be launched in the next few weeks at REI Theme.
5 Comments
Really nice work with the custom post type! Have you considered integrating with an IDX service to automatically import an agent’s featured properties from the MLS? You could also integrate WordPress sites with our CRM to more effectively manage leads generated from these websites. Let me know if you’d like to talk about this!
An auto-important would be awesome! Perhaps Woo is working on something like that too. The client’s focus is on the initial launch right now- but there’s room for a lot of new features. I’ll definitely be in touch.
It would be useful to have a search form to find properties.
I wonder how difficult that would be to implement.
Aslo, I would use dropdowns instead of text boxes for fields such as city or price, to limit the possibility of typos and errors.
I hope that in the future it will be easier to add custom meta boxes, without a plugin
I didn’t want to comment on the WooTheme’s site for fear of pissing on a parade, that and I’m a big fan of their work, but having built a few sites for agents, I don’t know of any that are willing to add listings manually. Each of them required an IDX/RETS bridge to bring property search to their site, which worked independently from WP’s search. Why display your own 1-20 listings when you can present the entirety (1000+) of the MLS for $30/mo via wp-realty or diverse-solutions?
I’m afraid all the work Woo is putting into taxonomies and custom search will end up being unused for the majority of realtors. I’m sure the functionality will find some amazing use somewhere…so I don’t want to call it wasted effort…
The plus here is we’ll be able to see what kind of cool layout Woo comes up with, hopefully it’ll be styling we can integrate into the property-search-plugin-du-jour.
Adam, you’re 100% correct. Agents don’t want to hand-enter properties in another website. They’re already entering properties into their MLS, and the MLSs syndicate the listings to hundreds of other sites.
I could definitely see this being useful for an agent to pull down their “featured properties” from their IDX feed and create posts on their blog for each property they’re listing, but the data would originate from the MLS, it probably wouldn’t be hand entered.