Peter Ricci at Agentpoint – WordPress For Real Estate

We recently received a submission from Peter Ricci at Agentpoint that really blew us away with how well it was put together both design and content wise. It was truly an original WordPress powered site built around a real estate service. We wanted to know more about it, so we emailed Peter and asked him about the site development and with his permission, we’re posting his reply of what went into building this very nice WordPress site. Enjoy!

The Fruit Collection

Elegant simplicity is how we approached this development. The Fruit brand is one of the most recognisable in Australian real estate, bold, smart and distinctive. The site is proudly developed in the WordPress the CMS/Blog platform using the Agentlog Property Listings Management System to drive property and team data.

Agentpoint developed a number of plug-ins specifically for these websites.

Overview: Agentpoint (web designer) has a Property Listings Management System (Agentlog) that allows real estate agents to manage all of their vendors property listings from one web based location. This system allows real estate agents to add properties, photos, videos, maps, brochures, open times and podcasts for each individual listing.

We decided to use WordPress after having so many problems with 3rd party CMS’s systems not being up to scratch and having a poor update record and the fact that WordPress had such a large development community only enhanced its offering.

It has taken months of work for a number of developers to get it right and all working well (speed, pages, standards) and now we have got it pretty much down where we would like it.

So here are a run down of some plugins.

· Real Estate Plug-in: This is the main plug-in and works without our Agentlog System and displays all of the agents property listings. It also controls search results, pagination, property pages, print pages, email listings, email to self, mortgage calculator and many more features. Also includes Lightbox image gallery for individual photo galleries. The plug-in and many settings such as company id’s and office id’s from our agentlog system. (we can have thousands of offices added), it also includes how many listings in search results, google analytics code, google maps codes and other basic settings.

· Feature properties: Allows user to create feature listings or have this automatically load from database.

· Latest Listings: Brings in latest listings (6 of each). The plug-in has a number of controls such as whether to display sales, lease or both types.
· Property clouds: Brings from database all suburbs, and suburbs grow in size if they have more and more listings within a particular suburb.

· Email subscriptions: A site user can subscribe to sales or lease email subscriptions, this sends them latest listings added to system. The plugin has a number of settings such as back days, html, text formats and send times and dates.

· RSS feeds: for sales and lease listings.

· Team Pages: We also developed a plug-in that allows all team members to have an individual page complete with all of their own for sale lease, under offer, sold and leased listings.

There are a few more, but these are pretty much the main ones.

The site also has XML sitemaps for Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN and because they are built entirely on the WordPress platform they are standards compliant and come with all of the features of this powerful platform.

We love seeing this kind of work and development going into a WordPress site. If you want to share a unique project and/or some new innovations regarding WordPress development, don’t wait for us to contact you, get in touch with us to share these useful tips with others who love WordPress as much as we do. 🙂