Great Real Estate Plug-In: The Secret Tool For Featuring Listings with WordPress
By Reggie · June 29, 2008
Many of you have already realized that WordPress has many benefits over a traditional Website. To start you are in full control of design, content, and distribution. Plus you can integrate any IDX MLS search unlike many template Website providers that only offer one solution. You could argue the only WordPress limitation for real estate agents has been the difficulty of displaying listings in an attractive and useful format…until now. Introducing Great Real Estate!
Great Real Estate is a new WordPress plug-in designed to assist real estate agents in displaying and marketing their listings online. This free plug-in was created by Roger Theriault; a developer/Realtor. To recognize the full potential of this plug-in, you should also install and activate the following plug-ins:
- NextGen Gallery: Adds integrated property photo galleries
- WordTube: Integrates property video
- FPP-Pano: Integrates 360 panorama
- DownloadManager : Integrates PDF attachments (i.e. disclosures, brochures etc.)
- Feed Wrangler: Adds listing feeds for listing syndication and display
So how does the Great Real Estate Plug-In work?
For starters, a new tab is created in your WordPress admin titled “Real Estate.” Once the settings have been customized, you can add & manage your listings from this area. When adding a listing, you’ll notice the plug-in adds an expandable field below the text editor titled “Real Estate - Property Information”. From here you can set Property Status, Address, Price, Dates, Marketing Verbiage, Physical Characteristics, and Features. You can also select a corresponding photo album, upload a QTVR file and set your properties geo-coordinates for a Google Map of the property.
Because this plug-in leverages default WordPress pages you can also bet that once you’ve added your listings, they will become optimized on Google and other search engines. To increase your listings optimization you may also utilize the All-In-One-SEO plug-in. This will help you ensure the meta-data accurately represents the home.
Now that your listings have been featured on your blog’s listing page, the next question you’ll be asking is, “How can I feature listings on other pages of the blog?” Simply access the Widget’s area of WordPress Admin (WP-Admin > Design > Widgets) and look for “Featured Listings.” Then click “edit” from the featured widgets pane. Here you can easily adjust how the properties are displayed: thumbnails, or list. For advanced users, you can also add a small line of code to one of your template pages and have the featured properties appear in a custom area. See more here.
The Great Real Estate plug-in also leverages FeedRangler to help you market your listings on Google Base, Trulia and Zillow. It also enables you to create a property feed for displaying listings in MyYahoo! and iGoogle. See more about the feeds here.
Read my Inerview with Roger here!
If you have enjoyed MyTechOpinion - Technology for Real Estate, please subscribe to our RSS feed!
Other posts you may enjoy:
Tags: plug ins, pano, property photo, great real estate, real estate agents, disclosures
[...] Estate Plug-In for WordPress Hi All, I hope this help! Read here: Great Real Estate Plug-In This plug-in ads a lot of great features for displaying and marketing listings. Everything from [...]
Thank you for sharing this great tool now if I can figure it out
Hi Chris, I understand how that goes.
Over the next few weeks I’ll be looking at this plug-in from different angles. Next I have an interview coming up, and then I was going to provide a how-to. Also note that Roger has created some great instructions and a forum. Best of luck!
Here is a quick start guide:
http://www.rogertheriault.com/agents/plugins/great-real-estate-plugin/quick-start-guide/
Reggie
[...] is a great write up over at MyTechOpinion for those that want an [...]
I have been looking all over for this. Thanks a million for showing this to us!
[...] Roger Theriault released a new plug-in for WordPress that makes displaying and marketing your real estate listings on your WordPress blog a snap. This [...]
Great tools to know about.
@UtahLuxury - I glad to share. When I came across the plug-in I figured the community would benefit. It really put the power in your hands.
@Eric - You bet!
[...] over at My Tech Opinion did an in-depth review of the plugin also agrees that this plugin is great. You could argue the [...]
AMAZING! Exactly what I was looking for!
I may have missed it — do the plugs work with Wordpress.com, or only Wordpress.org?
Reggie, if you get this in next couple hrs, could you email me?
[...] ?????? ? MyTechOpinion [...]
Great Real Estate Update