July 2010
www.propertycube.com.au
Property Cube specialise in marketing new developments, blocks of apartments and housing projects. They were looking for a real estate web designer who could allow them to effectively advertise the benefits of living in brand new apartment and housing complexes. We built a special projects WordPress plugin allowing them to highlight the benefits of each of their projects along with the properties belonging to each.
April 2010
www.forsaleforlease.com.au
For Sale For Lease (Forsaleforlease.com.au) are the leading agent assisted or owner assisted website in Australia. Based in Melbourne they required a real estate website which allowed vendors to add and manage property listings. We built the website using WordPress and created a real estate plugin allowing vendors to list properties and make payments through a payment gateway which we integrated with WordPress.
Our web designer was required to integrate third party advertising into the design making sure it was not to intrusive for website users.
We’ve been working closely with Australian Property Monitors to develop a Worpdress real estate widget which allows real estate agents to display property sales data alongside their property listings. You can check out a live example of the plugin at this Colliers website we recently launched http://www.investassured.com.au/125423.
The widget displays a summary of sales statistics for the suburb the property is located in along with a flash enabled graph for median house and unit prices over the past 10 years. In the demographics tab you’ll find handy information regarding the demographics of that suburb.
This plugin will work on any WordPress website so contact Agentpoint or APM for further information.
A new plugin we have created converts all properties in your real estate office database into posts through the WordPress blog and automatically creates real estate tags specific to the property and its location.
What does all of this mean? It will increase the size of your sitemap by around 500% because around 6 website pages are created for every current property and all future properties added to your website. The headline of the post is the headline of the property ad while the post description is the property ad description. At the top of each post we have the property type, listing type, type of sale and address of the property which are all keywords which property seekers are likely to search Google for.
Because everything is automated we are also generating automated tags which search engines love. The tags are specific to the property location and property type, lets take a look at this listing http://www.brealt.com.au/2009/08/acreage-lifestyle-close-to-cooroy/. We have:
363 Lake Macdonald , Cooroy, Qld
House For Sale – $780,000
The tags which are automatically generated are: Buy House Cooroy , House For Sale Cooroy , Real Estate Agent Cooroy , Real Estate Cooroy , Sell House Cooroy.
If the property was for lease, a different type (eg house) or in a different suburb the tags would be different. Each one of these tags creates a page in WordPress which is then included in the sitemap and sent to Google. This plugin is so powerful as the sitemap for this website http://www.brealt.com.au/sitemap.xml has gone from around 30 pages to over 600 pages in the matter of seconds. So 570 pages packed with property descriptions, headline, address and keywords property seekers can type into Google.
This is only possible due to features of the WordPress CMS system and how search engine friendly it is.
We are in the process of building a few real state websites for a couple of American based real estate agents. The release of this Local Market Explorer (LME) plugin couldn’t come at a better time, as there is no doubt we are going to integrate this into our online solution for our clients.
The LME is a plugin which draws property data from Zillow, Education, Flickr, Walk Score and Yelp allowing you to create a plethra of local suburb resources which makes searhing for property on your real estate website a pleasurable experience.
As soon as some of the larger online companies in Australia get into gear and develop an API which can be accessed we will be sure to develop the first Australian based plugin with similar functionality.
We have recently built a wordpress real estate network for the group of offices under the Great Ocean Road Real Estate brand. They have a group website www.greatoceanroadrealestate.com.auand then 6 office websites. They wanted a solution which allowed them to post an article on the corporate website blog which also appeared on the other network websites.
We built a small Multiple Post plugin which allows blogs to be post on an unlimited number of worpdress blogs as long as they are situated on the same server. The post writes to the other blogs and inserts the exact same wordpress post with the same title and description as what is on the original post. It also creates identical tags and categories which were used on the original post.
What’s even better about the plugin is that if you update the post on the original blog it will filter through to the other blogs the post appears on.
Another awesome example of the robust nature of using WordPress CMS.
Today Agentpoint launched a twitter wordpress plugin which allows an agency to automatically publish their property listings to their personal or agency twitter account. The tweet provides all the essential information to inform your twitter followers about the listing. eg.
House For Sale – Bondi Beach, 2 Bed, 3 Bath, 1 Car view at www.youragency.com.au/propertyid
This can be installed on any WordPress real estate website and all happens automatically meaning once you list a property through your property listing software the plugin notifies twitter.
We are committed to making sure our wordpress real estate websites provide a complete online marketing solution for all real estate agents. The best thing about all of our social networking solutions is that once an account is set up the only effort required by an agent is to create a property listing or write a post in their blog, leaving more time for the agent to sell/lease real estate.
Please contact me further to discuss how Agentpoint can devise an effective online solution for your agency.
Agentpoint has just finished a wordpress real estate stamp duty calculator which can be installed on any WordPress website. The calculator enables website browsers to calculate the stamp duty payable on a property purchase made anywhere in Australia. The Stamp Duty calculator is State specific allowing the user to accurately determine the stamp duty in their state.
A concern in building the plugin was that the State and Territory governments are constantly changing their stamp duty rates. Our solution was to build a plugin which allows admin to adjust the stamp duty formula through wp-admin according to amendments made by state governments.
If you are interested in including a stamp duty calculator on your website then please contact me to discuss.
Property seekers love gadgets, especially those widgets make searching for property more informative and enjoyable. We have just completed a favourites wordpress plugin which allows property seekers searching for property on your website to save listings to their favourites.
The favourites plugin uses a browser cookies to remmeber which properties a user has added as a favourite so when they return to the website at a future data their favourites are there for their viewing.
At Agentpoint we love building WordPress real estate plugins and widgets so if you want the most dynamic and feature rich real estate websites in the World then contact us for a chat.
Also, you can check the plugin out at www.investassured.com.au
Just a quick message to inform all of our subscribers about the www.agentpoint.com.au website redesign.
The new website allows users to more easily look through some of the work Agentpoint has recently completed. It also users the latest in social networking and Web 2.0 technologies. We welcome any feedback so please make any comments through this post.
Regards
Agentpoint Team.