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Open Beta Announcement for Local Market Explorer 3

Posted on August 26, 2010 by Andrew Mattie

I’m really happy to say that the version 3 beta of the Local Market Explorer WordPress plugin is finally available for everyone to try out. For those who don’t know what Local Market Explorer is, it’s a way to embed local area info from Zillow, Education.com, Walk Score, Yelp, TeachStreet, and Nile Guide directly into your WordPress-powered site in order to benefit your visitors and give search engines more content. You can see a demo of Local Market Explorer v3 on Geek Estate and on BankVibe’s new real estate center. Screenshots of v2 and other info is available on the official plugin page.

While the development of this plugin was funded by Zillow, all the different components in the plugin are now completely independent from each other and can be used as individual modules if desired. Version 3 is a complete rewrite of the plugin that brings with it a ton of features that had been requested on the Local Market Explorer feedback page as well as many bug fixes. Following are the big things that have changed.

  • Performance has been significantly increased by making all of the external data requests in parallel instead of in series. This means that the modules that have slower APIs won’t slow down the page as much as they did in the past.
  • The modules can now be used on individual pages and posts instead of only on the Local Market Explorer virtual pages. This adds a great deal of flexibility for embedding this valuable data into your pages. Here’s an example of the market stats module for Los Angeles loaded into a random page. This functionality is implemented via WordPress shortcodes and includes a handy toolbar icon in the page / post editor for inserting these shortcodes.
  • The HTML markup and CSS styling has been significantly pruned so that skinning is easier and so that the default styles work better with many more themes.
  • It’s now easier to use a custom page template for all LME pages.
  • A real-time IDX real estate module has been added to all city and zip pages to display the newest listings in those areas. This only works if you also have the dsIDXpress WordPress IDX plugin (disclaimer: I work for Diverse Solutions, the company that sells dsIDXpress).
  • The admin UI has been significantly enhanced to make it easier to use. A help section has also been added in the admin.
  • A neighborhood module has been added on city pages that links to all the neighborhoods within that city. These neighborhood names are provided by Zillow’s GetRegionChildren API.
  • Support for canonical link tags has been added so that search engines will better index the true URL and won’t see duplicate content within your domain.
  • This version works way better with some of the more obscure WordPress installs as well as with WordPress 3.x.
  • Support for XML sitemaps has been added via the Google XML Sitemaps plugin.
  • Lots of bugs have been fixed relating to data not displaying when it should (ex. homes for sale in certain areas) and blank data displaying when it shouldn’t (ex. Zillow Home Value Index showing $0 when Zillow doesn’t have that data).
  • More charts and data have been added to a few of the modules.

The Local Market Explorer v3 beta can be downloaded as a zip file from here. After you’ve downloaded it, simply install it in your blog by uploading it through the plugin installer. If you have v2 installed, you’ll probably need to delete it first. Deleting v2 won’t delete your settings or area descriptions though; installing v3 will then use these settings / descriptions. Additionally, you should be able to downgrade to v2 if you really want to for some reason.

While this release is considered to be an open beta and hasn’t encountered any major issues during testing on a number of other blogs, you may want to consider back up your site before installing this to make sure nothing happens with your descriptions and settings if you already have v2 installed. You may want to consider WordPress Backup or WP-DB-Backup; I’ve personally never tried either. You’ll probably be safe without doing this, but it just never really hurts to double-check your backup system.

Anyway, I’m sure this will have bugs, so please discuss in the comments. If you have feature requests from here on out or encounter other bugs after v3 is released, please use the feedback page. The final release will be out soon!

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  • http://www.nosnivelling.com daveschappell

    The new Local Market Explorer WordPress plugin looks great, Andrew.

    If it helps, we released a TeachStreet API a few weeks ago (http://www.teachstreet.com/api) that may make it easier to get to the TeachStreet data — let us know if you see anything missing, or that we could make even easier for you.

    Dave Schappell
    Founder, TeachStreet

  • http://twitter.com/briantercero Brian Tercero

    Thanks for the update. The link to download the plugin is broken.

    I was able to figure out the download path, but just a heads up.

    Will be installing it on a site of mine today, http://www.losalamoshomes.net

    • Andrew Mattie

      Crud! I thought I double-checked that. I fixed it now; thanks for the tip.

      Looking forward to the feedback.

  • http://www.sacramentobill.com/ Anonymous

    Hi Andrew,

    I noticed that at least some of the modules appear to be handled in iframes. Will the search engines index this content? Don’t search engines skip over iframes?

    Thanks.

    Bill

    • Andrew Mattie

      The only module that’s in an iframe is the Walk Score module. The reason I did that is so that you can put two Walk Score modules on the same page or post if you want. Otherwise, they’d interfere with each other. Walk Score in an iframe doesn’t really matter though anyway because it’s all JavaScript and wouldn’t be indexed by a search engine in the first place.

  • http://twitter.com/KimberlyYow Kimberly Yow

    Virtual page with new version looks great! But, am I correct that the Flickr module was removed from your plug-in? Thanks for the upgrade!!

    • Andrew Mattie

      Yes, Flickr was removed. I had heard quite a few complains about it displaying a lot of irrelevant photos that didn’t really pertain to the area and it was slowing down the page, so I removed it. I will probably add in Panoramio as a replacement at some point in the future though. In the meantime, you might want to try

  • http://twitter.com/IntownElite Intown Elite

    More spiderable content is, of course, great, but I have some reservations. First, it places tons of external links on my site. This gives my users tons of opportunities to leave my site. Doesn’t seem like a good thing. Also, wouldn’t having all those external links mean I’m “leaking” Page Rank? Are the external links no-follow? Second, it gives credence to Zillow’s data, which I find highly suspect. Their “Zestimates” are WAY off the mark in my local market. That’s why I have Zillow Valuations deactivated in my dsSearchAgent, it just gives bogus info. I love the idea of dsIDXpress integration, can you show us an example of how that looks?

    • http://www.newrulesnewtools.com/ Mike Price

      It’s true that the data Zillow has in some markets is not as accurate as others, but characterizing it as bogus is a bit harsh. Zillow is constantly improving it’s data. If you explore all of the tools available to you, you’ll find it to be a great marketing resource. Which market are you in?

      • http://twitter.com/IntownElite Intown Elite

        I’m in Intown Atlanta. We have lots of 1920s to 1940s homes, and value is largely driven by renovation level. Zillow just uses publicly available data, such as tax records, which are notoriously inaccurate in Atlanta. Often square footage is way off because additions were never updated in the tax records. No algorithm is going to tell you renovation level, etc., so I’ve seen they’re “Zestimates” be off $100k in either direction on a $400k house. There’s just no substitute for “boots on the ground”. Now, back to the dsIDXpress in this plugin, can you link to an example? I didn’t see any on the links on the Geek Estate blog links.

    • Anonymous

      External links don’t leak pagerank. Worry about the quality of sites you’re externally linking to.

      • http://twitter.com/IntownElite Intown Elite

        You are correct, I read up on it after I posted. My other concerns remain.

    • Anonymous

      External links don’t leak pagerank. Worry about the quality of sites you’re linking to.

  • Randi Thornton

    While all of this content is extremely valuable for any real estate website, the risk of losing your visitor to Zillow and others is high because of the links directing the visitor back to Zillow. Is there a work around for this?

    • http://www.newrulesnewtools.com/ Mike Price

      Unlike many national portals, the listing agent and contact information is included on all listing data in Zillow. It’s the 2nd most trafficked real estate site on the web.

    • Andrew Mattie

      While the risk of losing visitors is certainly a possibility, my view is that the increase in visitors you could get from search engines as well as the increase in your site’s usefulness because of this content makes it worth it. I could see how someone could think differently though.

      To allay your concerns about Zillow specifically, you can set your Zillow username as an option in the admin. Once this is set, all Zillow links will pass your username and then brand the “Zillow experience” with your name and information at the top. Take a look at the Geek Estate demo links in the post to see what I’m talking about.

      • http://twitter.com/IntownElite Intown Elite

        The “branded” Zillow experience may have a small banner with my contact info on top, but the most important thing is where the “calls to action” are directed. If all the property inquiries or “schedule a showing” requests were directed to me when operating within the “branded” Zillow experience, that would be one thing, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. Instead, competing agents are presented as the contacts for each listing.

        Now, back to the dsIDXpress in this plugin, can you link to an example? I didn’t see any dsIDXpress listings on the example links posted.

        • alexkrumm

          I also don’t see any dsIdxPress listings or documentation; how can I include this information on my site? I;m a dsIdxPress subscriber.

  • http://www.atlantarealestateinfo.com/ atlantarealestate

    I like and use DS, but this is idiotic.

    Exactly how again does an agent benefit from adding this widget and creating up a bunch of links away from his site….to a competitor no less?

    Also, exposing all his expensive (AdWords or Organic) traffic to Zillow?

    Tell you what, I’ll write a widget and see if Zillow and Realtor.com will add it to their sidebar.

    C’mon everybody!

    As Ed Schneebly screamed in School of Rock, “aaaahhh, what are they teaching in this school!!!”

    Does anyone ever think this stuff through before inking this nonsense?

    • Andrew Mattie

      If you really don’t like Zillow, you can just completely turn off their modules in the admin. In fact, you could choose to ONLY use the Yelp module for example if that’s all you really wanted / liked. As I mentioned earlier, you can also add your Zillow username as an option so that, if you do leave the module on, any visitor click-throughs will have Zillow branded at the very top with your information.

      I’m obviously biased, but I think you should try it out and see what I’m talking about. The ability to insert any of the content into pages / posts is especially a neat new feature. You can always uninstall it if you really dislike what it offers.

  • http://www.randyvanderpool.com Randy Vanderpool

    Glad to hear it is out and available… should be a huge help! Thanks!

  • http://www.MaineHomeConnection.com/ Nozmo

    I just can’t understand the logic in this – continuing to promote the enemy (excuse me, the competition). Why not spend the time and effort putting together YOUR OWN local information and become an authority that way?

    • http://SanDiegoRealEstateAgent.net San Diego Real Estate Agent

      Obviously having your own, unique content is great BUT not everyone has time to write their own content. This is a good option for those .
      people.

      Although it does send buyers to outside sites, it does make your site a resource to them by providing them with valuable info!

  • http://SanDiegoRealEstateAgent.net San Diego Real Estate Agent

    None of the maps are showing up on my blog for any of the modules…any idea why?

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