Wordpress Theme Developers: Listen Up

August 5, 2009
By: Erion Shehaj
Author's Website: http://www.signaturehouston.com

Since single property websites became a powerful (somewhat) mainstream marketing tool for real estate, forward thinking agents all over the country have starting building them for every single one of the listings they market. But so far, the choices we have at our disposal, leave me (and others) wanting more:

1. Postlets – This site gets most everything right, especially with their new Postlets Pro option. Positives: Huge photos in a Flash Slideshow, Modern (Enough) Look, Embedded Google Maps and Virtual tours, Walkscore and School Info incorporated, Google Analytics, Affordable Pricing, Automatic Submission to portals etc etc. Negatives: Zero Customization Options (= everyone’s sites look the same), Zero SEO Benefits, 30 day expirations.

2. VFlyer – Similar to Postlets, but with monthly subscription cost structure starting at $12.95 up to $79.95/mo. Same SEO deficiencies related to site being hosted on service provider’s server and domain being pointed to it.

3. MyMarketWare – This product is more robust that the first two and fills many of their deficiencies, but it’s also more expensive at $39/site and in my opinion, a bit more time consuming to put together.

Idea

Design a set of Wordpress Themes (about 5 total with 3 color options each) specifically for single property websites. They need to have the following features:

Photo Slideshow with Large Main Photo (750px+) and filmstrip below it, featured in front page.
Modern Look.
Google Maps, Walkscore, Education.com incorporation (APIs available for all)
Theme Options Page on backend that allow agent to upload photos, paste copy and put the site together in no more than an hour.
Price Structure: $80 for theme set, unlimited sites.

Show you the money

Math is my favorite subject. There’s 1.1 Million Realtors in the United States. Let’s say only 1% of them would be interested in single property websites, or 11,000. Then, lets say you get 30% of them to purchase your set or 3,300. At $80/pop, that’s a quarter million dollars. Even if I’m half wrong, that’s still six figures. Would you design 5 themes for six figures?

Why am I asking?

Single Property Websites in and of themselves do little to sell the actual property since it takes more time for the new domain to rank on Google (and therefore, attract traffic) than it takes for a home to sell. Sure, you can pull traffic with sign riders, social media promotion, Craigslist etc. But in the end, the site impresses the Seller and that’s why most agents put them together.

But I’m looking past the sale.

Most Realtors work (or “farm”) a specific area of town that they specialize in. Suppose that an agent averages about 12 new listings in that area every year, and for each one of those properties she builds a dedicated site on 123StreetName.com, Wordpress based, All In One SEO juiced, hypelocally optimized for local keywords etc etc. In that five year period, that agent would amass a total of 60 sites that would keep working for the agent in perpetuity, generating business on autopilot. I can do this now on Wordpress, but the amount of time that is required to customize a theme that wasn’t meant for this purpose makes it severely inefficient.

So. Any takers?

Also, I would love to hear from our readers and contributors, what other features might be interesting to have in this set?

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Categories: Blogging, Marketing, Single Property, Websites

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Josh Ferris

Erion,

The potential of this idea is enormous. I dare say you would have been better served saving it for yourself and paying someone $5K to do this for you. ;)

The only thing I think will serve as a hinderance to this is that many, many agents still don't have web hosting, know what WordPress is or how to download the themes. There's a big investment needed here because you have to get someone to connect with the APIs, design the templates and code them.

That said, I'd really enjoy not having to pay vFlyer $120/year.

Marlow Harris

Without having to spend any extra money, I create a single property website for each listing on Postlets and then host that on my website using a sub-domain. That way, I get more traffic to my site, at the same time, giving it fresh content. (Example: http://NorthCapitolHillView.SeattleDreamHomes.com and http://WestSeattleViewLoft.SeattleDreamHomes.com

Doing this has so many more benefits in terms of SEO, plus it's cheaper and doesn't take any more time than creating a WordPress site for each property. That sounds like a lot of hassle and expense, without any long-term benefit to my website.

Adam Gallegos

I would like to see something like this. A sign rider with the URL, attracts a lot of neighbors. A tool I like to offer them is the ability to receive listing & sale updates in their neighborhood.

Amanda Cornelius

Hi Erion. I like your idea and love wordpress. But ... I find that most of our users are looking for a really easy solution that is all inclusive, i.e hosting, domain name and sign rider. We have been building property websites since 2001 and our service includes the sign rider, hosting for 1 year and the domain name. The advantages of going with a company that is focused on real estate is all of the extra free features like, easy posting to craigslist, listing syndication, property feedback, links to maps, schools etc...

Erion Shehaj

@Joshua

Possibly. But I'm not in that business - I do what I do, and let others do what they do best. I just see a win/win situation here and I think someone should take advantage of it so we can take advantage of the results.

As far as agents who don't have hosting, I'd bet they don't do single property websites either :-) There's definitely a learning curve here, but one that our industry has started to follow and IMO will continue to follow in the future.

@ Marlow

That's what I've been doing till now, except I do dedicated domains. It's easy enough and fast. However, I disagree that you get SEO benefits out of pointing your subdomain to a site that rests on Postlets' server. Moreover, you cannot customize the look - I've got the same site you posted for one of my properties. And the theme I'm suggesting would be as easy to setup as a Postlets site, through the theme options page. The real meat of the idea rests in dominating your neighborhoods with optimized sites well after the sale. Change can be challenging but if it is going to improve results, we must undertake it.

Karen Goodman

I like your idea, but instead of having a bunch of single property websites for sold homes, which no one is going to find...or they will bounce off quickly when they realize it is old and sold, here is what I would like:

A Wordpress.com theme (or a really easy to use theme for Wordpress.org) that gives you one master site with a home page that somehow lists each home address/picture. I'm thinking that there would be an active home section plus a section for sold properties. When you click on an address, you would go to something that looks like a single property website with multiple pages.

Agents could use a domain for a niche market (subdivision, town, city neighborhood) or for the entire city. Or for a non-geographic niche such as acreage properties or historic homes.

One of the main reasons I went with vFlyer over Postlets is because I get a profile page with all of my listings tied together. Unfortunately, only active listings show up on the profile. If the Wordpress solution also included sold properties and could be hosted on my own domain for good SEO, and there was a way to syndicate to the major real estate sites including craigslist, I would definitely buy it instead of vFlyer.

Here's the link to my vFlyer profile which shows you what I mean:
http://kgoodman.vflyer.com/home/Listing.jsp?acc...

@karenstl

rhinogrady

Kgoodman,

What you are saying is very possible you could use Wordpress Multiuser (WP-MU) which would create a social network of individual WP sites with each site being an individual property. We are working on a similar solution at the moment to integrate with our new property listing software www.zooproperty.com

In about 6 weeks we will be releasing some of our wp real estate plugins free to theme designers so they can develop real estate themes to sell.