After I already wrote a big article about real estate optimization with Photoshop, WordPress and search engine optimization last week, I wanted to introduce good WordPress themes for real estate agents and companies who want to create a platform for real estate search. Thanks to WordPress Themes a lot has changed. In the past you had to build each page individually and of course link it. Today all this is done by a content management system. The most popular CMS in the world is WordPress. Millions of pages were built with it and many more will follow. Many real estate agents and, of course, online marketing and advertising agencies use WordPress and modern WordPress themes.
Direkt zur #1 Hometown auf Themeforest: WordPress Theme – Download
Advertisements and presentation with WordPress
WordPress Themes are prefabricated internet pages that can be edited and individualized for yourself through settings. Important is, if you have never worked with a content management system or WordPress system before, you should not start directly with a real estate portal. The functionalities are relatively complex and elaborate. Accordingly one should bring along sufficient previous experience. But enough small talk, let’s look at the essential features of a real estate feed. At the end I have my toplist and recommendation for real estate WordPress Themes.
Translation into languages
For many users it is important that the topic is translated into several languages. Because not everyone is fluent in English and with technical terms, especially in the real estate sector, it can quickly take a lot of time to constantly translate individual words. Therefore one should already pay attention to the fact during the selection that the topic, if one does not feel so sure of the English language, already contains a translation and/or a translation.
Very few themes are translated, you usually have to create this translation yourself. My tip, for all of you who are searching, create an extra language file in your plugin folder, edit it e.g. with a program like PoEdit.
Pre made homepage – Prefabricated website
The layout of a website, which has different elements and formatting and design, can take a lot of time. Therefore, many of the WordPress templates offer directly finished pages as layout. These can be easily packed with a One Click installation as a demo on your own page. You already have a beautifully designed start page or a clear page with all team members.
The pages are mostly built with Page Builder. We already have a detailed article about this on YouTube Video! If you want to know more about Page Builder and Content Creation, you can find the detailed article here.
Page Builder
One click importer – Demo example insert for learning
For all those who haven’t built 20, 50 or 100 WordPress pages yet, this demo content is really worth a lot! Here you can see how the author of the team integrates his structure, the elements and the embedding work. You can also view the extra menu items, such as the new real estate listings. Here one can recognize directly from several examples, how the information is structured and where which data is entered or how a finished real estate advertisement would look on their side.
The core of any WordPress installation are the various extensions that extend the content management system with blog function to an online shop, a real estate portal or even a social media platform. Would you have thought that this is possible with WordPress if possible? That’s exactly what makes it the most popular CMS in the world! Let’s take a look at which plugin functions are indispensable for you as a broker.
Front-End – Real estate ,anagement
Those who like to work directly from the website and don’t want to deal with a purely informative back-end should make sure that the topic also has a front-end editing function for the real estate. This means that all advertisements can be edited directly on the website with a simple push of a button. This means that you don’t have to switch to the back end first, but can see the results live, so to speak.
Front-End – Submission of new properties
For brokers, the front-end or back-end editing function as administrator of the page is sufficient. Who wants to build up his real estate page, however, to a large real estate portal, that must give also other brokers the possibility to place their advertisements. For this there is a user management with which new brokers can register. These are automatically or manually accepted and activated. You get the possibility to place your own real estate advertisements, to edit them or to delete them. So you can invite various brokers to present their houses or apartments or plots of land on your platform.
Integrated live messaging system (communication)
If you think modern, you should also have a functioning messaging system. Do you know any websites on which you have a small chat window or speech bubble at the bottom left or right? That’s what this is all about. Users and visitors can contact our team and broker directly. Without detours and without telephone calls, quite simply via the browser.
Your employees can start communication immediately or process the request a little later. In this messaging system it is also possible to create predefined message modules, e.g. for standard questions. But let’s get back to the basic question, which real estate is the best for WordPress?
E-mail notification and saved search
Notifications and saved searches for already registered users are an important tool for you to get you back to your site. Recurring users are very important, not only for search engine optimization, but also for your sales. The more often you can reactivate users, the more traffic you have on your website and the more sales you will be able to generate. With extensions that allow you to receive e-mail notifications, e.g. new advertisements for a certain area in Berlin or even when a property has been taken off the market, you are even more interactive and interesting as a platform. You should also allow your users to save searches so that they can directly connect to meaningful email notification functions. Most real estate themes already have such user management on board.
Login and real estate comparisons
Buying a property is a big investment. But also renting an apartment and paying the rent deposit is a lot of money for most fellow citizens. Therefore, it is worthwhile to offer a comparison function as a real estate portal but also as an individual broker. With this feature, your users can easily save individual real estate listings and later compare them with each other. Just as you know it from online shops like Amazon, where you can compare several products with each other.
Payment system for brokers (external)
Directly integrated payment systems make it possible that if you build a portal with several brokers, amounts for real estate advertisements can be collected directly. With various payment providers, from credit card to Paypal and of course the classic bank transfer. By the integrated payment system you can save a lot of effort in the invoicing, as well as the administration of customers.
Important functions: Search and localization
In addition to these features, there are of course many more ways for users to make a comfortable visit to their homes clean. This includes, for example, auto-completion in the search field.
Autocomplete in search field
If you are looking for something, you need an autocompletion just like with search engines. If you enter a spelling error, for example, no search result would be available in theory. When you make a suitable suggestion for the search query in advance, we can avoid many mistakes and thus also minimize the previously mentioned bounce rate.
Search for radius (km) and geolocation
In particular for the search of flats and condominiums, for purchase or rent it is important that one considers regional aspects. Regional aspects are particularly important when it comes to investing in a property that you want to live in the longer term. So that only those offers are displayed that are relevant, the search should also contain a slider for the number of kilometres. So you can directly select a city area and filter only objects in the vicinity. This makes the search process much easier for our users.
Resuming search: type of construction, plot, etc.
Almost all themes have of course integrated the further information, so that I can leave a user in the search directly, whether he wants to see e.g. only advertisements that are with balcony or with a fitted kitchen. You can define all these filters and parameters in your back-end, depending on the properties of a single property.
Last but not least you should always think about the performance of your own website. The better and more structured the page is, the faster it is in the loading time, the higher it will be placed in the search engines. In Germany, the search engine Google is the most important, followed by Telekom, Yahoo and other platforms. Therefore, pay a little attention to the performance of your potential new website.
SEO and search engine – Optimization of the real estate page
The term SEO comes from Search Engine Optimization and means translated search engine optimization. But why is search engine optimization so important?
Search engine optimization constantly brings new leads, i.e. customers who, for example, buy a product or sign up for a specific list or newsletter. The more visitors we have on a website, the higher the chance that we will make good deals. Search engine optimization costs in relation to permanent advertising, only a one-time investment. Advertising that is optimized for clicks costs money with every single click or sometimes with every impression. This is why many companies attach great importance to search engine optimization. You should do the same with your new real estate project!
Pagespeed – Loading time of the internet page
The last important point before we come to the concrete recommendations is the Pagespeed. Pagespeed is the English term for the loading time of a website. The shorter the loading time, especially in relation to the competition and also with applications, the better it is for your website and the more positive it has an effect on search engine placement. With Pagespeed you can achieve CSS by optimizing scripts like HTML, Java but also by compressing image files. A detailed tutorial on compression for real estate advertisements can be found here
After you have learned a lot about search engine optimization but also about advertising real estate on WordPress, we now come to my recommendations for real estate WordPress themes! You can simply buy the themes for a really very fair amount at the biggest platform there is in the world. You can install the themes with just a few clicks. Have fun and good luck!
