In my latest collaboration, Saddy Delgado of One Sotheby’s International Realty company tasked me with a job. Update her site saddydelgado.com to a responsive design. Over the next few moments, I will share my experience with creating a real estate website. It will receive data from MLS using IDX Broker on WordPress.
What was under the hood?
- The site was originally done a custom php/mysql application back in 2012 using Zend Framework.
- Hosting of the site was being maintained by a small company that makes the real estate sites for One Sotheby’s International Realty.
- The hosting company specialized in designing and implementing a bridge between their clients and the MLS API. This meant that if the product owner were to switch real estate companies, the MLS data would cease to work until another solution presented itself.
What were the requirements?
- The importance of maintaining search engine rankings was paramount as the product owner’s domain had been ranked high after being online for a few years.
- The product owner did not want to lose the look of the real estate site.
- The site needed to be responsive in order to follow trends of how people browse websites in 2016, namely via mobile devices and tablets.
- The site needed to create original content that fell outside the usual content you find in other personal agent real estate sites.
- Create a new site that would be easy to maintain for the foreseeable future.
Implementation of saddydelgado.com
I immediately though about the needs of the product owner and also thought about how important it was to get it right. One of the most successful real estate brokers in the Realtor Organization needed the very best service.
This meant that despite what many in software engineering like to do, I had to put down the shiny object, aka the latest greatest technology for web development, such as NodeJS with MongoDB and Express, coupled with ReactJS just to throw it out there. Sure they have a great community, very popular and I extensively use for my personal projects, but since scalability is something I covet with every project I take on, I needed to leave something behind for my product owner that would allow them to find someone else to take over the reigns of the site with minimal effort.
WordPress was used.
So I went with WordPress. Yes, WordPress. At the time of the implementation WordPress was still using version 4.5.3 and the host was using PHP 5.6. (They are now at 4.7, and 7.1, respectively. Major changes to both underlying preprocessor and application.) It was a no brainer to use one of the most popular content management systems to run a multimillion dollar listing real estate site. A thriving community with an ever growing repository of plugins and themes to extend the core software.
The Theme
Repeat after me, UNDERSCORE S THEME. You can get it here. This starter theme, which it’s link is located in the annals of the WordPress Theme Handbook, is essential when starting with a custom theme. It is assumed that if you decide to do this on your own that you have a strong understanding of html, css, javascript and php. It also has no significant styling. However it does have all the necessary base template files needed to produce the various views in WordPress. I went ahead and made a child theme of the site and then got to work. Mockups of the site were not necessary since the original site was the mockup.
MLS in your real estate website. Hello IDX Broker.
My main concern was creating a custom plugin or finding a plugin that could make API calls to any MLS data source. I came to find that IDX Broker was the solution I was looking for. I had use other 3rd party MLS API Internet Data Exchange services, but IDX Broker really blew me away. The application process was painless, and the implementation was even easier.
Since MLS datasets are divided into regions and there exists several regions, the National Association of Realtors limits its access to certain companies that in turn create application program interfaces to deliver the MLS data. No web scraping was necessary. It is a reminder that doing things from scratch does not always produce the best results.
Essentially IDX Broker helped achieve the integration of MLS data in real time. If the client added a new property to their MLS system, the property would automatically be added to the site. IDX Broker also provides features that can be added as code snippets directly into certain areas of the site. From Advanced Search features to selecting areas on a map, IDX Broker delivered. They also provided masking their service with your own subdomain to get full SEO credit.
Remarks
Real estate site development with IDX Broker and WordPress takes a regular website to a whole new level. It will provide all the features that a potential client comes to expect in a site that is able to show your real estate listings.
However, I must say, that some of the images used in MLS listings and the pseudo virtual tours that they provide from outdated technology should give way to full immersive virtual reality tours. Think of the possibility of having a client “walk” through the listing before ever walking into the listing. There are some niche services out there already like Google Street View that add virtual tour for businesses. Why not for a listing? And the other feature are quadcopter flyovers of properties. Anything to help you sell the listing is what it is really about.
Greasy Hacks
Special thanks to Saddy Delgado of One Sotheby’s International Realty. A true professional in the luxury real estate market, you can reach her at 305-632-4256.
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