GlennBatten.com » Real Estate

Playing Around With Zoo Property

Glenn — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 14:04:08 +0000

Website design for real estate has one major obstacle to overcome and that relates to the data management of the listings. Real Estate is all about the internet and its important that your website syncronises with a range of online portals.

This is why your typical website designer struggles with websites for real estate agents. Running a property listing database is not actually that simple and syncronising with the a range of portals is quite complicated. Your typical real estate website providor for real estate agents provides template websites only. These are typical cookie cutter sites exactly the same as hundreds of other agents and whilst they “get the job done” they do not provide exception results. If you want to create a custom site the options were very limited until now.

Zoo Property provides the simple task of running a property listing database for an agent and syncing those listings with all the major real estate portals. This allows a webdesigner to worry about the actual website itself rather than the complexities of the property listing database.

Zoo Property provides a simple api interface for web designers to connect with their system. They also provide a range of plugins for use in the WordPress CMS and blog system.

So at work we are undertaking a new First National brand update at the moment and we are looking at updating our website around a Zoo Property and WordPress solution. I will end up writing a full article on the experience for the Business 2 blog but I can confirm that everything is going well. Zoo Property does not limit your web designer to use WordPress but because they provide a range of WordPress plugins it speeds up development time and has allowed me to create a website with very little effort. They really are natural fit and we should be launching the new site soon.

Australian Real Estate Software and Online Solutions Directory

Glenn — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 07:00:28 +0000

About 12 months ago I went looking for an online directory for real estate agents. I was looking at that time specifically for virtual tour options available. No matter how hard I looked I could not find one place that provided a directory specifically targeted to real estate agents, let alone specialising in Australian Real Estate Agents. There are so many options available

The solution at the time was to whip up a website at australianrealestatesoftware.com to prove the concept and test if agents would use it.

The test proved both successful and unsuccessful at the same time. For a minimal effort it got quite a reasonable level of traffic for specific targeted audience.

Unfortunately because I did not want to invest too much into the first version of the site in case agents wouldn’t use such a directory I chose to only create a very basic site. This lead to people finding what they wanted through the search engines but not really browsing the directory for other solutions available.

The other week I decided to give the old girl a bit of a tart up and moved everything over to a wordpress installation. The wordpress CMS allows me to quickly and easily provide advanced functionality. So now the site not only displays a funky new look but visitors can now leave comments and easily rate particular solutions as well. At the bottom of every entry is a list of other software or solutions in the directory that might also suit.

Visitors can now even subscribe to updates either through RSS, email or twitter.

The change has already proved to be highly successful and the average number of pages viewed per visitor is now 5 times more than the previous design. If you are an agent and you know something that should be in the directory and isn’t, let me know by submitting the details.