It’s been a common question at my workshops and when I run into people at events like REIN meetings. People love the simplicity and flexibility of WordPress, but want to list their current properties on their site. There’s a couple ways to do it, and I’ll cover some of them here.

Categorized or Tagged Posts

This is the simplest way to get your listings published. It’s how Brent publishes his current listings right now while we decide on a new theme.

• Do a new post for each listing
• Categorize them as ‘listings’ or ‘property listings’
• Tag them with appropriate attributes like price ranges, number of bedrooms or bathrooms, square foot ranges or construction type

Pros:

• Simple and easy – if you don’t know how to write a post, just give up and hire someone to do all this.
• Guaranteed to work with your theme and current plugins.
• Won’t break when you upgrade WordPress.

Cons:

• Can’t bulk-upload listings
• No templated fields for area, bath/bedroom and other attributes
• You’ll have to add pictures manually (or semi-manually), although Flickr slideshows are fantastic.

Here’s what a simple listing looks like on Brent’s site.

Real Estate WordPress Plugins

There’s some great plugins out there that are simple and free. Each one requires a little bit of work to install and configure, but they’re pretty easy to use. One good example is WP-Property. These plugins give you more flexibility and style than regular posts, but will work within your existing theme.

Pros:

• Still simple and easy. In the current versions of WordPress you’ll be able to do one-click installation of most plug-ins and they’re easy to configure.
• Usually they’ll work with your theme and other plugins. From time to time, you’ll get a conflict. If you use lots of plugins it’s more likely. If it’s a formatting thing, diagnosing a CSS conflict can be difficult.
• Lots of flexibility, functionality and style. There’s some truly great plugins out there, like lightbox for displaying photos in full size.

Cons:

• Limited bulk-upload of listings
• Mapping or MLS functionality is usually US based, and things like Trulia don’t work here.
• Can lead to technical problems, and if you’re already running a real estate WordPress theme you may run into conflicts.

Most plugins have screencasts to show you how to get started or explain how things work. Here’s one for WP-Property.

WP-Property – Tutorial 1: Adding Buildings from Andy Potanin on Vimeo.

WordPress Real Estate Themes

There’s a million of them. Themes are the skins which go over the chassis of your website and make it look and behave how you want. Here’s some Pros/Cons and then I’ll go over a couple of my favorites.

Pros:

• The best looking, most flexible and often easiest to use option.
• Bulk upload or automated feeds possible.
• Excellent ability to use multiple conversion points.
• Almost infinitely configurable and many premium themes (the ones you pay for) offer some level of support.

Cons:

• Some cost to the better themes out there.
• Configuring a theme to do the real estate things you require, and adjusting the design to fit your brand can be complex, or can be restricted by the license you purchase.
• Most good themes are US-biased, meaning MLS listings and such don’t always work the way they’re advertised.

Some Real Estate WordPress Themes I Like

ElegantEstate by Elegant Themes

AgentPress by Studio Press

Estate by Woo Themes

There’s a lot of ways to skin this particular cat, and it’s always changing and improving. Leave a comment and let us know if there’s a particular solution that works well for you.

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This may be more like Seven Reasons I’m Too Lazy To Blog, but we’ll work under the assumption I’ve just been busy. It might not look like it, but I’ve actually been busier than a one legged man playing Twister. There’s been a bunch of stuff happening in the background this week.

WP 3 I finally upgraded my poor blog to WordPress 3.0. Part of the reason is I like to let other people work out the bugs before I risk breaking my blog. I’m starting to be at the point where I get enough traffic and am lacking enough time such that if this thing goes down it’s a real pain in the butt. I’m happy to say that is was a painless experience.

Part of the reason I didn’t want to upgrade to WP 3.0 was I’d heard that there were some bugs between it and Thesis. I hasn’t upgraded from 1.6 to 1.7 yet, for the same lazy reasons as WP, and I really didn’t want to break my thesis installation. This was also pretty slick, although it still requires some FTP work. Anyways, I like it a lot, and even with the random GPL licensing legal conversation out there, Thesis is my preferred premium theme and is pretty fantastic for SEO.

1962 Stats I updated the ever popular Edmonton Real Estate Values Since 1962 spreadsheet with the must recent numbers. It goes up to June 2010 now, and I’ll give it till the fall and then recalculate the retrospective analysis. For now it’s all here if you want the data in a more accessible and useful format than the PDF’s you can get from the Edmonton Real Estate Board.

Housing Type Stats Since I was going through EREB stats anyways, I pulled the last few years worth of Edmonton’s average house prices by housing type into a spreadsheet and made a wee graph. Again, the data is here for you to enjoy and make use of.

Some have reminded me that I haven’t published the retirement savings post I mentioned in last week’s post about my generation being potentially screwed in retirement. I wanted to do more research into the actual numbers based on how old I am, when I want to retire, when my kids will go to University, etc. Stay tuned, it’ll come out this week.

It’s been a bit of a trend, but I’ve done more renos! Surprise! Actually, Leigh’s been the real rockstar of this project. Her role is much more that of a Project manager, since we’re using sub-trades for a lot of the work, but she’s still put a lot of sweat into this job.

And finally, I sent out two JV letters to friends who are interested in doing some real estate together. Unlike a lot of people in this industry, I don’t use this site to get people to invest with me. You can’t just throw me an email and then send me a cheque. I prefer to work with people I know reasonably well, have some shared interests and mutual friends. It keeps us both accountable and makes sure we’re both looking for the same things.

And actually, one more thing. I’m pretty stoked for the REIN fieldtrip and Multi Family weekend in August, although I’ll be at a wedding on the Saturday. Drop me a line if you’re going to be in town from somewhere far away, cause it’s always nice to meet new people. I get a kick when I bump into people who read my blog.

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In about 48 hours I’ll be getting on a plane and returning to the Great White North, which gives me cause to reflect on the past 3 1/2 months. I’ll be doing some more of that in the next few posts (as I’ll have a lot of time in airports to write them), but I’m going to talk about Continuous Improvement for a bit.

This weekend I finally wrote the test to become a Google Analytics Qualified Individual (GAIQ). For those who aren’t familiar with Google Analytics (GA) it’s a program which lets you see how much traffic is coming to your website and what it’s doing there. I’ve used it with huge sites making millions of dollars through e-commerce, and I’ve used it on little blogs like this one. The test was $50, which isn’t a trivial sum for a certificate which looks like they copied one used by a kindergarten teacher, but that’s not the point.

The point is that for the last three months, I haven’t just been fruitlessly searching for a job, roaming the European countryside on vacation and drinking the fruits of Ireland. I’ve been working to improve myself. Some of it’s been little stuff, like changing this blog over to the Thesis theme and starting to learn about WordPress hooks and CSS.

Then some of it’s taken more time, like the Google Analytics exam, or the reading I’ve done. You can see some of it in my Google Reader or my Delicious bookmarks. I’ve done a little writing for friends (see my story on an iPhone worm at WebAnalytics World). I’ve released another rental site ranking whitepaper and put on a free webinar on internet marketing.

In everything I do, I’m always looking for ways to improve what I do and how I do it, from sailing, to work, to music, to my marriage. I work to cultivate a spirit of continuous improvement, always trying to do better, in everything I do. Sitting on a beach for more than a week or so just isn’t in my nature.

I’ve been offered a position back at Enquiro. I know things have changed there in the short time I’ve been gone. I hope they find that I’ve changed too.

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It’s been almost two years since I started this blog, and it’s high time for a redesign!

If you’re a regular reader (or get my email updates or RSS) you may notice things changing quite a bit over the next week or two. If you see something you like or dislike, please leave a comment. If there’s stuff on other sites you like, leave a comment and I’ll check it out.

For now I’ve switched things to the Thesis WordPress Theme, a theme which has a lot of flexibility, and I’m using it for several other projects too. As usual, this blog is the test bed for my other SEO and webdesign projects.

I’m also considering reversing my previous stance against advertising. Anyone have strong thoughts one way or the other? Are you interested in advertising?

That’s all! It’s a sunny weekend in Ireland and there’s a big football (Irish Soccer) match on today!

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I gave a talk about marketing for Canadian real estate investors this week, focusing on internet marketing. Given that I work as an SEO, it’s a topic I know a bit about, so combining internet marketing and real estate investing was a pretty good fit.

Here are some of the resources I promised people.

Canadian Search Engine Market Share

Hitwise is finally publishing Canadian-specific search engine statistics. You can see their full press release here.

Google Receives 80 Percent of Canadian Searches in April 2009
Search Engines, Social Networking and Entertainment top visited categories in Canada
New York, NY - May 27, 2009 – Hitwise, an Experian company, announced today that Google search properties accounted for 80.17 percent of all Canadian searches conducted in the 12 weeks ending April 25, 2009. MSN search properties, Yahoo! search properties and Ask search properties received 8.84 percent, 7.34 percent and 2.75 percent, respectively. The remaining 41 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1 percent of Canadian searches.

Percentage of Canadian searches among leading search engine providers
Domain	April 2009
Google search properties	80.17%
MSN search properties	8.84%
Yahoo! search properties	7.34%
Ask search properties	2.75%
Note: Data is based on 12-week rolling periods

Google Trends

Google’s Keyword Tool

Gmail (and how to use multiple addresses via Gmail)

Google Docs

Google Analytics

Google Webmaster Tools

WordPress.org (for install it yourself)

WordPress.com (which is simpler, but less powerful)

Netfirms (which also offers one-click WordPress.org installations)

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