One of our specialities is developing sites for estate agents. We use Property Hive WordPress plugin as a base but we build on that market leading software with our own custom features that make our client sites stand out from the crowd.
We’ve recently re-developed a site for a large estate agents in the south east and this is what we’ve accomplished to get the company owner to say …
Can I congratulate you and all concerned on a great job. I believe our website is now working for us, not against us!
Well done and thank you
Tim Witt
Rush, Witt & Wilson
Blocks
We develop all our sites using WordPress latest default block theme. This negates the requirement for a resource hungry child theme and results in much leaner, faster websites.
But … Property Hive doesn’t currently support the WordPress full site block editor so we developed our own plugin to bypass the default Property Hive templates and deliver a set of custom blocks to deliver the content we require where we require it.
Offices
Rush, Witt and Wilson are a large estate agency with 7 offices and whilst Property Hive has some options for multi-office businesses, they are difficult to find and are limited to contact details and location.
So we expanded on that … 🙂
- Office Description
- Office Featured Image
- Social Links
Staff
… and we didn’t stop there. We added a custom taxonomy so that members of staff could be added and assigned to one or more offices! Each member of staff has …
- Name
- Description
- Job Title
- Sound Bite / Quote
Reviews
And what would offices and staff be without reviews?! No problem, we added a custom post type for reviews that include …
- Title
- Reviewer’s Name
- Review Link
Each review is associated with an office and can even be tagged by staff members so that reviews that mention specific members of staff can be shown on not only the office page but also the relevant staff members pages!
Finally we’ve setup a monthly scheduled event so the operations manager can receive a monthly league table to see the offices and members of staff with the most reviews for the last month!
Open Graph
We noticed that property (and other) pages were not showing the correct title, description and image meta data to allow shared links to have correctly displayed information on social media, etc.
We fixed that.
Import Alto / Vebra Properties
We found the options for importing properties from Alto / Vebra limited and rather than importing all properties and all images from the feed, we forged filters to not import properties that are let, sold, SSTC and over 1 year old. Furthermore any that already exist in the database are deleted accordingly the rules set in the Property Hive settings.
Property Hive also marks all imported properties as “on the market” by default so those which are let / sold / SSTC and under 1 year old are not only marked as not “on the market” but to save server resources we delete all but four of the properties’ images.
Cookies
Our client specifically wanted a cookie-free site. No cookies, no cookie banner. Property Hive drops a cookie on visitor browsers to remember which properties were recently viewed so we used their built-in filter to turn this off.
If you’d like to see the site you can take a look at it here …
This is just a glimpse into some of the features that we work on for estate agent websites and if you are in the market for a site that “works for your business and not against it”, contact us today!
