Managing real estate listings - any ideas?

Hi,

I am fairly new to Modx but have completed 6 basic sites in Modx successfully. These were just for clients looking to update content and image galleries - simple stuff!.

Next project is for a real estate site. The client is looking for a form where a user can add, edit and delete a listing. The listings would include title, description, image thumbnail with link to full gallery, etc - the general info you would expect on a realty site.

To summarize - is it possible to build a form, where a user can manage each individual listing and update the page?

Any help and ideas would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

Hi Anika,
I’m sure it’s possible to build that. I think it would be a pretty big deal, though.

Despite having built 30+ sites with MODx, when faced with a real estate situation I have opted for for dedicated Real Estate systems. At the risk of "un-selling" MODx for this, here’s my take...

Easy Realtor Pro looks nice, as it’s cheap and has loads of features. But I found bugs that I had to fix here and there. Tech support was OK, but spotty - mainly one guy, whose response to bugs wasn’t helpful - more like, just re-install. It also runs pretty slow - probably somewhat clunky DB programming. Lots of generated HTML, so content isn’t separate from layout at all. It does work, but it’s decidedly funky.

"The Real Estate Script" was much more solid, and loads of features.
http://www.therealestatescript.com/
Yes, its structure is largely based on tables, but templating is still not too bad because the author did a really nice job of organizing the templates, and for tables, they’re pretty easy to apply CSS to if you’re good at it. Yes, it is possible to have tables that suck less than others.

Maybe someone will have a MODx-based solution.

Good luck, Dave

Hi Dave,

Thanks for this! This is very helpful. I will definitely take a look at the real estate script. Having slept on this, I think I am just going to take a simple approach to this. Make individual pages for each listing then use ditto to output the listings on to a listing ’summary’ page. I just need to make sure the listing template is super easy to update! This site is fairly small - there are only 25 listings on the current site so I think I will still use Modx for this project. Thanks again.

Quote from: anika at Mar 02, 2010, 06:20 PM

Hi,

I am fairly new to Modx but have completed 6 basic sites in Modx successfully. These were just for clients looking to update content and image galleries - simple stuff!.

Next project is for a real estate site. The client is looking for a form where a user can add, edit and delete a listing. The listings would include title, description, image thumbnail with link to full gallery, etc - the general info you would expect on a realty site.

To summarize - is it possible to build a form, where a user can manage each individual listing and update the page?

Any help and ideas would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

anika

This sounds pretty doable with MODx. I would suggest you take a look at the eform2DB snippet. Additionally, you could use Ditto to aggregate the listing information. There are several ways to approach this, but I definitely think it’s doable in MODx

Anika,
Yes, for a simpler site, MODx should be fine. Back in the day when I was being asked to put something together, at first MODx sounded great, but then the requested feature list became so massive that I finally gave up and went for the hardcore real-estatey solutions. You could kind of tell that the client was just reading off features of some massive real-estate site.

I have been doing a lot of things lately where I use Ditto for organizing/templating documents in any fashion, and each document has TV’s (or just the regular document fields, like description, summary, etc.) that become the input fields, which, in turn, populate the Ditto listings. You’d end up with a page of house thumbnails and descriptions, which would link to the document with the full listing. Might be great.

Einstein’s idea of using Eform2DB is also an interesting one. I have enjoyed using this very little-known snippet - it’s surprisingly effective, but hasn’t become an official snippet, possibly due to the developer getting too busy. By doing it this way, you feed the listings with a form instead of my document-centered method. And then you could write a bit of code to display the stuff any which way from your new non-MODx table.

Cheers, Dave

Interesting thread!

I dabble in the real estate world. I do photography and web design.

A lot of real estate sites look really awful. Way too much going on, like one of those huge TV remotes with too many buttons. Many have that "attractive" mid 90’s Front Page look, if-you-know-what-I-mean.

If you are good at CSS you can style a MODx site nicely. Using Ditto, Tags, and MaxiGallery you can present an attractive site that would cater to a real estate outfit that did not have too many listings. TV’s can present small thumbnails for Ditto aggregated listings. The actual listing pages themselves can be all presented nicely with CSS and a gallery system.

But clients may want all the "stuff" you see in many real estate sites. For some including the MLS is a must. This gets into licensing, monthly fees and dealing with a tables based feed system. Some clients will also expect an iFrame map system, fancy search engines that connects with the MLS as well as their own listings, mortgage calculators, and other priority database features.

Even if a client indicates that he/she wants to keep things clean and simple you might have to deal with the eventual "oh, can you add more thing?" which can soon get you into the heavy lifting arena.

I would love to learn if others MODx developers have successfully built sturdy real estate sites. It would be great to see some samples. The real estate industry is really dragging right now but there is money to be made in delivering quality photography and web design/development to industry professionals.

Not sure if this is what you’re looking for, but I did a site about 3-4 years ago for a rental company. Still, the feature set was similar. I just used modx documents for the properties and TVs for all the property attributes. Granted, my client has kind of screwed up the site, but at least you can get an idea of what I did and it may help out. There’s obviously a lot more that we could have done with it, but budgets don’t always allow. I don’t typically post links to my sites, especially sites I’m not crazy about, but here it is in case it helps.
http://www.mja1inc.com

EDIT: To answer your question - yes, it is possible to build a simple real estate website with modx.

Hi there.

Interestingly i’m working on a real estate site right now. After a lot of thinking, consulting with MODx gurus, and looking around i decided to do the site with Evo.
My client is not in the US so MLS was not an issue but supporting multiple languages/countries was.
So here’s my approach so far. It might change if i reach some dead ends.

Each property is a separate document organized in the tree by country, city, area, neighborhood.
The big advantage of this is that each property can have a unique SEO-friendly url. Property attributes are TVs of appropriate types. I’m using YAMS to add multi-lingual functionality.

I looked at AjaxSearch for the searching functionality but it proved impossible to do the multi-tv search similar to Century 21 site. So currently i’m trying to use Ditto filters to accomplish this. The advantage of doing search with Ditto and the Request extender is that search pages can have bookmarkable urls.

I’m also using Ditto tagging to add secondary property classifications.

In addition to the properties themselves the client wanted to show proximity relationships: nearby schools, nearby hospitals, etc.
I found a very promising snippet called Related that seems to be a good solution but i haven’t tried it yet.

I also considered using Quid in case searching all TVs in the single table proved too slow, but will hold off for now since the client will not have more than a few thousand properties.

Hope this helps.

Good stuff!

I sense that this might prove to be one of those "really useful MODx threads"...

I looked at AjaxSearch for the searching functionality but it proved impossible to do the multi-tv search similar to Century 21 site. So currently i’m trying to use Ditto filters to accomplish this. The advantage of doing search with Ditto and the Request extender is that search pages can have bookmarkable urls.

also have a look at tvExplorer http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,16456.0.html
demos:
http://www.dixsix.fr/explorer/
http://www.deco-in.com/recherche-avancee.html

...as well as basic multiple filtering with Ditto only: http://bit.ly/bgx7dX

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*related* "How to Show a "Featured Home" on main page?"
http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,45117.msg269043.html#msg269043
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I found a very promising snippet called Related that seems to be a good solution but i haven’t tried it yet.

also have a look at QUILL for this
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adding "Quick Links" on the manager welcome page to create ressources in the appropriate folders:
http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,43572.msg260076.html#msg260076
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"Changing Page’s Parent Based on Page TV Drop Down"
-> e.g. folders for different statuses "sold" "pending" etc
http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,44285.0.html
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Listing ressources (from different folders) in a manager welcome tab for quick access & editing:
http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,43572.msg268852.html#msg268852
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btw. i don’t see much that can’t be done with MODx for a real estate website