I thought I could walk away! Then I remembered something.
I forgot to mention WHY I did not advise you to use Joomla in the above suggestion. I've built literally dozens and dozens of Joomla sites and in my opinion Joomla is overkill to the outer most extreme.
IF HOWEVER you have a site like the site I built for a Utah Realtor that needs Joomla's more advanced features then by all means use Joomla. IF you only want a CMS with features for posting pages, posts, downloads, property listings and some menu management then I suggest you use WordPress-CMS which I write about all the time in WordPress.com among many other forums and blogs.
WordPress as a CMS is an ideal solution where you have only a few things to download and will do little more than write content for clients and search engines. I've sent thousands of people (link stats of course) to this post from Adobe where I submit guest articles and its a pretty good example of a WordPress CMS
Adobe Edge WordPress CMS Article
If however you want to have a site where you have an office full of agents, you want agents to have blogs, you want agents to access agent only real estate documents like listing agreements and other things and you want agents to have CMA forms and numerous other features like the ability to submit articles, photographs, content all of which would require approval than Joomla works well for this.
The Utah site I built for example has the following features using Joomla, Open Realty and WordPress.
- Agent Blogs as Subdomains so agentblog.domain.com
- Document management separated as either agent accessible or visitor accessible
- MLS integrated using a custom IDX Cron Script for Open Realty
- A custom featured property presentation management solution
- Video Uploads and Dynamic Virtual Tour features
- Custom URL's via a hacked version of Open Realty
- Custom templates per site category using Joomlas custom template assignment feature
- A custom commercial WYSIWYG editor (A download on my site now)
- A custom article submission feature for agents
- A school and regional resource directory
- Guided navigation link management
- WordPress with listings from the Open Realty listings Manager in agent blogs
- Agents can display featured listings that they own in their blog
- Menu's are cross managed and all aspects are managed from within Joomla
- They use my Open Realty featured listings anywhere (now a freebie for link bait)
- They use my Open Realty dynamic slide show generator
- They use my WordPress Listings Plugin (in beta but FREE none the less)
- Agents can display featured listings that they own in their blog
- They use my Featured Listings Slider (Free but being updated for 2.4)
- They use my External Joomla modules script; this allows you to display Joomla components outside of Joomla like polls or even menu's inside of WordPress for instance. This makes managing things like Menus across an entire site easy because if you update the menu in Joomla then the menu is updated in WordPress, Open Realty, or whatever else you want.
- They use my registration bridge so when someone registers to an agent blog they are automatically registered to Open Realty to save searches.
- A custom pre-defined search form using Ajax and MooTools for MLS listings.
- Lots more I cant mention but three days after their site went live they got 14 contacts from the site.
The above site owner will be using the UltimateIDX as well for their new sites and agent blogs which are going to be built once UltimateIDX has more to show. Were working on UltimateIDX to make that happen.
In that instance that is a Joomla instance. Anything shy would be a WordPress instance.
I hope you find enough information to make a good decision.