Real Estate Forums

jntwebdesigns

Just found this thread and have read Jared's blog numerous times, and worked with clients and colleagues that speak very highly of him. This post caught my eye mainly because of the mention of the Open Realty forum moderation. I really like the Open Realty program, it is flexible and expandable for most any type of website, not just real estate. We have just finished a online addon shopping cart system for selling Open Realty addons, and it is built entirely with Open Realty!!!

But, when we decided to announce it on the forum, we were met with great friction. It was first posted in the General Discussion section only to be removed. Then I posted in the Show Off section... a section meant to show off your Open Realty websites. Since this was a site built with Open Realty, thought it would be acceptible. It was also removed. Then I posted a new addon in the Commercial addon section, only to have the link to the addon moderated (removed).

The response I got was that the site contained an addon that competed with the Contact Form that Transparent Technologies sells. So, in other words, we can not mention the site at all on the Open Realty forums.

This has been an ongoing point of concern among the Open Realty followers for some time now. Many of the people I have dealt with from the Open Realty forums have mentioned the responses recieved from the moderators, and the lack of useful answers.

Jared

JNTWebDesign; SO glad to see you in the forums, I work with Al Smith frequently when it comes to addons and he mentioned that we should all start a little venture as you well know about.

What you say above in its entirety is why I was banned from OpenRealty. They dont like my blog apparently. Actually now that I think of it I don't like my blog, strange, I never really realized that until just now. I must rework it someday.

Anyway, JNT, We should work together to build a site dedicated to Addons and plugins where we could maybe build a site that is fee based or something where professional publishers of templates and addons could market their products instead of being beat up for trying to do so.

I have new found respect for Mick G. over at OpenRealty however, I think he has made a full circle and seems to be a pretty decent guy. I had lost respect for him for a while with the militant attitude toward members of the forum. He's a clever, intelligent and knowledgeable person about OpenRealty. But I have noticed he tends to treat people with more respect and understanding.

The EZProRealty is 95% done, the new component is being completed by the programmers now as I'm told and they sent me a link to the admin panel which is SOOOOOOOPER sharp looking and clean. They added in GoogleMaps, multiple slideshow options, new search options, some AJAX code and many little things that make all the difference in the world for PROFESSIONAL REALTORS specifically a bit better support for IDX and RETS integration.

Anyway, glad to see you.

You can always PM me.

~ Jared

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Every battle is won or lost before it is ever fought.
www.JaredRitchey.com
UltimateIDX Solution

clydd

I have been searching for a new stable and scalable platform than what I started out with.
Sadly for the past one week I have been stalled ..just running around waiting for answers on the Open Realty Forum.

I guess I have come full circle in my quest. it started out last year with Joomla as base, and then tried various components with it. (Directory components like mosets, sobi2 cms realty etc) finally settled for the nice and good ezrealty.

But as my needs are growing, and reading Jared's comments on whether ezrealty would cope with bigger datatbases etc, I started re looking at Open realty. I will for sure be moving to higher end servers when finally done.

My site which has been running free of cost to all agents / owners, now bridges/integrates/wraps joomla +a forum +ezrealty + wordpress seamlessly, although my atrocious css skills give way sometimes and thats the only thing thats shows.

Anyhow, back on the Subject of Open Realty:

I was actually surprised that such a platform has not been made or geared up for a multi agent or fsbo situation. It looks like its been created for single agents or bulk upload only.

What am I talking about?? consider this. Say a home owner or free lance agent wants to do a listing.. he then selects Add a listing and selects a Country ...then a State .. (taking the USA that is 52 states in a dropdown) Now he moves to City .... guess what! ALL THE CITIES of all the states in the USA come as a drop down list!.. Heaven forbid you need to put in counties or "localities" as they call them should OR be used for other countries.

There is no intelligent chaining of fields either in the backend when adding a listing nor in the front end when searching. (front end chaining is done via a addon using a xml list of cities etc and ajax)

This is a serious shortcoming for such a mature platform, where subcategories or parent/child relationship of fields cant be done.

So to get all this done you need custom, custom, custom addons that make the claim that OR is open source and free a bit redundant.

Lastly I can't help it... but I think all should know and I agree with Jared, even if he has made peace with the mods /admins at OR forums.. that "certain" mods always want to have the last word. I have had one thread shut down so I could not post a retort.

Regards

Jared

Hello Clydd,

FSBO's are dead and will likely not be around in the future on any large scale. No one trusts them and most are built by those with a great deal of wishful thinking in hopes of instant cash. The fact is that there are way to many FREE very commercialized services like Trulia and Yahoo Real Estate for anyone to bother with an FSBO site. Given the economy and condition of the Real Estate market it would be foolish for a Realtor to invest in such sites to promote listings that do littler or no additional marketing.

If you think for a moment that we can build a WordPress OpenRealty site and host it for a year for under $300 for all of an agents or offices properties; Why would anyone spend $30, $40, $50 a month to be on someone elses domain?

BTW EZPR Component and WP Realty are ready for use and download.

__________________
Every battle is won or lost before it is ever fought.
www.JaredRitchey.com
UltimateIDX Solution

clydd

Hi Jared,
Hmm yes I see what you mean about FSBO. in mature markets like US etc.
Here in Dubai it's a whole diff story!

I'm actually not looking at building an Fsbo site. I just have a free resource for all... agents , owners, developers etc (here in dubai mainly).
To encourage the use of technology when presenting and explaining real estate projects and so that they all imbibe and practice ..well best practices!.

My point about the lack of Sub categories in OR, is that there is no way to link "counties" or "localities" to a city.
Thus if you want to provide dropdown lists for agents to select a locality.. all the localities and cities of a country show up! when listing a property.

Being able to preset localities reduced the chance of searches showing for example
Austin, Texas(10 listings) , awwStin, Texas(2 listings) aUstin, Texas(4 listings) etc...
Just because each agent or owner mis-spelt the location name.

Regards!

Such sub category defining is well done in joomla's ezrealty for instance.

clydd

Im trying to download the Core files of EzPro Realty and the link is going nowhere on the Ezpro realty site

bpizzy

I posted this to another thread but didn't get an answer I was looking for. Hopefully someone here can help:

I am looking to move a website over to OR and use it as a CMS and also for its IDX capabilities. I am running into one big problem I can't seem to solve. The page Title tag is used to directly generate the "Search Engine Friendly" url, which would be cool if my page title was something like "Real Estate". However as any SEO knows it should be something more like: "FSBO Louisville Real Estate | Flat Fee Realty | Property Management". Is there some way to build the permalinks for a separate field? Does anyone know an Open Realty plugin to fix this?

Thanks for your help.

Jared

bpizzy; I have some good news then, WP Realty version 2.0 is supposed to be ready tomorrow. It will be a free download, it uses dynamic URL's generated either by pre configured settings or can be overridden by you on a per page basis.

The only problem in using for your project is that it requires WordPres as its a WordPress plugin.

Jared

__________________
Every battle is won or lost before it is ever fought.
www.JaredRitchey.com
UltimateIDX Solution

bpizzy

How does the plugin link to OR and how about all the IDX MLS listings that I am having automatically fed into my database? Is it a simple integration or will there be conflicts? I am very familiar with wordpress. I am not very familiar with OR.

Thanks a lot for your help.

Jared

No linking to OR is required and as far as IDX or RETS from the MLS, scripting is required to get the data in. MLS data providers are too broad in scope and structure to have a one off turnkey fits all solution. Every MLS or IDX I've ever worked with it has required custom coding.

__________________
Every battle is won or lost before it is ever fought.
www.JaredRitchey.com
UltimateIDX Solution