Interested in seeing more “Sold” signs with your real estate business? Take a look at your website. If you don’t have one that’s your first problem. If you do, ask yourself if it’s clean, modern and easy to navigate.
One big problem with the real estate industry is that agents get sold on websites from franchisors or affiliates. These include franchisors like Remax and Baird and Warner. Many agents partner with companies like these, and they get all sorts of incredible benefits. Unfortunately, however, the websites usually aren’t good at all.
However, you can still be associated with your real estate company and make your own WordPress website. This way, you have complete control over the design and functionality, and you can boost your sales by utilizing the best WordPress real estate plugins. The plugins, or extensions you install to add functionality, include highly advanced property listing plugins, options for adding mortgage calculators to your site, along with integrations with Zillow.
If you’re getting started from scratch, I’d recommend finding a real estate WordPress theme. But older WordPress sites can be improved with the help of a solid WordPress real estate plugin.
The Pieces Needed to Build an Effective Real Estate Website on WordPress
Since many people reading this article are new to WordPress altogether, it helps to explain the elements that will go together to create the ideal real estate site. We’ll be listing the best WordPress real estate plugins below, but you’re only going to select maybe one or two of them for your website.
The rest of the plugins you decide on won’t have a direct relation to real estate. Instead, they’ll protect your site, make it faster, allow for social sharing and give you marketing options. Since you shouldn’t install too many plugins, it’s important to stick with the reputable essentials.
For a brand new real estate site, here’s how you would piece it together:
- Find and install a WordPress real estate theme.
- Install basic WordPress plugins for things like marketing and SEO.
- Install a WordPress real estate plugin (listed below) to improve on the theme or add a feature that’s missing.
Once you’ve found a theme, it’s time to make sure your site has the basics. Therefore, every real estate agent, company or developer should launch a new site with the following plugins:
- Yoast SEO – An SEO plugin for improving your Google rankings and optimizing each page and post based on specific keywords.
- Easy Social Share – Here’s your marketing go-to. This offers email marketing tools, a list builder, social media sharing buttons and more. We, in fact, use this on our Kinsta site. Make sure to also check out our in-depth post for more social media plugins.
- Akismet – This essential plugin identifies and archives spam comments and messages. Therefore, your site looks professional and you’re not forced to sift through the spam yourself.
- All in One WP Security and Firewall – Block everything from brute force attacks to malicious files intrusions.
For every recommendation above, there are dozens of alternatives for you to use. Here are some lists to give you some tips and a better selection of plugins:
You’ll also be happy to learn that Kinsta handles caching for you, so you don’t need a plugin for that, yet you can still keep your site’s performance up.
Best WordPress Real Estate Plugins
Now it’s time to move onto the real estate plugins. These are made just for selling, buying and renting homes and apartments. We’ve compiled a quick list of our recommendations (in no particular order,) but if you’d like more complete, in-depth reviews, continue on.
1. Estatik
Estatik is definitely the king of all real estate plugins, seeing as how it offers a wide range of features in one plugin. Yes, you get the listings and multilingual support. Yes, you receive a responsive layout with a photo gallery. Yes, you can create a slideshow or integrate with social media.
The Estatik PRo version goes for $89, and it provides a full suite of tools like customizable labels, frontend subscription management, and an advanced search module.
Why This WordPress Real Estate Plugin Rocks
- Even the paid version is worth it. You only have to pay the one-time fee, then you can pretty much turn any WordPress site into a full-fledged real estate hub.
- It includes a great map view, eliminating any reason to get a map plugin.
- A mortgage calculator is also packaged into the plugin.
- The plugin integrates with PayPal to accept subscriptions for clients who want to add listings on a consistent basis.
- It’s multilingual for connecting with more customers.
- There’s a slideshow widget for showcasing all of your homes.
- The support is really good.
- The premium version integrates with the MLS.
Downsides of this WordPress Real Estate Plugin
- There isn’t much bad to say about the Estatik plugin, but some users have had problems with 404 errors and images in listings, but the support team seems to quickly resolve issues like these.
2. Real Estate Pro – WordPress Plugin
The Real Estate Pro plugin comes highly recommended for a few reasons. First of all, it’s one of those rare plugins where the settings, pages, and templates are all configured right after installation. You truly don’t have to touch anything for it to look pretty nice.
Secondly, the plugin allows for a clean listings modules with a beautiful image gallery. Customers can purchase through your website by going through PayPal or Stripe. Furthermore, it’s fully responsive for clients to browse listings on their mobile phones and tablets.
Why This WordPress Real Estate Plugin Rocks
- Real Estate Pro is compatible and integrated with MailChimp. Therefore, all new customer emails are stored in your database.
- You can use Visual Composer with the plugin.
- It allows you to configure subscriptions.
- Charge for things like adding a listing, claiming a listing, selling a VIP badge or even accessing the site.
- The plugin translates into 13 languages.
- The users that come to your site can bid to get the top search rank. Essentially, you could run a listings site with the plugin and not even be a real estate agent.
Downsides of this WordPress Real Estate Plugin
- Although it comes with translations, it’s not that clear how to make the translations.
- The help files are lacking.
- It doesn’t integrate with the MLS.
3. WPL Real Estate
With the WPL Real Estate plugin, you get a chance to list agents, share a map view of your listings and offer an advanced search for your clients. The main reason I like this one so much is because it caters to agencies with a handful of agents. You can post agent information and share photos to give buyers or sellers more on who they’ll be working with.
The WPL plugin has some native and compatible themes, but it should work fine with just about any WordPress theme. There is a free plugin with decent features, but the true functionality comes in the form of the WPL Pro version. Unfortunately, you have to ask for a free quote in order to see how much it’s going to cost you.
Why This WordPress Real Estate Plugin Rocks
- The plugin connects easily with the MLS.
- The customer support is rock solid.
- There’s more to it than just property listings. For example, you get agent listings and an awesome search feature.
Downsides of this WordPress Real Estate Plugin
- The multilingual features aren’t included with the free version.
- In fact, quite a few customization options are omitted from the free version. For instance, you can’t hide the address, accept multiple currencies or adjust the “More Details” section if you don’t have the premium version.
4. Easy Property Listings
Easy Property Listings has more of a freemium business model, where the regular plugin is completely free, but several extensions are available for you to buy. For example, you can buy the Comparables extension and spend around $47.
The stats are rather interesting since you can look at how many listings have been posted in a certain timeframe. You can also check how many of those you have been sold. Listing widgets are provided as well. Therefore, you can reveal some property listings in a sidebar next to your blog feed.
Why This WordPress Real Estate Plugin Rocks
- The listings don’t need much in terms of customization. This is one of the easier plugins to show your listings and see them displayed beautifully on your website.
- It integrates with WordPress frameworks like Genesis, Headway, and iThemes Builder.
- 100s of theme templates come with the plugin.
- The customer support is strong.
- The plugin delivers over 150 custom fields for the ultimate listing customization interface.
- The API documentation is available to give more experienced developers more freedom.
Downsides of this WordPress Real Estate Plugin
- The following paid extensions should definitely be part of the regular, free plugin (but they aren’t): Sliders, Listing Templates and Advanced Mapping.
5. Essential Real Estate
The Essential Real Estate plugin gives you a lot of premium features in their free version of the plugin. You can easily customize and override the layout and functions. It supports global payments, single list properties, single agents, and more.
This plugin essentially has everything you need to start a Real Estate website. It also has an impressive 5-star rating on the repository! It has custom post types, taxonomy features for properties, agents, packages, user packages, invoices, and even transaction logs. You can add new listings, edit them, and much more.
Why This WordPress Real Estate Plugin Rocks
- Easily add/modify all attributes for a listing (such as city, state, status, neighborhood, price, etc.)
- This plugin has tons of features packed in!
- You can submit properties via both the frontend and the backend.
- Pays close attention to SEO, allowing you to even set the slugs for custom post types.
Downsides of this WordPress Real Estate Plugin
- Due to everything, the plugins includes it can be a little overwhelming.
- Longer learning curve.
WordPress Real Estate Themes (Bonus)
Even though this post is regarding plugins, we couldn’t leave out a couple really high-quality real estate themes you should check out.
1. WPCasa
WPCasa is probably the most widely known WordPress theme framework built to satisfy real estate agencies’ various needs. It is a flexible, fully responsive framework offering countless options for customization.
Edit screens and theme settings are extremely easy to handle with the use of drag & drop widgets. There are numerous layout options available, the background and the components of the header are also customizable, but if that wouldn’t be enough, you can create your truly bespoke website by using one of WPCasa’s professionally designed child themes, or making your own.
All WPCasa themes and child themes are available in several languages, which can easily be added and edited in the WordPress admin. Continuous support is provided in three languages to help users get the best out of the purchased theme. Purchase includes future updates and installs on unlimited sites.
The icing on the cake is that you can not just look at the front end demo before buying the theme, but you can create a personal test site for 7 days free of charge to experience all the advantages and drawbacks of the theme.
2. AgentPress
AgentPress is also a fully-featured realty WordPress theme, which is truly a great deal for real estate professionals.
Purchase includes access to AgentPress Pro and the Genesis framework too. Responsive design, unlimited support, and updates are of course provided. Again, several layout options, custom background, header, and menu are available. What makes AgentPress special is its smart listing system based on the combination of dsIDXpress plugin and dsSearchAgent. This mixture provides indexable MLS listing system, which is also good for SEO purposes.
Does Your Site Have the Best WordPress Real Estate Plugins?
As you may have noticed, you don’t really need all of these WordPress real estate plugins. Sure, you might go with something like Estatik for listing your properties and WP Amortization Calculator for displaying additional financing information, but there’s no need to have two home listing plugins. Therefore, we recommend reading these reviews, then testing out the ones that sound interesting.
Then you can install the necessary WordPress plugins for security, SEO, social media, and more (the standard plugins we covered at the beginning of this article). If you have any questions about the best WordPress real estate plugins, or if you’d like to talk about your experience with any of the plugins, let us know in the comments section below.
Brian has a huge passion for WordPress, has been using it for over a decade, and even develops a couple of premium plugins. Brian enjoys blogging, movies, and hiking. Connect with Brian on Twitter.
Excellent post and plugins suggestions! I’m enjoy to work with almost of them, I use to play with much plugins while testing themes compatibility.
I’ve been testing many of these plugins for the past few months. Estatik is easy but doesn’t allow much customization. Real estate pro isnt free. You should make that distinction clear. IMPress also has a nice look but no customization. I’ve just begun testing essential real estate today, it looks promising but I had to send an email requesting more information that I couldn’t learn from their documentation.
Bottom line for me is without customization that allows me to create a look a feel similar to my site most of these plugins aren’t worth the time. They will gladly offer customization after you pay for their premium product and will charge you an additional fee for customization. I can do this on my own.
I wouldn’t recommend for any reason to use any theme of WpCasa. I have had too much problems with the themes, add-ons and custom developments.
They don’t care about customer support. It seems to be just one person behind WpCasa, so I assume this is the reason of the lack of reply from their part to my several requirements to customer support (…more than two and a half month waiting).
After more than a year of experience with WpCasa the best recommendation I could give to anyone is to look for a true settled company adn with real customer support.
Loved how you really Rocked this article! :) Nicely done!
I was googling to see what the latest RE stuff available for another upcoming project and thought I’d throw in a couple honorable mentions since they are both commonly used by many other RE web-developers like us.
I’ve used most of your list above for doing various client projects over the years and there are some themes and plugins missing from the list that I thought your (developer) readers may also be interested in.
We build a lot of standalone FSBO/Rentals/Community type sites with just a few off-the-shelf themes such as WPResidencene from themeforest. Theme comes with everything needed for basic RE sites like, built-in Maps, Agents/Customers portal and even has Listing Alerts! It also includes paid listing submissions if you need that sort of thing.
Pros – beautiful theme with tons of built-ins.
Cons – like many do-all RE themes, having to make custom core changes for clients i.e modify core code into child theme etc. so clients get things “their-way” can be daunting for non php programmers.
If you need to move up from that using (real) RETS data, then I’d suggest RETS PRO. I’ve used it to build out every kind of crazy realtors request that you can imagine. As a RE web-developer needing to work with RETS data, there is either realtyna or rets pro. I’ve used them both and only rets pro had the easy-to-use flexibility/scalability needed to do the custom things needed by our RE clients, i.e multi-rets into a single db etc, literally anything a developer could want is already packed into it.
Pros – RETS PRO is a developers dream since they built it with us in mind.
Cons – Like Realtyna-Pro, RETS PRO cost about the same – A LOT!
Hopefully that helps readers that are web-developers or planning on hiring one to do something similar.
Thanks, very useful
PropertHive is a plug-in that I came across recently and looks to have all you’d want and more especially with a tenants portal etc.
Infact this is someone that would be good to know, do any of these plugins have a feature where buckle landlords, vendors etc can have an area to track things and list additional properties and also another place for tenants and buyers to monitor, report issues and pay etc…
Which of the above mentioned (if any) might be good for a real estate marketplace similar to Zillow concept where you list as many agents as you can and sell subscription plans to them?
Hey! good job, thanks for sharing important WordPress plugins. I will try to these plugins in my new projects.
I’d add Showcase IDX to the list. We’ve switched to them from another vendor and are beyond impressed. Still need a solid hosting provider and good agent branding or content but without their search tools and listing pages for our buyers, they’d be going to Zillow. ShowcaseIDX.com
this scenario amuses me all the time, I wonder if the developer knows anything about real estate at all. The moment I see feature such as search > property type? land/office, but there is an option to select the number of bedroom and bathroom! LOL. agree ? in fact, 90% of the ThemeForest template have this issue!
I tried the Pro version of Estatik on a client site and the best way to describe it hearkens back to a phrase that Chevy Chase coined on Saturday Night Live years ago: “Not Ready for Prime Time”.
It’s not a bad plugin, but it has two glaring problems that killed it for my client. Thing 1 was the fact that when you added new fields for listings (a somewhat clunky process in itself), you then get to re-order them in the way you want them displayed. So “Beds” and “Baths” come together, for example. This works fine for the RE Client-facing side of the software, but for the agent interface, everything is scrambled and displayed in the order you entered them into the database.
Thing 2 is that there is no “Broker” back-end interface. You are either a Client viewing properties, an Agent editing only your own properties, or the WordPress Admin with access to editing all the properties. So if you assign your office manager to that role, s/he can also mess with all your WordPress backend stuff. This one is really not acceptable.
Overall, the backend interface “works”, and as I said, it is a little clunky. The architecture is confusing for a skilled WP admin and developer, so imagine a non-techy Broker trying to navigate it. My client said “no thanks, you do it.”
Support is laudable. I got very quick responses to my questions and to my requests for changes, but in the end, they did not do any of the changes. They even promised that the scrambled-order thing would be fixed in the next release, it never was.
As I said, I think it’s a good start, but it is really not ready for prime time and I removed it from my client’s site. I wish that someone would have done a really in-depth review of this thing and discovered this. Oh, I guess I just did.
Very useful, Randy, thanks – this was shortlisted but definitely looks like I should be looking elsewhere for now, at least.
If you’re based in the UK, Property Hive is a Free to use WordPress plugin, to meet all of your agencies needs.
We offer free and open-source software for WordPress. You can be fully operational in a matter of minutes, with the option to either just run your website or manage your entire agency.
The extra add ons we offer range from Managing bookings; Seamless integration with major property portals; Real-time data feeds with the likes of Zoopla, and On the Market; To the little things which give your users a seamless searching experience such as map search and draw a search.
All of this is completely customizable. You can hire third-party developers and designers to help with any customization if needs be, at a fraction of the price of corporate companies.
Take a look for yourself here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/propertyhive/
Estatik support is brutal. takes 24-48hrs per reply and they don’t fully read your queries. I’m getting a refund. I’m not sure how it’s ranked so highly on so many comparisons.
Live chat for pre-sales and only email for post-sale support.
Anyone have an actual example of it running on a site?
Hi,
We developed the free Real Estate Right Now plugin. With our plugin, you can create your own fields and Search Box. Slider Price Range and more.
The plugin provides a lot of options for each field type, which gives you unlimited possibility to manage, search and filter the custom fields for any agency.
You don’t need another plugin or extension (neither coding) to complete the job. Agents (team) table and page included.
You can download it at the WordPress repository:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/real-estate-right-now/
Cheers,
Bill
Plugin Developer
Thanks for letting us know Bill.
As I am associated with the real estate company. I want to make my own WordPress website and your post really helps me a lot in how to enhance my business. Thanks for sharing such an amazing post with us.
Thanks for this great and detailed review. I wish to add the need to recognize that folks use WordPress Page Builders these days to design sites. Some of the Page Builders are actually Theme Builders and make it easy for anyone to create themes, design and customize websites with little or no technical knowledge of codes and CSS.
This means that Plugin authors should take that into consideration and create Plugins that will easily work with the popular Theme and Page Builders such as DIVI, Elementor.
Any Plugin that does not allow for easy integration with the major Page Builders is lagging behind and need updating.
Some of these have been removed from the WordPress repository for security threats, bad practices, or just haven’t been updated in over a year. When you update the date for an article, please confirm the products are still active and available.
Hi Randy, thanks for letting us know, this was already queued and now the post has been updated.