Website for an Estate Agents

[Dewetha]

Hi Guys,

I have a client who is an estate agent who is looking to give their site a bit of a facelift and also implement some dynamic pages so that they can post the properties they have for sale directly on their website rather than having to link to a third party site.

I would like to give them the ability to upload/modify/remove property themselves rather than it having to go through me.

Has anyone done anything similar for an estate agent/letting agent before?

Did you use a pre built script that you implemented to achieve it?

Any recommendations greatly appreciated.

Regards,

pseudonym
Dewetha Network Services
http://www.dewetha.co.uk/

[AdRock]

I guess this Estate Agent isn' tpart of TEAM as the TEAM website would show houses he has for sale.

Other people have suggested using a CMS such as Joomla or Wordpress but seeing as I have never used them, I can't comment. I preferred making my own CMS system which was tailored to my needs.

Creating the CMS system isn't too bad but hte bit that I found tricky and still haven't found a decent solution is a search script which I bet you would need.

The adding, editing and deleting of records in the database is not difficult at all and you should be able to get plenty of help here. I can even send you some of my scripts that you may be able to adapt if you want.

I only know about TEAM becuase I had to do some systems analysis for a fictious estate agen t at collge a couple years ago

[Marc]

Yes, as AdRock said, i would recommend you build your own CMS. Thus allowing you to know what is going on if there were any upgrades they want to make and also if there were any problems.

Good luck.

[AdRock]

I hope your client understands that it can take a couple of months to get your CMS working correctly to how they want.

I made mine just over a year ago in the summer and I am still making improvements and adding new features so it's not something you can do in a few days unless you have a lot of spare time and know a lot of server side programming such as php

[Lchad]

There are MANY industry specific programs (especially real estate):
I haven't used them but since they are industry specific they seem like they maybe out of the box type solutions for you.
Check these links:
http://www.sitescripts.com/PHP/Industry_Specific_(Real_Estate)/
So many to choose from at that link!
http://www.hotscripts.com/PHP/Script...ate/index.html
I did a search on google for real estate php scripts and there are many many more!

[Nortus]

Open-Realty is an out of the box open source real estate software.

I had a look at it for a client that I am working for at present. It seems to have everything needed for real estate.
The only thing that put me off was looking through the showcase sites, even the ones that are considered really good look like they have come from the school of mid-nineties design and that is usually an indication that building templates for a system might be a pain. (Usually because the code behind the site is a mess.)
That said, I will be looking into it properly over the next day or two and will report back with my honest opinion.

Joomla has a real-estate add-on that is supposed to be brilliant but I have not tried it.

Im currently developing this site which has a similar purpose but have not got to the back-end yet. I'll let you know what I go with. (Probably Joomla as it needs to be finished in the next working week.)