Announcing the Local Market Explorer WP Plugin: A New Way to Create “City Pages” Inside of WordPress
By: Drew Meyers, Zillow Business Development Specialist | August 12, 2009
We’re happy to announce we have just finished the Local Market Explorer WordPress plugin that creates “city pages” inside the WordPress interface.
While the most important feature of any agent or brokerage Web site is a robust search interface to find homes for sale, one of the questions home buyers — particularly those relocating — are trying to answer prior to looking at listings is “where should I live?” Home buyers spend an immense amount of time researching areas they are interested in living to get a better feel for the area. So, as an agent or broker, having that local information on your own Web site is a huge benefit to being a complete real estate resource for your clients throughout the buying process.
There are a number of great local real estate Web sites built entirely on top of WordPress. For example, Ines Ines Hegedus-Garcia’s Miamism, Heather Elias’ LoCO Musings, and Jim Duncan’s Real Central VA are three that do this. WordPress is a powerful platform that more and more agents and brokers seem to be utilizing by the day. As many of you know, Zillow is big on syndicating our data to other Web sites, so we’re naturally intrigued with anything that can help us with this effort. While widgets are easy to add to sidebars within WordPress, plugins provide added flexibility above and beyond the possibilities of widgets.
There are a couple of WordPress plugins built using the Zillow API, such as the CMA plugin built by Realivent, but this is our first official entry into the Wordpress plugin game. We think there is huge value in adding real estate market information, but there’s even more value to bloggers if all the most relevant information consumers are looking at when researching places to live is included in their city pages — so we teamed with a few other companies who have complimentary datasets. The plugin pulls school data from Education.com, local amenity data from Yelp, photos from Flickr, and of course, real estate market statistics and recently sold information from the Zillow API.
Here are the modules currently included in the plugin, along with a sample screen shot for each one.
Market Statistics:
About (text editable by you) and Flickr Photos:
Market Activity:
School Data:
Walk Score:
Yelp:
Some details:
- You’ll need separate API keys for all the APIs, except for Education.com. The links to the API signup pages are accessible via the settings menu of the plugin.
- The plugin does not support neighborhoods or ZIP codes — yet. We plan to do that in version 2 of the plugin (already in the works).
- The Yelp, Walk Score, Market Activity, and About/Flickr modules can be turned on or off, and we’ll continue to add more flexibility to let you utilize this plugin in a variety of ways with future versions of this plugin.
If you’d like to see an example of the plugin, I’ve installed it on the Geek Estate Blog as a demo. Here are a few sample pages:
Once you install the plugin, how do you actually use the plugin? A couple possibilities:
- Whenever you mention one of your target markets in a blog post, you can link to the city page for that area
- Add links to the city pages to your sidebar. For example, if your target markets are Sammamish, Issaquah, and Redmond — below is sample code for your sidebar:
<p align=”center”><img src=”http://www.yoursite.com/wp-content/plugins/local-market-explorer/images/badges/120lmegraphorange.gif”></p> <ul> <li><a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/local/Sammamish/WA/”>Sammamish</a></li> <li><a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/local/Redmond/WA/”>Redmond</a></li> <li><a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/local/Issaquah/WA/”>Issaquah</a></li> </ul>
You can download the Local Market Explorer plugin here in the WordPress Plugin Directory. If you have questions, please check the FAQs.
The plugin was built by Jonathan Mabe and Andrew Mattie, both of whom have day jobs with Diverse Solutions (a member of the Zillow API program). I have to extend a huge thanks to them for their great work on this plugin.
For the WordPress bloggers out there — what do you think? Do you have any specific requests for the next version of this plugin? Perhaps more market data, a Twitter module, ability to automatically link to your local pages within blog posts, more flexibility to modify the sidebar widget, or a module that brings in data from Wikipedia? Please leave your feedback on this Zillow Advice thread or in the comments field below.
- Stumble it!
- Categories: Partner Relations, Zillow API
Comments
26 Comments so far
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Sero on August 12, 2009 11:42 am
Thx. That’s very usefull information.
Walk Score Blog » Blog Archive » Zillow Releases WordPress Plugin with Walk Score on August 12, 2009 11:55 am
[...] Zillow just released their Local Market Explorer plugin for WordPress that provides a great overview of the home values, schools, local businesses, Walk Score, and photos of a city. [...]
jf.sellsius.theclozing on August 12, 2009 6:13 pm
Nice job. This is a great way to layer information.
If an agentincorporate this plug-in with Apture.com (which works dandy on Wordpress), they will blow the doors off the competition.
I’m imagining some folks are green with envy.
Zillow New Wordpress Plugin for Real Estate on August 13, 2009 7:54 am
[...] Zillow blog via [...]
Joe Spake on August 13, 2009 3:41 pm
can you tell me what this error message means?
Warning: LMEPage::include(/home/content/j/o/e/joespake2/html/memphisrealestatebuzz/wp-content/themes/thesis-15/page.php) [function.LMEPage-include]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/content/j/o/e/joespake2/html/memphisrealestatebuzz/wp-content/plugins/local-market-explorer/lme-client.php on line 36
This is the result when I enter URL for my area.
Drew Meyers on August 13, 2009 3:44 pm
Joe-
That sounds like an issue with the Thesis theme you are using. Unfortunately, I can’t help you resolve it. I would suggest posting a question in the Wordpress forums where more developers hang out - http://wordpress.org/support/
Creating City Pages with Wordpress – Local Market Explorer WP Plugin | GeekEstate Blog - Real Estate Technology News and Analysis for Real Estate Professionals on August 13, 2009 4:01 pm
[...] disclosure: I was in charge of coordinating this project on behalf of my employer, Zillow.com and we announced the plugin on Zillow Blog yesterday. The plugin was built by Jonathan Mabe and Andrew Mattie (Andrew contributes to Geek Estate), both [...]
Gainesville Real Estate on August 13, 2009 5:01 pm
Thanks for all the useful information!
Andrew Mattie on August 13, 2009 6:55 pm
@Joe: Based on the error, it seems that your theme doesn’t have a WordPress page template. This template, which would be in a file named page.php in the theme directory, is used by any plugins and any standalone pages you have to display content that doesn’t fit the format of a normal blog post. You can find out more about it here on WordPress’s page template codex. With the theme you already have, it would likely take a qualified WordPress developer just a few minutes or so to modify one of the other template files in your theme to become a post theme. You may even be able to straight-up _copy_ (not move) the post.php file to page.php and have everything work the way you want it to.
Seann Birkelund on August 13, 2009 10:37 pm
Nice work Drew! It’s great to see it live.
Brad Officer - Jacksonville real estate agent on August 14, 2009 7:47 am
Cool plug in. I’ll attempt to add this to my thesis theme….sounds like some issues with integrating within Thesis?
New Local Market Explorer plugin for Wordpress on August 14, 2009 2:10 pm
[...] Great news for those of you who are building your web sites in Wordpress. Zillow has announced the release of the new Local Market Explorer WP Plugin. [...]
Joe Spake on August 14, 2009 2:44 pm
Brad, I am not a coder, but I tried everything I could. I put it on the Thesis fourm.
don on August 16, 2009 6:32 pm
This looks very interesting, is there a list with the cities that are currently being supported with this?
Drew Meyers on August 17, 2009 12:05 pm
Don-
The plugin will work with any city where there is data available (which is most cities in the US).
zillow.com Offers New WordPress Plugin | propertyadguru.com on August 17, 2009 2:56 pm
[...] post on the zillow.com blog explains the overall aim of the [...]
Market Explorer Plugin for Wordpress great for creating local content | Consistent Clients - Real Estate Marketing on August 18, 2009 9:10 am
[...] From FOREM: Great news for those of you who are building your web sites in Wordpress. Zillow has announced the release of the new Local Market Explorer WP Plugin. [...]
Dolores Farmer on August 19, 2009 7:40 am
I am unable to get the plug in to operate. Checked for proper PHP and Wordpress versions, installed the plugin, activated it, got the API’s, etc. Having been trying for days with no luck
New Local Market Explorer plugin for Wordpress | Everyone Read It! on August 30, 2009 6:39 pm
[...] Great news for those of you who are building your web sites in Wordpress. Zillow has announced the release of the new Local Market Explorer WP Plugin. [...]
Top Widgets for Real Estate Blogs | Business-Blog-Consultant.com on September 14, 2009 1:21 am
[...] New Local Market Explorer Wordpress Plugin – Creates “City Pages” based on a mashup of these services - Zillow market stats and info, Yelp, Walk Score, Flickr, School Data from Education.com. The plugin does not support neighborhoods or ZIP codes – Zillow is working on that for next version. [...]
TeachStreet now included in new Zillow Local WordPress plugin | TeachStreet Blog on September 14, 2009 3:05 pm
[...] to the folks at Zillow for being so inviting — a few weeks ago, they released the new Local Market Explorer Wordpress plug-in, making it really easy for real estate agents and other locally-focused bloggers to add hyperlocal [...]
John whites on September 23, 2009 3:45 am
Ah.. that’s a great static shown thanks for sharing such a wonderful piece of information… will like to see more and more…
zillow.com Updates Local Market Explorer | propertyadguru.com on October 5, 2009 4:10 pm
[...] Local Market Explorer was first released, zillow.com outlined its advantages: “Home buyers spend an immense amount of time researching areas they are [...]
Release Equity on November 3, 2009 6:30 am
This wp plugin is great news, thanks.
Charlotte Real Estate on November 3, 2009 5:38 pm
love the data,and the all in one location- and consumers should love it…
Question,any SEO folks like to venture whether this helps or hurts a site SEO wise? The way I’m seeing it, if we all install it- hundreds or thousands of backlinks go directly to Zillow, and the others, insuring they stay atop the Google pages in everyone’s area…
Trulia had to deal with this a while back with their widget, wound up being able to give back atleast 5 backlinks to all users.. what about Zillow?
Drew Meyers on November 5, 2009 7:51 pm
Hey Terry-
The plugin populates compelling content on your own site and is all about giving your audience what they are looking for. Zillow has always given followed links off your profile page - check it out. Also, each link out utilizes our built-in co-branding functionality.
I just took a look at your mortgage page - I’d urge you to take a look at the mortgage center WP plugin as a way to give your consumers real time rate information.