What’s Coming in Version 2 of Local Market Explorer
By: Drew Meyers, Zillow Business Development Specialist | August 26, 2009
We’ve had a lot of great feedback regarding the Local Market Explorer WordPress plugin we announced a couple of weeks ago. As a reminder, the WordPress plugin allows you to quickly and easily create “city pages” inside of WordPress. Examples:
I’m happy to say that, as of few minutes ago, the plugin has been downloaded 572 times already (at this writing).
Two of my good friends, Jay Thompson and Kris Berg, both served as early feedback channels for me and installed the plugin on their blogs (Phoenix Real Estate Guy and San Diego Home Blog respectively). Jay’s initial feedback was that he was not keen on displaying the Flickr photos and that he wanted the ability to create pages for ZIP codes.
Kris’ feedback was similar - she wanted support for ZIP codes rather than just cities. Another friend of mine, Jim Duncan, installed the plugin and wanted more data in the market statistics module. We’re feverishly working on getting version 2 out the door based on the feedback we’ve heard.
Here are additions/improvements coming in version 2 of the Local Market Explorer:
- Support for neighborhoods and ZIP codes rather than just cities
- Add additional market statistics such as median list price and median sold price to the market statistics module
- Turn off modules on a per-URL basis
- Ability to turn off Flickr module while still keeping the text description field
I should also note that, if you have some PHP skills and are looking to do some advanced customization with the plugin, then Matthew Swanson has a great post worth reading over on Geek Estate Blog. If you have any additional feedback, please let us know in Zillow Advice or here in the comments!
If you want to try out the plugin for yourself, you can download it here.
- Stumble it!
- Categories: Partner Relations, Zillow API
Comments
7 Comments so far
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Ajay Mehta on August 26, 2009 11:37 am
572 downloads - wow!
The Local Market Explorer really is a ridiculously cool WordPress plugin. I’m looking forward to seeing it evolve and implemented all over the place.
Matt Dollinger on August 26, 2009 11:45 am
Drew,
This is great stuff and I’m really proud of all the work that you have been doing on this. One of the things that I might consider though is that we have a tendency to do alot of “The Client would like THIS…” rather than asking the client “What would you want to see?”
Also you might want to check out http://www.AmericanTowns.com. I think they do an awesome job of aggregating all of this info into one place.
Keep up the great work!
Matt
Kris Berg on August 26, 2009 12:23 pm
Great plugin, Drew! I agree with Jay that the Flickr photos add little. As you know, I am really looking forward to the next release which allows info to be displayed at the zip code level.
Brandon Green on August 26, 2009 2:16 pm
Wow–572 downloads is impressive!
Hospedagem on August 26, 2009 8:47 pm
Hello buddy nice post. I have bookmark your site.
cool WordPress plugin
Thanks to sharing with us.
Vinny LaBarbera on September 10, 2009 8:51 am
Looking forward to using the plug-in as a standard feature in our Wordpress blogs. Thanks Drew!
Local Class Information from Teachstreet Now Included in Local Market Explorer | GeekEstate Blog - Real Estate Technology News and Analysis for Real Estate Professionals on September 14, 2009 3:38 pm
[...] Version 2 of the plugin, which will include support for neighborhoods and ZIPs, is getting close to completion and I’m certainly looking forward to seeing additional customizations as a result of the added flexibility we’re adding. If there is something specific you’re looking for that’s not currently included, let me know in the comments. | More [...]