As Social Media Manager for the National Association of REALTORS®, I was lucky enough to be involved in an amazing string of events that eventually changed the way Google and other search engines were allowed to index listings from agent provided IDX’s. Long story short, they can now.

During that debate, I postulated that while in theory, I agreed that the rule needed to be changed, I also felt that the advantage that the agent had gained would be short lived. As of today, it officially is.

Diverse Solutions has released their new IDXPress plugin to the public, and from the input I’ve received from some of the beta testers, this affordable and simple to set up plugin is going to allow the same sort of Google-Lovin’-Indexing that was considered an unfair advantage less than a year ago.

If you’re hoping to grow organic SERPs from listing based Google queries, experimenting with a plugin like this is a no-brainer. It won’t be long before this sort of tool is required simply to keep up with everyone else.

Registration for Real Estate WordCamp is now open. There are three tiers of pricing. ALL Four get you the same access to the event.

All net proceeds for this event are going to mffo.org. All of Real Estate WordCamps costs have already been covered by sponsorship commitments. Therefore, all of the admission proceeds will go to charity. The more you spend, the more that goes to charity.

Give what you feel is appropriate. Some people feel like they are more committed to learning when they pay more for an event. Go right ahead and do that as well. By organizing an event for charity, the talent wanting to present is top notch. You could spend a lot more than $200 on a conference and learn a ton less.

Register for Real Estate WordCamp

Check out this free WordPress Plugin from Bring The Blog. The Real Estate Chart of the Day embeds a new chart (I’m guessing every day right?) on your sidebar. This is a pretty simple way to add dynamic content to your blog. I’ll leave it running here on this site for today. Here’s a screenshot if you come along later.

Dan Green, who wrote this plugin is speaking at Real Estate WordCamp. We’re still ironing out the details on his topic, but this is just another example of the great talent attending the event!

In doing a presentation with Mariana Wagner, Ginger Wilcox and Kelley Koehler last year, I laughed as she told the crowd,

“My three partners call themselves geeks. They’re not geeks. They might be geek-lite. But they are not geeks. I’m a geek.”

It’s so true, Kelley is a former software engineer that would rather sell real estate than code all day. But she knows her stuff. When I get confused trying to hack around in the code, I Skype Kelley. Now here’s your chance to do the same. Registration opens this weekend. Are you ready to mix it up with the geekiest geeks in real estate?

Developers often turn to the WordPress Showcase for inspiration. The site spotlights unique examples of the ways WordPress can be pushed. It’s cutting edge. There’s just a handful of real estate related sites in the showcase. Most prominent among them is the R&W Mosman and Neutral Bay Real Estate site developed by Peter Ricci.

Peter is presenting at Real Estate WordCamp. His goal is to show developers how they can duplicate a site like this in a manner of minutes. More details are coming soon, but this is good stuff folks. The premier real estate WordPress developers on Earth are coming to this WordCamp. Are you?

For more, check out Peter’s LinkedIn profile, or follow him on Twitter.

At the end of the day, everyone who attends Real Estate WordCamp will have a better understanding of how to use WordPress to build a real estate web site with a great user experience. This is my goal. Throughout the day, we’ll be talking nuts and bolts, but to get us all started, I want to make everyone think of what might be possible.

Redfin’s business model has ruffled a few feathers in the real estate industry. They rely heavily on empowering a consumer to do most of their shopping online. So an obvious key component to such a business model is a killer user experience online. It’s my opinion that Redfin leads the industry in creating this experience.

This is why I asked the man who designed Redfin’s site, Matt Goyer to open Real Estate WordCamp. Matt’s going to talk about the strategy involved in building the site. He’s going to show us all what makes a great user experience so we can spend the rest of the day finding ways to leverage WordPress is building such a site.

For more, check out Matt’s LinkedIn Profile or follow him on Twitter.

Eric’s writing a “Project WordPress” series over at GeekEstate and starts off with a great introductory post on preferred plugins.

“there are plugins that have more features than these, but I choose these plugins because of their combined features & support. There’s nothing worse than upgrading WP only to find that one of your plugins is no longer supported, and so breaks your site (which has happened to me.)”

Full Story

I really wanted to keep Kubrick as the theme. But, it was really hard to serve up sponsorship ads with the default theme, and I got tired of developers offering to trade me a “real” design for sponsorship. Since my goal is to raise as much money as possible with sponsorship dollars, I’m not doing any trades. I busted out Thesis and built that “real” site myself. Yeah, I’m sure some pro’s could have done better, but I’m pretty happy.

Now the site is ready to serve up some banner ads that readers will actually see. There are eight slots and only eight slots. Each sponsor will have their banner served with seven other sponsors and one charity. Early sponsors show up longer and more often.

Interested? Details here.

I’ve been playing with the new Simple Real Estate Pack for WordPress plugin this week and it’s pretty cool. I’m using it to add school data from education.com’s API.  I like the way it renders tabbed information for elementary, middle and high schools. Simple Real Estate Pack is free. Go check it out.

I’m going to use this blog to track products, services and news that effect WordPress developers and users in the real estate industry. The hot news today is that Brian Gardner’s Agent Press product has officially launched.

I am very pleased to announce that AgentPress has officially launched! The AgentPress theme is an ideal solution for real estate agents looking to market themselves and rise above their competition while being fully optimized for the highest search engine results. more…