What are the main differences between Wordpress blogs and the blogs built into Point2Agent Premium and Professional sites?
For real estate agents, the most important difference is that a self-hosted Wordpress blog can be used with thousands of Wordpress plug-ins and widgets.
That functionality is especially important if you want to take advantage of new plug-ins such as dsIDXpress that enable search engine-friendly listings to be integrated with your blog. With the dsIDXpress plug-in, you can also have widgets such as a search widget, a “newest listings” widget and a featured listings widget. For search engine optimization reasons, this technology is light years beyond the i-framed MLS/IDX search pages typically used on Point2Agent sites.
None of the IDX plug-ins that I’ve researched display the entire MLS database and instead display only a few hundred listings for a search. This limitation may give visitors the wrong perception — that you only have access to this limited array of properties — but having some indexable listings in your site is probably better than having none.
There are also thousands of other widgets and plug-ins that can be used to add additional bells ‘n whistles to a Wordpress blog. What’s more, there are thousands of both free and paid “premium” templates available for Wordpress that make a Wordpress site’s appearance infinitely customizable. (This site is built on the premium Thesis theme.) Point2Agent’s templates are somewhat customizable, at least for those of us who know CSS and HTML.
However, the Big Kahuna – the really important difference for you real estate agents – is those searchable MLS listings. Once you get them, you’ll be amazed at how many people search for homes using MLS numbers or street addresses as search keyphrases.
Related posts: