Which WordPress Theme Is Best for My Real Estate Site?

Clients keep asking me whether or not the Agent Press wordpress theme is the way to go…

Quick answer? Maybe. But probably not. Agent press is nice looking, and has been designed to appeal to real estate agents… but that’s about it. The theme itself won’t generate leads, and in the case of Agent Press, I might argue that some of the inherent property listing functionality could actually hurt your lead generation efforts….

The "Agent Press" WordPress Theme Is A Cool Idea, But Not The Best Real Estate Lead Generation Solution

How Might Agent Press Hurt Your Real Estate Lead Generation Efforts?

The fact that you can easily add and feature your listings within a theme like Agent Press is cool, but if you think about the opportunity cost of not posting your listings to a blog in a more “lead generation” friendly way, the importance of having a Real Estate friendly theme starts to fade.

What I mean is this — The real estate listing you post to your blog directly using Agent Press’s listing posting feature won’t be syndicated to Trulia, Zillow, Google Base, etc. Instead, it’ll just sit there on your site, actually competing with it’s own posting on syndication partners diminishing the chance that your listing will garner organic search engine traffic.

A Better Approach To Posting Your Listings To Your Blog

Instead we advocate using a 3rd party single property website service such as Realbird , to create a sharp webpage, then embed the website into a blog post. Again, the goal here is to take advantage of the free syndication provided by Realbird. And if you make the most of your single property real estate websites, you can divert visitors from this page back into your site where, your lead capture elements live..

Where Are Your Lead Capture Elements? How Real Estate Specific Themes Miss The Mark….

The most important thing to remember when creating your WordPress based Real Estate lead generation system, is that your site needs some kind of core lead capture element, an offer in the sidebar, or below each post, or perhaps as a popup. Without some method for capturing a reliable percentage of the visitors who land on your site, you’re setting yourself up for failure.

But Can’t I Just Add This Lead Capture Element To A Real Estate Specific Theme Like Agent Press?

Yep, you sure can. But you can also do the same with any other wordpress theme out there… your choice of theme doesn’t matter… Whatever theme you choose will need to be tweaked for max effectiveness. So why not choose a theme that allows for easy customization? Why not choose an option that will allow you to easily differentiate yourself from other agents in your marketplace?

Choose A Framework, Not A Theme

There are a number of theme frameworks out there that allow for easy, unlimited customization of your real estate site. The advantages of choosing one of these over a pre-packaged theme like Agent Press are many, such as.

• The Ability To Quickly Switch Color Scheme and or header elements
• Easy tweakability of the WordPress theme files via hooks
• Varying layout options and widget areas
• Frequent Updates – These themes are built to change with the times…
• The Ability To Easily Create Varying Page Templates! — This will become much more critical as more brokers come around to the idea that large local wordpress based web publications fueled by Agent Created Content are the way to go…
  

  Which Frameworks To Choose?

  Well, we love Frugal.

  

  And there’s also Thesis, Headway, and Thematic.