We have been shopping for a new website and been talking to a lot of real estate web design companies. Some of the charges are outrageous but one real estate web design company recommended that we opt for an open source solution, thus saving a lot of money.
Has anyone ever used an open source real estate website for their site? Any advice would be appreciated.
I’ll chime in on this since it is someting I have been working on.
Joomla kicks ass. It is a Content Management System website. It’s free and it is very popular among CMS websites. There’s even two modules made specifically for real estate. One is called Hot Properties http://www.mosets.com/ which you have to purchase for a small fee. There is another open source free solution very good but still needs some development called open realty http://www.open-realty.org/. The good thing about Joomla is that both of these tie into Joomla pretty easily.
The only thing missing is a CRM backend so that people can view a listing and send you an email which I have found a solution for, I just need a programmer to tie it all together. It’s called Vtiger.http://www.vtiger.com/. I might end up paying someone to do this for me.