The Ultimate Real Estate Plugin Compilation [No Platform Spared]

Your real estate website can be greatly improved with real estate plugins.

This is especially true if it’s powered by popular content management systems like WordPress or Joomla.

This article aims to help you with your decision-making which plugins are worthwhile using.

This article aims to help you decide which plugins are worth using. 

But here’s a little spoiler for you: using too many plugins might harm your Google rankings. 

I’ll explain more about that later in the article.

Editor’s Note: This blog post was updated on 07/03/2024 to include the latest information about [topic] and to address any errors or inaccuracies found in the original version.

What Is a Real Estate Plugin?

People use plugins to add extra features to their website. Usually, this website is run by a content management system (CMS).

The term “plugin” is mostly used in the context of WordPress CMS. Other platforms may use the term “extension (e.g. Joomla).”

The important thing is that a real estate plugin or extension expands the capabilities of an existing real estate website or web application.

13 Types of Real Estate Plugins

In my research I discovered 70 real estate plugins on WordPresse’s plugin page and 12 extensions on Joomla’s extension page.

Only from the number of available real estate plugins can one tell that WordPress is larger and more often used.

By the way, I already discussed other advantages of WordPress in this article.

So, in my research, I went through all of them and manually filtered the plugins that are relevant for real estate.

Real estate plugins I didn’t count were the following:

• The ones that haven’t had an update for some time.
• The ones that weren’t designed or developed for the U.S. market.

The table below will give you an overview.

Besides me doing some filtering, the offer of real estate plugins available for WordPress is still more extensive than the extensions from Joomla. You can find the latter here.

Based on the above data, WordPress plugins offer more representative information for different categories.

The main plugin category on Joomla is “real estate pages and property listings,” which is also part of the major five I identified below.

I analyzed and categorized all of the real estate plugins.

Here are the fourteen categories ordered from most common to less common:

I included a cake diagram below.

This gives you a better impression of how the categories distribute.

When you look at the diagram, you will quickly see that half belong to the categories of add-ons or themes and calculators (mostly for mortgages).

Why is there such a high percentage of add-ons for existing real estate plugins or WordPress themes?

When you develop a WordPress theme, you don’t always get all the functionality right from the get-go.

The same is true when you develop WordPress plugins. 

Developing an additional plugin to fix or extend the limited functionality of a theme is often an easier workaround than making the necessary changes within the theme or the already existing plugin.

But there’s a problem with that.

When you have a theme that needs different plugins to work to its full extent, it will cost you page speed performance.

And a decreased page speed will reduce your chances of Google liking your website. enough to rank you on the first page (see my article about ranking factors here).

Now you know why offering a real estate WordPress plugin that works as a customer relationship management system isn’t a good idea. 

It may also increase the chances of getting hacked.

Why?

Each plugin needs to be updated regularly. 

Adding plugins is a bit like adding a surface to a target. 

It’s like eating more calories than you should.

Three Criteria for a Good Real Estate Plugin

• A plugin should be updated regularly with the latest WordPress version (as I’ve already suggested above).
• It should have at least 500 active installations (users already using it). The latter shows the overall acceptance of the plugin in the market.
• At least one user review scoring at least 4 out of 5 stars.

Generally, the review part is less important. 

Why? 

We have the more important metric of active installations. 

For example, I have used many different plugins for WordPress and never left a positive or negative review. 

Many users will do the same. 

It’s faster to deactivate and delete a plugin that sucks than to write a review. 

So the active installations indirectly communicate how well accepted and established a (real estate) WordPress plugin is. 

That’s why it’s a better metric.

16 Best WordPress Real Estate Plugins for Agents and Agencies

Based on the earlier criteria, here is a table with the best WordPress real estate plugins for agents and agencies. 

As you can see, many of the smaller real estate plugins that had their own category didn’t make it into the best category. 

Only the “iPanorama 360 WordPress Virtual Tour Builder,” “Home Value,” and “WP Real Estate” plugins made it. 

This is because most of these smaller plugins lacked the 500 active installations. 

Many had a single 5-star review but not enough active installations. 

As the overall best in terms of most active installations (10,000 each), I identified these: 

• Responsive Mortgage Calculator
• Optima Express + MarketBoost IDX 
• IMPress for IDX Broker
• Essential Real Estate

10 Best Free WordPress Real Estate Plugins for Agents and Agencies

You may also wonder which plugins mentioned above are free to use. 

As you may notice in the above table, free plugins can be divided into two categories.

On one end of the spectrum, there are the genuinely free ones with full functionality. 

On the other end are the free ones with limited functionality (the freemium model). 

Freemium means you need to get a paid plan if you want more functionality.

I applied the same criteria to the free plugins, and the result you can see in the list below. Here are the 10 best free WordPress real estate plugins:

• Responsive Mortgage Calculator
• Mortgage Calculator/ Loan Calculator
• Simple Mortgage Calculator
• Home Value
• PropertyHive
• WP Real Estate
• Essential Real Estate
• Easy Property Listings
• Estatik Real Estate Plugin
• iPanorama 360 WordPress Virtual Tour Builder

12 Joomla Real Estate Plugins – Extensions

And what about Joomla real estate plugins that are actually called extensions?

For the sake of a complete article, I will list the 12 Joomla plugins/extensions for you below. 

But again, there is not much variety, and most, if not all, fit into the “real estate pages and property listings” category.

This article has been reviewed by our editorial team. It has been approved for publication in accordance with our editorial policy.

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Tobias Schnellbacher

Tobias is an internet entrepreneur with a passion for digital marketing and copywriting, particularly in the real estate sector. He also likes cats and fitness. For nine years, he operated an international online referral real estate agency serving U.S., Canadian, and German sellers and buyers, which resulted in multiple seven-figure property sales.Learn more

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