Real Estate website CMS

June 1, 2006 6:50 PM

I am doing some part time networking/maintenance work for a real estate office. To post a new listing on their site, they have to get the owner's brother-in-law (who has his own job and lives three hours away and assigns priority to his b-i-l's company accordingly) to generate the page for the listing and change the index page and get them uploaded. I know there are several CMS packages aimed at the needs of a Real Estate company. Anyone have any experience with any of these? Free would be nice but not required.
posted by spartacusroosevelt to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Well, can you get him to cobble together a template? The basics of html aren't so staggering that you couldn't pick it up yourself and further your knowledge and not be single source dependent for their generation.

It doesn't sound like you have the volume that requires a CMS, CMS only really cut own on your orkload when you're totally saturated with content generation, they make the management of it easier, often not the actual generation.

Just tossing this in there, there haven't been many answers floating by, but there's not a lot of detail here, if you really want CMS perhaps some base requirements would help.

At a stretch you might be able to adapt one of the wiki's to your likely, but this again approaches a volume consideration, you may not have enough volume to make it worth it.

I'll check and see what my realtor uses, but I believe her husband writes it all himself.
posted by iamabot at 8:53 PM on June 1, 2006

I've just started playing with Nvu. It's essentially Netscape Composer with an integrated FTP client and a few more bells and whistles, and looks pretty easy to learn.

It's free, open-source, and looks like just the thing for simple website maintenance.
posted by flabdablet at 9:46 PM on June 1, 2006

Response by poster: Actually I was looking at scripts listed here. I was thinking that there was probably already software to generate a database of searchable listings with a backend that would allow a mere agent to upload some pictures and type out the descriptions, pricing, etc. instead of manually creating a page for every listing. I was wondering if anyone had experience with any of these systems or ones like them.
posted by spartacusroosevelt at 10:25 PM on June 1, 2006

joomla might be a good free CMS option. there is actually a real-estate specific template that you can buy, but it's not free. (it's listed on the joomla.org site).
posted by BigBrownBear at 8:22 AM on June 2, 2006