Why Drupal is an awesome choice for real estate websites

Real estate websites should be built as solid and beautifully as the houses they are showcasing. Among the platforms to build them, Drupal is a really convincing option. Drupal is known for numerous strengths, but how exactly does it suit real estate websites? Let’s see the particular benefits of Drupal’s for real estate websites in today’s review.

Some of Drupal’s benefits for real estate websites

It is hard to start somewhere and even harder to finish when you describe the endless number Drupal benefits! Drupal allows for creating absolutely any kinds of powerful and feature-rich websites. It has tens of thousands of add-on modules, and developers can create custom ones for any client’s wish. Flexibility, SEO-friendliness, security, and other features are Drupal’s visiting cards.

However, let’s imagine an awesome real estate website and distinguish at least a couple of its particular needs that are perfectly covered by Drupal.

• Integration: from a payment gateway to a mobile app

Real estate websites often need integration with booking, scheduling, or payment systems. But that’s just the beginning — you can even output your site’s content to a mobile application and implement much more complicated data exchange scenarios. All this and much more is possible thanks to great third-party integration capabilities in Drupal. When in comes to third-party integration particularly in Drupal 8, the level is simply sky-high.

• Images in perfect harmony

On real estate websites, there is often an opportunity for users to add their content — preferably, with photos. It would be great if all users submitted images of exactly the same format and size! This is especially important for selections of real property objects (for example, the latest listings on your main page). And Drupal has a magic wand called images styles that let you set up automatic formatting, fitting all user-submitted images to the desired look.

• Advanced categories

Real property websites usually need categorization. Drupal has an advanced taxonomy system for that, which allows for multi-level category sets. It is easy to categorize everything — types of real estate operations, types of property, geographical locations, absence or presence of a particular facility, etc. And Drupal taxonomy hides many more advanced options.

• Filtering and sorting

Your users will be able to easily choose real estate according to their preferences — by location, date, price, and so on — thanks to Drupal filters that are easy to set up. Filtering lets users see only the desired content (i.e. real property belonging to a certain city), while sorting puts content in the desired order (i.e. from cheapest to most expensive items). And that’s just the beginning of the opportunities of Drupal’s filters.

• Smart search

Everything on your real property website will be found easily! It can have handy options like allowing for users’ typos or alternate spellings, highlighting the search queries, suggesting related content, location-based search, autocomplete, and so much more. This is possible when Drupal search modules like Search API, Apache Solr Search, Search API Solr Search and others are put in good Drupal developer’s hands.

• Special real estate Drupal modules

In addition to plenty of modules for various website goals, Drupal has some nice contributed modules for the real estate industry. Drupal Real Estate, Drupal RETS Real Estate Framework (dRealty), Immoclient, Rooms, and other modules offer ready-made solutions for classified ad sites, booking & room management, advanced opportunities to use MLS (Multiple Listing Service) and RETS (Real Estate Transaction Standard), and so much more.

• Great mobile display

People often visit real estate websites on the fly — for example, when they urgently need to find accomodation in a new city. An important Drupal benefit for real estate websites is its mobile friendliness. Its latest version, Drupal 8, is even mobile-first, so it is perfect for building mobile responsive websites and native mobile applications.

• User roles and content moderation

As a rule, a real estate site needs different types of users with different needs for access — for example, a regular user, a property owner, or a realtor. Drupal has a very advanced system for creating user roles and giving them permissions in all aspects of viewing, editing, and deleting the content. In addition, Drupal 8.5.x gets new opportunities for content moderation workflows, which may come very handy for real property sites.

• Multilingual options

Real property sites are often international, so it is great to have multiple languages on them. This is easy to implement with Drupal. Drupal 8 has reached an exceptional level of multi language opportunities. It supports over 100 languages, has read-made interface translations, allows for content and configuration translations and easy language adding.

Final thoughts

This is just a glimpse at Drupal’s benefits for real estate websites. Absolutely any ideas can be fulfilled by an expert Drupal developer team — so feel welcome to apply.

PS. This article has an extra bonus for you — a collection of awesome Drupal real estate website examples. It is coming in the very near future — follow our updates on social media!