Buying a home comes with a million different considerations. How is this pool going to affect my ability to get a loan? Can we get by with 1 1/2 baths? Is the yard big enough? That tree next to the carport makes me nervous. When was this place built? What do you mean insurance adjustors hate trampolines!? Before a prospective buyer can move on to any of those questions though, you’ve got to get them considering the property in the first place. A gorgeous WordPress real estate theme for your realty website can make that first big step a whole lot easier.
Full disclosure here, my parents have been realtors for a long time. Their website was pretty outdated, and they asked me to help. So, after moving hosts and one nice clean install of WordPress later, we went theme shopping. What we had narrowed down as our final candidates were too good not to share. What follows are those final candidates, and I’ll share with you what we loved about each. Hopefully it makes your WordPress real estate theme shopping easier too!
5 Gorgeous WordPress Real Estate Themes
Each of the below themes are SEO optimized and fully mobile responsive. That’s something you’d expect from any quality, modern theme, but can’t take for granted. With that note out of the way so that I don’t feel compelled to mention it for each, let’s take a look!
WPCasa Oslo
Oslo uses the trendy large featured image slider on the homepage, but unlike many current real estate themes it doesn’t swallow the entire rest of your website. The menu bar and contact info at the top remains prominent, and the toggle-able search widget below invites visitors to get right down to business. The contact widgets at the top of the page are great features as realtor contact info is typically required at the top of each page anyway- Oslo makes it easy. All around it’s a very pretty and stylish but not in-your-face overwhelming visual experience.
Notable Features:
- Fully localized and translation ready
- WordPress-centric UI and editor
- Property search widget
- Good property management on the back end
- Extendable with addons
- 1 year license covers support and updates
- Easy customization & well documented directions
Locality
Locality offers a more toned down, less in in-your-face imagery in their presentation. It still does a wonderful job of conveying that imagery though, and offers plenty to captivate every site visitor with a scrolling featured slider and the option to include assorted feature properties immediately below. It has a visible and tasteful header widget for displaying your contact info from page to page, right alongside optional social sharing buttons. Locality is wonderfully customizable and exceptionally well documented. An added and welcome feature of locality is an IDX tab for your MLS listings all packaged and ready to go for you.
Notable Features:
- Contact info in header from page to page
- IDX tab ready to go for MLS listings
- Featured properties slider
- Rich single page property listings
- Special taxonomies for property type, city, and features
- Very customizable with excellent documentation
Elegant Estate
Elegant Estate is powered by Elegant Themes, which offers a unique advantage outside above and beyond the individual theme. Namely, the fact that your license grants you access to a library of their themes should you wish to move on to a different look after a time. Elegant Estate has plenty to keep you right here though, with a style that is simple but recognizable and really brings out the imagery on your page. This theme does an excellent job of showcasing the reason you’re in business- making the beautiful properties you’re listing highly visible and attractive.
Notable Features:
- Preloaded color schemes for easy styling w/o CSS
- Access to the extensive library of Elegant Themes themes
- Great support and documentation
- Guaranteed cross-browser compatibility
- Complex aesthetics possible via shortcode
- Ready-to-go page templates for listings
Vellum
Vellum breaks the mold of single focus real estate themes. Being a multi-purpose theme means it’s adaptable to many different types of business, but it excels when purposed as a real estate theme. Again we have persistent contact info in the header from page to page. Your featured listing is prominent and bold without being brash, and it tastefully showcases your other featured listings below it. The focus with Vellum is very clean and natural. There are many less elements on the Vellum homepage without ever feeling like you’re missing anything, which puts the focus very succinctly on your properties.
As a closing note, it’s made by Parallelus, one of the best theme developers in the business, and built on the very solid Runway theme framework.
Notable Features:
- Contact info in header from page to page
- Excellent support and video documentation
- Dynamic animations via Slider Revolution
- Not just mobile responsive, is specially designed with touch display in mind
- Drag and drop assembly via Visual Composer
- Variety of post formats with sortable portfolios (standard/gallery/video/etc)
Timothy Real Estate
Timothy can weigh on your budget a little, but it’s quite simply one of the best WordPress real estate themes we have come across. First, you’re not just looking at the cost of the theme, but because it’s a child theme built on top of the distinguished Genesis Framework by StudioPress, you’re going to need to purchase both the theme and the framework. All told you’re looking at a bit over $100USD. But…
Timothy strikes a delicate balance between featured imagery and volume, managing both a majestically sprawling featured property side by side with lots of smaller featured properties without becoming cluttered. You have the persistent contact info in the page header as you’d expect, and it also fully supports IDX, even coming with a search widget for MLS listings. It’s essentially everything you could want in a real estate theme if you’re ok with the pricetag.
Notable Features:
- IDX support
- Widget for MLS listing searches
- Persistent contact info in header
- Multiple presets for page layout
- Extensive cross-browser support
- preset social icons
That’s our 5 WordPress real estate themes! I won’t tell you which one we landed on so that I’m not giving an outright endorsement of one over the other, but honestly each of these themes are excellent choices. Especially for those of you that might be taking on a realtor as a client, you can save yourself some serious time by choosing a theme that already offers IDX support as it’s something pretty fundamental to the business that I could see being a hassle to start from scratch on- but then I’m again I’m not a developer so take that with a grain of salt.
Do you have any WordPress real estate themes you love or strongly recommend? Tell us about them in the comments below!
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