An Open Response to “ONE System Real Estate”
August 6, 2009I read a blog post yesterday that is a prime example of misunderstanding what Joomla is as a whole. The website in question tried to up sell their proprietary real estate management system over Joomla. Apart from the article being terribly misleading, the author himself and potentially the developers of the “ONE System Real Estate System” from Boston Logic are leading people, clients, developers, real estate agents, etc. down a misinformed road. (Read the post here)
I’ve had experience in several real estate websites (one with over 5,000 properties and custom integration into their internal Access database and local MLS). However, rather than write my thoughts and rebuttal to this company, I am going to let one of my friends, Doug Krum, respond. He specifically deals with Joomla-based real estate websites. Here’s his response:
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Upon reading the following link, some items came to mind that weren’t covered. Keep in mind this comes with many years experience in real estate technology with close workings with top 100 real estate companies in the US.
>>Joomla is an open source content management platform. It was built to make building a generic website easier.
It would more accurate to say that Joomla is a php application used for a web site platform. With this in mind, Joomla is a starting point that can be taken into many directions as long as the right people are at the steering wheel. Since one of Joomla’s core values is EXTENSIBILITY this means a developer can add or develop plugins and extensions anyway he or she sees fit taking Joomla into a new direction never thought of before. This, in essence, is also an advantage to using open source software.
Since Joomla already has a correct MVC architecture in place, a developer can automatically strengthen the plugin by using the built-in security. The plugin can’t run unless called by Joomla. Many self-built content management systems (CMS) won’t have very many security features in place and will fail when it comes to security.
>>It was not built for real estate offices or agents.
Joomla wasn’t built specifically for real estate just as the IPHONE wasn’t built for real estate. Should we not use the IPHONE as well? In similar fashion, the IPHONE is a base communications platform that can be taken into many different directions by various industries, real estate, finance, sales, etc. depending on the APP that is loaded.
>>At Boston Logic, we’ve developed the ONE System Real Estate Website Platform, but I’m not going to write about that today.
You should talk about it as it’s your 12 hour work days that are at risk. Developing a platform is going to put all the changes, bugs, moves, adds back onto your own team. This isn’t to be taken lightly. Anyone who has been part of a development team knows the work-load that comes with the territory. The idea that any less than 3 full-time people working on a php application project and it’s going to be a success now and still be around in the future, isn’t a reality. Projects must move with technology. That movement must be done by real people. Those people cost money. Therefore any reliable, custom-built platform project is going to cost a significant amount.
Now as a customer or real estate office, why would I spend that amount of money, take the risk on an un-verified platform that is either in-secure, not well maintained, going to be bought out by another company or is simply going to disappear either through lack of support for the project or through advancements in technology? As a customer or real estate office, I’d be better off spending the money on a verified platform, that is known to be secure (with the right people), that is going to be well maintained now and in the future, that isn’t going to be bought out by anyone and isn’t going to disappear through a lack of support and will roll with advancements in technology. In fact, I’d be an inexperienced fool not to use a well supported project. History has more than shown that non-well supported projects die away.
Even more, your own blog is proof of evidence of this principle as it runs off WordPress. What? You didn’t create your own? You didn’t trust a small company who developed their own blogging platform? Why not?
>>Before we invested the thousands of hours that we’ve put into building this system
And it still isn’t finished. Be prepared to invest many more thousands of hours for things you’ve missed, didn’t think about, didn’t prepare for, had no idea about and for items that aren’t in existence yet but will be 6 months from now. I really, really feel sorry for your team.
>>Joomla is not built to integrate with an MLS.
Nothing is built to integrate with an MLS. MLS systems are simply application projects (in essence no different than Joomla). Anything that is built to integrate is most likely done so by the MLS developers. Since, MLS systems aren’t unified across the US or anywhere else, it’s really irrelevant. As soon as you start dealing with two different MLS systems with two different sets of standards, all hope is lost on any type of easy integration. It must be done like all other integration, by hand.
>>Obviously, joomla doesn’t have a real estate lead management system for you to leverage.
And your team built a custom lead management system? If so, I really, really, really feel sorry for your team. Lead management systems (or CRM) is another project by itself. Every company has trouble figuring out how to integrate their CRM of choice (Tiger, Sugar, PeopleSoft, etc) with their site.
>>Joomla’s content management system is overcomplicated for real estate.
Any item that is powerful and customizable is going to be complicated. This is the nature of customization projects. A good aspect of Joomla exists in the fact that any developer can re-template the admin panel and limit what the end customer uses.
>>Joomla is relatively laborious to style. Our team has worked with Joomla plenty of times. It’s still a bear to make the pages all look good. If you think you’re saving money, think again.
I respectfully disagree. Once template for all pages isn’t laborious. One of the reasons Joomla has gained popularity is the styling ease of CSS. Possibly your team should brush up on Joomla styling (I can recommend some excellent people). This brings more to the point. If your team can’t style Joomla, how in the world do you really think you’re going to support a whole CMS (with CRM integrated)?
>>As a point of reference the last Joomla site that we worked on required about $75,000 in work to get to what the client wanted.
Show the site. This may be true but you fail to show what the site will do. What would it have cost without Joomla? My last pitch I got for a site was $300,000. That’s a $225,000 savings, if they are the same. Again, to be fair, we don’t know because you haven’t told us.
>>Joomla is hard to turn into an effective real estate website. Great real estate websites have lots of features that are not part of the Joomla platform.
And music is hard for everyone except musicians. Using Joomla as a platform for effective real estate websites is easy for a Joomlaian (Joomlaite?).
The big idea here is that the whole reason special item projects exists (Joomla, Drupal, Tiger, Sugar, Peoplesoft, Foxycart, Freshbooks, SAP) is because it’s been known that developing projects is difficult, costly and time-consuming. Rather than having the support put solely on your teams shoulders, it better to be part of a paying team that pulls resources together to produce a good product.
Think about it this way, who creates their own mapping solution anymore? Why would you when Gmaps, Ymaps, MSNmaps and MapQuest have all done the hard work. If you did build one, would it be any better than what’s already available? No. Simply choose one you like, integrate it and pay the respective cost.
Real Estate offices are complicated customers that have many complicated moving parts with massive amounts of information with laws that must be followed. Pulling this together has and will continue to be difficult.
Two types of projects exist; the projects that are built with separate blocks and the projects that are all in one solutions. AFAIK, effective and affordable all in one solutions don’t exist. They are very expensive and only somewhat effective. The projects built with separate blocks excel in some areas and not in others. Integration is a bear but if successful will excel past the alternative. I know of no other way. Joomla can be used a building block for an effective real estate web site.
By the way…the blog in question is breaking the Joomla logo usage and trademark requirements. :-)
FYI, I was recently looking for a house. There are NO great real estate sites. There aren’t even any good ones. There are some that have a lot of houses but are crap to see and use. There are some, like Zillow, that are ok to use (even flashy to see) but don’t have enough houses.
So, this is a world of developers a little out of touch based on what you see in the sites. They don’t get it and it’s ripe for someone to come along with a game changing package. It would be hilarious if that happened to be built on Joomla!
I left a comment on that blog that’s still in moderation. (essentially just promoting my services ;) )
While that blog may not be adhering to the Joomla logo usage guidelines, I think that would still fall under fair use, since he’s obviously not claiming to be Joomla or using the trademark to promote his work.
Yeh I left a comment too….with no publishing of it. :-)
I’m a full-time web developer who mostly works in Joomla. I got into this field after building websites for my old career–a mortgage company and an independent broker/dealer stockbroker. That article is a complete crock. I had great success with my Joomla! lead-gen websites and it led me into doing Joomla as a career.
Joomla is an elegant, easy to teach, easy to learn, easy to style, and easy to extend package. I try to use it over Drupal and WP with most of our clients because it’s so easy to turn over to the client. Thanks for writing this response.
Excellent rebuttal!
When I read that article this site immediately came to mind http://www.housefinderuk.com/
My daughter worked part-time with a local Realtor a white back. One of her assignments was to oversee the local contractor building a new web site for the Realtor. She found out that the contractor was building a custom site from the ground up. Using PHP and Mysql of course, but re-inventing the “coding wheel.”
She tried to explain to the Realtor what was happening and that the Realtor was paying way to much money for the site. But the Realtor’s view was that everyone else in the business used this contractor and they were the best around, regardless of the exorbitant prices they charged.
Hard to change pre-conceived notions some times! But good for the contractor as they also had long term maintenance contracts for who knows how many “custom” sites in our local area!
Just looking at the name of that site, the thought springs to mind that the article was written for one reason, and that was to get some free PR in the joomlasphere, its not always easy so writing something controversial is a sure way to do it.
He is now getting tons of links to his sites, with the words Joomla, real, estate, that might help his rankings, the joomla community has some powerful link juice sites!
Its actually quite a clever little link building idea?seo idea, and I wonder if it was written purposely to cause an uproar, I had never heard or visited the site before now!
Who knows, its still a load of old tosh they are talking though!
@Paul Yeh I wondered about that too. It seems to be an insensible article. This site has a “NOFOLLOW” to his site. :-)
However, this blog post has served it’s function. Look what happens when you type in their real estate company: http://www.google.com/search?q=ONE+System+Real+Estate&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
What can people do for money! It’s unbelievable!
We recently completed a Real Estate website using Joomla with daily MLS imports using Open Realty and IDX Manager from Transparent Technologies. It was our first MLS integration site and while it was a fair amount of work, what isn’t at this level of integration. And that is the point of this post. Joomla is extensible and the strength of the offering is the choice of third party plug-ins/scripts to make it possible in each vertical. Joomla is excellent for Real Estate!
@Rick, yeah that page ranks higher than any other!! Gotta admire the idea, it certainly got people talking, who knows maybe even they dont believe it themselves, shame what some people will do.
p.s positive is i found your blog out of it :)
Yeah I think you are right, the page should rank higher than any other page that exists.Any way cool idea.
Can someone tell me if Joomla synchronizes with microsoft outlook contacts appo8intments and tasks? We sell a real-estate CRM solution that synchronized with Outlook and would be interested in adding Joomla to our list of compatible products.
Scott Schmitz
RealOrgainized, inc.
PS We are also working on Google Contacts and Google Calendar sync, which will be a fantastic way to do over-the -air synchronization. If Joomla does that, we could sync that way as well.
“hard to turn into an effective real estate website”
I thoroughly endorse that comment after wasting much time and money on Joomla and Mos etc…
The question is what do you think or believe IS the best platform for real estate?
Katie
Take my advice forget joomla and go with WordPress if you want the search engine optimization benefits
What kind of search engine benefits?
My company manages several real estates that have facilities like swimming pool, tennis courts, squash courts, fitness clubs and BBQ pits.
My biggest problem daily is to resolve the use of these facilities. Tenants competing with these facilities can turn ugly and I hate to deal with it.
Anything done in Joomla to help me with managing these. Booking system, calendaring etc for facilities.
Excellent question. I have tried most if not all systems including Joomla and Mossets Hot Property but found Joomla to be too unwieldy to use ultimately.
We ended up customising our own none cms system in fact to get the simplicity and flexibility that we needed.
I am transitioning from WordPress to Joomla 1.5. I installed Open Realty last night with a couple of hitches but they were pretty easy to fix. With Joomla it is simple setting up forums that are similar or as good as vbulletin and phpbb. Also, it is easy to set up comments, login/password, member areas etc. The best part of all… it’s all free!
Deference to website author , some good information .
It is a really interesting post. I have my own real estate business in my home country and I try to read as much as possible about this issue in countries where this business is more advanced. thanks again.