Those of you who have had self hosted WordPress real estate websites for a number of years may remember the local market explorer WordPress plugin (released back in 2009, see launch post here & here). The plugin makes it simple to create city, neighborhood, and zip code pages filled with useful content within any self hosted WordPress blog.

After a long hiatus, Local Market Explorer is back on the plugin directory along with a new “what the locals think” module powered by data from StreetAdvisor. The module displays a ranking for neighborhood or city, as well as excerpts from the most recent reviews about the area.

Below is an example from the Seattle page on Geek Estate.

what-the-locals-think-seattle

You can see some other example integrations for New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

sa_logo_360The plugin has been offline for quite some time due to a WordPress security issue, which is now resolved. StreetAdvisor funded the development required to fix the security issues as well as adding the “What the locals think” module. Formerly, the plugin contained modules from Zillow, Education.com, Yelp, NileGuide, TeachStreet, Homethinking, MatchCollege, and WalkScore. Some of those prior modules didn’t work due to updates to WordPress or were no longer available (TeachStreet, for example, was acquired by Amazon and shut down), and we chose to disable them as a result.

If you have a self hosted WordPress site, and interested in the ability to easily create pages for specific regions — we’d love some feedback via the feedback forum as to whether or not Local Market Explorer is helpful. We’ve tested the plugin on this blog, but we’d be super appreciative if you let us know if you find bugs you stumble across as you use it.

Disclosure: StreetAdvisor is a current consulting client of mine.