I’m hoping the final version of WordPress 3.0 is close to completion (the Beta came out a few weeks ago) and I wanted to take a few minutes to touch on two of the cooler possibilities for agent and broker sites opened up by the release of 3.0. As you may or may not know, the biggest feature of version 3.0 is the “merging” of WordPress.org and WordPress MU. What that means is that the regular version of WordPress will now support multiple blogs from a single instance. This is a big deal in my opinion, as it opens up all kinds of possibilities that were only available to MU users. Here are two of the cooler ones (in my opinion of course):

1. Hyper local blogs — With previous versions of WordPress, when building landing pages for ZIPs, neighborhoods, subdivisions, HOA’s, etc — most people choose to use “pages” for their SEO landing pages. With 3.0, it’ll be almost just as easy to create an entire blog devoted to a specific region and have that be the landing page rather than just a specific “page”. There are multiple benefits to taking this approach:

  • One: you can change the theme on a region by region basis, which would enable you to easily customize the header and change the sidebar for each neighborhood, ZIP, HOA, etc. This serves two purposes. First, it provides the ability to “brand” a blog as very specific to the region of focus – for example, with a notable landmark from the desired region. Second, it provides a way to quickly and easily change calls to action depending on the region a consumer is looking at. For instance, you may want to have a “Search for Greenlake Homes” graphic on a blog for “Greenlake” and a “Find Homes in Queen Anne” graphic on your “Queen Anne” blog.
  • Two: it’s easier to make a blog dynamic than it is to make a page dynamic. This is important for both SEO reasons and consumer experience. For instance, you could now easily post monthly market updates for a given neighborhood and all of that additional content will help the overall ranking of the hyper local blog’s home page. And from a consumer experience perspective, those updates could be read in their entirety straight from the main blog. Sure, previously, you could still accomplish this to a degree by using categories to tag market update posts appropriately and displaying them on the desired page — but giving each region it’s own blog is a much more flexible option in the long run.

2. Agent blogs offered by Brokers — many agents are realizing the power of WordPress blogs, and now brokers will be able to offer them to their agents. Of course, setting up an entire platform that scales for hundreds or thousands of agents with themes, plugins, etc is not free — it takes development expertise, resources, and money. But it’s now more of an option than previously when MU was the only game in town. My hunch is that most brokers are not going to maintain these blog networks themselves, but have their technology providers do it for them.

Note that both of these are currently doable with WordPress MU, but MU is a harder platform to work with and it doesn’t have nearly as large of a developer community as WordPress.org does. Further, MU was prone to be incompatible with a number of plugins, which made development more difficult.

Of course, the fact that these possibilities are now built into WordPress rather than only WordPress MU means the barrier to entry drops. That said, WordPress is just a tool. At the end of the day, it’s all about what agents and brokers do with the available tools that will determine whether they succeed or fall by the wayside. Talk and ideas are cheap, and this world unfortunately has very few “doers” that will execute on their ideas. I’m guessing the vast majority of agents and brokers will probably never do anything with the new features of 3.0 — but, those that do will race ahead of the pack with great success. At Virtual Results, we’ve been playing with the BETA a bit, and you can be certain that there will be a few early agent and broker sites coming once WordPress 3.0 is in a more stable and bug free state.

Especially those who have played with the BETA version a bit, what other cool things are you looking forward to seeing from the first agent and broker sites running 3.0?