We are pleased to unveil a new mortgage center plug-in that creates a mortgage center inside your WordPress blog.
This new Mortgage Center WordPress plug-in provides:
- real-time rates
- a monthly payment calculator
- closing cost estimates (courtesy of Closing.com)
- a few educational mortgage articles
- links to the latest blog posts from Mortgages Unzipped, Blown Mortgage, and Mortgage Reports.
Since buyers are looking for mortgage information and many agents and brokers have WordPress blogs, we thought this was the perfect plug-in for us to develop. We launched our first WordPress plug-in (Local Market Explorer) in August, and were thrilled with the great customization, feedback, and implementation – including early adopters Jay Thompson and Kris Berg. A couple quick notes regarding the details of the mortgage center plug-in:
- You can choose to display national mortgage rates (default) or rates for a specific state in the admin options
- Zillow co-branding can be utilized by saving your Zillow screen name in the admin options
We do have mortgage rate and mortgage calculator widgets if you’d prefer to take that route, but the ability to blend data into the look and feel of your blog is a big benefit in using a WordPress plug-in as opposed to a widget — for those running WordPress that is. If you’d like to customize the look and feel of mortgage rate information on your site, but do not use WordPress, take a look at our mortgage APIs.
We once again have to extend a huge thanks to Andrew Mattie (who has a day job with Diverse Solutions) for the time and effort he put into developing this plug-in for us.
If you want to see what “mortgage center” looks like, I’ve installed it on Geek Estate Blog. You can download the plug-in in the Wordpress plug-in directory.
As always, leave any feedback or suggestions in the comments below or in Zillow Advice.
We hope you like the new plug-in!
Excerpt from:
Announcing the “Mortgage Center” Plug-in for WordPress
Related Posts
- Now Available: Mortgage Rate Widgets by State
Today, we updated our popular mortgage rate widgets so that you can add mortgage rates to your site according to state. So, if you live in California, you can add California mortgage rates.
After we built the first set of mortgage rate widgets, we received a lot of requests to make them local. So, we built a way for users to select a region on the rate widget page. These new widgets have the same great functionality and graphs as the originals except that we now display the average rates for any chosen location. We hope this will help make the data more relevant to you and your site.
The data still shows the latest mortgage rates available. Using the 1.3 million real quotes submitted in Zillow Mortgage Marketplace each month, we are able to show live, accurate rates across the country in near real time.
>> Learn more about our rates here.
We hope you enjoy these new widgets and we welcome any additional feature requests!
Original post:
Now Available: Mortgage Rate Widgets by State - Local Market Explorer v2 Now Available
The Local Market Explorer WP Plugin that we released in August just got an upgrade! Though the BETA version 2 has been available for a few weeks, it’s now officially available for download in the Wordpress Plugin directory. Here’s what’s new with version 2:
- Support for neighborhoods and ZIPs rather than just cities
- Additional flexibility to re-order the various modules on the page
- More market statistics are now included in the market statistics module
- Support for video embeds (Scripps Ranch example on Geek Estate with Kris Berg’s video embedded) in the about module
- A few performance improvements
You can download version 2 of the Local Market Explorer plugin here in the WordPress Plugin Directory, or if you already have the plug-in installed, then simply navigate to your plugins page and click the automatic upgrade link. If you have questions, please check the FAQs. Here are a few sample pages on Geek Estate Blog:
- 90210
- 94010
- 94027
- Pearl District, Portland, OR
- Upper Eastside, New York, NY
- Brentwood, Los Angeles, CA
- New York, NY
- Los Angeles, CA
- Charlotte, NC
As always — we’d love your feedback; please leave feedback on this Zillow Advice thread or in the comments field below. We hope you find the improvements valuable!
Finally, for those running wordpress and looking to give your buyers acces to mortgage information, take a look at the Mortgage Center WP Plugin (example Missouri mortgage information implementation on StLouisHomeData).
Read more:
Local Market Explorer v2 Now Available - New Zillow Widget: “My Profile”
Here at Zillow, we’re doing our best to continuously roll out a solid set of useful real estate widgets that provides free information and data for your Web site.
Yes, social networking (read: Twitter, Facebook) can be entertaining, but to a lot of real estate professionals, the real meat-and-potatoes of online marketing efforts is a blog or Web site.
That’s why we’re pleased to announce more content you can add to your Web site or blog with the My Profile Widget. Your visitors can see your Zillow activity with this easy-to-use widget. It uses the RSS feed of your personal Zillow Profile to generate a list of your latest Zillow activities.
This is just one of many Zillow Widgets that also offers free co-branding. So, if a user follows through to our site, your name, contact information and photo stays at the top of the screen.
Give us feedback on our Zillow Widgets for Web sites section and tell us what you like or don’t like, or give us ideas for new widgets that you would want on your site.
Read this article:
New Zillow Widget: “My Profile” - Announcing the Local Market Explorer WP Plugin: A New Way to Create “City Pages” Inside of WordPress
We’re happy to announce we have just finished the Local Market Explorer WordPress plugin that creates “city pages” inside the WordPress interface.
While the most important feature of any agent or brokerage Web site is a robust search interface to find homes for sale, one of the questions home buyers — particularly those relocating — are trying to answer prior to looking at listings is “where should I live?” Home buyers spend an immense amount of time researching areas they are interested in living to get a better feel for the area. So, as an agent or broker, having that local information on your own Web site is a huge benefit to being a complete real estate resource for your clients throughout the buying process.
There are a number of great local real estate Web sites built entirely on top of WordPress. For example, Ines Ines Hegedus-Garcia’s Miamism, Heather Elias’ LoCO Musings, and Jim Duncan’s Real Central VA are three that do this. WordPress is a powerful platform that more and more agents and brokers seem to be utilizing by the day. As many of you know, Zillow is big on syndicating our data to other Web sites, so we’re naturally intrigued with anything that can help us with this effort. While widgets are easy to add to sidebars within WordPress, plugins provide added flexibility above and beyond the possibilities of widgets.
There are a couple of WordPress plugins built using the Zillow API, such as the CMA plugin built by Realivent, but this is our first official entry into the Wordpress plugin game. We think there is huge value in adding real estate market information, but there’s even more value to bloggers if all the most relevant information consumers are looking at when researching places to live is included in their city pages — so we teamed with a few other companies who have complimentary datasets. The plugin pulls school data from Education.com, local amenity data from Yelp, photos from Flickr, and of course, real estate market statistics and recently sold information from the Zillow API.
Here are the modules currently included in the plugin, along with a sample screen shot for each one.
Market Statistics:
About (text editable by you) and Flickr Photos:
Market Activity:
School Data:
Walk Score:
Yelp:
Some details:
- You’ll need separate API keys for all the APIs, except for Education.com. The links to the API signup pages are accessible via the settings menu of the plugin.
- The plugin does not support neighborhoods or ZIP codes — yet. We plan to do that in version 2 of the plugin (already in the works).
- The Yelp, Walk Score, Market Activity, and About/Flickr modules can be turned on or off, and we’ll continue to add more flexibility to let you utilize this plugin in a variety of ways with future versions of this plugin.
If you’d like to see an example of the plugin, I’ve installed it on the Geek Estate Blog as a demo. Here are a few sample pages:
Once you install the plugin, how do you actually use the plugin? A couple possibilities:
- Whenever you mention one of your target markets in a blog post, you can link to the city page for that area
- Add links to the city pages to your sidebar. For example, if your target markets are Sammamish, Issaquah, and Redmond — below is sample code for your sidebar:
www.yoursite.com/wp-content/plugins/local-market-explorer/images/badges/120lmegraphorange.gif”>
- www.yoursite.com/local/Sammamish/WA/”>Sammamish
- www.yoursite.com/local/Redmond/WA/”>Redmond
- www.yoursite.com/local/Issaquah/WA/”>Issaquah
You can download the Local Market Explorer plugin here in the WordPress Plugin Directory. If you have questions, please check the FAQs.
The plugin was built by Jonathan Mabe and Andrew Mattie, both of whom have day jobs with Diverse Solutions (a member of the Zillow API program). I have to extend a huge thanks to them for their great work on this plugin.
For the WordPress bloggers out there — what do you think? Do you have any specific requests for the next version of this plugin? Perhaps more market data, a Twitter module, ability to automatically link to your local pages within blog posts, more flexibility to modify the sidebar widget, or a module that brings in data from Wikipedia? Please leave your feedback on this Zillow Advice thread or in the comments field below.
The rest is here:
Announcing the Local Market Explorer WP Plugin: A New Way to Create “City Pages” Inside of WordPress - New Zillow Widget: When Will Real Estate Market Hit the Bottom?
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, everyone knows that market conditions have been rough over the past year as the U.S. and much of the world attempts to recover from a recession.
Home values have dropped across the nation and mortgage rates are still in the low 5’s, so this is a prime opportunity to poll visitors to your blog or Web site on how they feel about the future.
By adding the new Zillow Market Bottom Poll widget, you can ask the question that’s on everyone’s minds:
“When will the real estate market hit the bottom?”
Install Market Bottom Poll widget on your site and you’ll find out.
This is just one of many Zillow Widgets that also offers free co-branding. So, if a user follows through to our site, your name, contact information and photo stays at the top of the screen.
All poll results are shared across all installations, and the results are updated dynamically.
Here are three of our latest widgets:
- Single-home value estimate
- Real estate market bottom poll
- Do you qualify for the $8,000 first-time home buyer tax credit?
Give us feedback on Zillow Widgets for Web sites section and tell us what you like or don’t like, or give us ideas for new widgets that you would want on your site.
Read the original here:
New Zillow Widget: When Will Real Estate Market Hit the Bottom?
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