Since the launch of Property Hive in 2006 we’ve had support for three departments allowing agents to categorise properties accordingly for displaying on their estate agency website, sending to property portals, and more. These departments were Residential Sales, Residential Lettings and Commercial:
Although this has worked well, we’ve always had support requests that asked about how these can be customised. Some examples where these might need to be customised are:
- Splitting out an existing department (i.e. splitting lettings into professional and student)
- Adding a separate section to a website showing certain properties (e.g. auction properties, prestige)
- Supporting properties that don’t fall into one of the existing departments (e.g. farms, land, holiday lets etc)
There are lots more examples but the general consensus is that we didn’t have a definitive solution and had to get around it using another solution such as marketing flags or custom fields. This isn’t ideal and we knew we can do better.
As a result, we’re pleased to announce the introduction of customisable departments:
As well as the original three departments you can now add as many additional departments as you need to meet your estate agency needs. You can also opt to base it on an existing department to inherit the functionality surrounding how searching by price works, which fields show when editing property records etc.
When a new department is added this will effect everywhere within WordPress, both backend and frontend, where departments are used, including property searches, applicant registrations and more.
We’re super excited about this new feature and the flexibility that it gives to agents building WordPress sites.
This feature was released as part of version 1.5.0 of our core free Property Hive plugin is available to use right away.
