WordPress and estate agency
An agency site where the listings are imported and the answers are not in them
An agency does not write its property pages. They arrive from the software the negotiators actually work in, pushed into the site by an importer that drops each field into its own slot: price here, bedrooms there, description in a tab, floorplan and energy certificate as attachments. What a visitor sees looks like a page. What a crawl receives is a scattering of labelled fragments, refreshed every few hours, describing properties that may already be under offer. Which is why the material for an agency assistant is almost never the listings.
Why this pairing is its own job
The WordPress install guide covers the tag, and the estate agency guide covers what the assistant has to know. What follows is the part that belongs to neither.
- Listings are written into custom fields by a feed importer and rendered into tabs and panels by the theme, so the particulars, the floorplan reference and the accessibility detail reach a crawl as fragments rather than as prose, if they reach it at all.
- The feed runs again every few hours and overwrites what it wrote before. Anything a person edits on a listing page is gone by the evening, which means the listings cannot be improved into better material even by somebody willing to do it.
- Availability moves faster than any index. A property under offer this morning is still a live page this afternoon, and an assistant that asserts a status from a page is asserting something the negotiator changed before lunch.
- The material that actually converts on an agency site is the process pages, and those are stable: seller fees and tie in terms, landlord service tiers, referencing, deposit handling, how viewings are arranged. None of them come from the feed and all of them are asked at eight in the evening.
What changes about the install here
<script src="https://cdn.askably.xyz/w.js" data-key="pk_live_YOUR_KEY" defer></script>The tag is the same one on the WordPress guide. Everything below is about where it goes on a estate agency site specifically.
Index the process pages and leave the listings alone
Point the crawl at the fee pages, the landlord service tiers, the tenant referencing page, the deposit policy and the viewings page. Leave the property pages out of the material entirely.
This feels wrong at first, because the listings are the site. But the questions that arrive out of hours are about fees, referencing and deposits, and those have durable answers. The questions about a specific property are about availability and offers, which are the two things the assistant must not assert anyway.
Where a visitor is asking about a particular property, the right behaviour is to point at the live listing and offer to take their details for a viewing. That is a better answer than a summary built from a page that may be four hours out of date.
Valuation landing pages are often on another domain
Agencies run valuation campaigns on separate domains, sometimes provided by a marketing supplier, sometimes a one page site with its own address. Every one of those is a separate origin, and a tag pasted onto it renders nothing until that origin is listed.
Decide whether you want the assistant there at all. A valuation landing page has one job and one form, and a chat panel on it is either a genuine help with the fee question or a second thing competing for the same click. If you do want it, list the origin at the same time as you paste the tag, not after somebody reports it as broken.
Four audiences, one greeting
Buyers, sellers, tenants and landlords arrive at the same site with four different question sets. The assistant answers from whatever material matches, so the separation has to exist in the material rather than in the widget.
Keep the landlord service pages and the tenant process pages clearly distinct and clearly labelled, and say in the greeting what it can help with. A landlord asking about management fees and a tenant asking about deposits are using words that overlap more than you would expect.
Where the answerable material lives
| Seller fees and the terms attached | Commission basis, sole or multiple agency, the tie in period, the notice to withdraw, and how withdrawal or abortive fees work. Sellers compare agents on precisely these terms and rarely get a straight answer before an appraisal. |
|---|---|
| Landlord service tiers, side by side | Tenant find, rent collection and full management, with what each includes: inspections, contractor instruction, arrears chasing, renewals, compliance certificates. Landlords buy on the difference between the tiers. |
| Referencing and deposit handling as written procedure | What is checked, when a guarantor is needed, how long it takes, how much deposit you take, which scheme holds it and how deductions are decided. Entirely proceduralised, which makes it ideal material and keeps it away from any judgement about a person. |
| How viewings are arranged | Accompanied or not, the hours including evenings and weekends, notice needed on a tenanted property, and which properties are by appointment only. This is the question that converts an evening visitor into a diary entry. |
The first thing to get right
Decide explicitly that property pages are not material, and write the fallback that points a property question at the live listing and offers a viewing.
Everything else about an agency assistant is straightforward. This one decision is what stops it asserting that a house is available when the negotiator agreed a sale at four o'clock, which is the only failure here that costs the agency something real.
The failure that belongs to this combination
An accessibility answer assembled from a field that was not there
The specific failure this setup produces is quieter than a wrong price and worse in its consequences. Somebody asks whether a flat has step free access. The listing template has a field for floor level, the feed did not populate it for this property, and the theme renders the empty field as nothing at all.
If the property pages are in the material, the assistant answers from whatever it did find: the description text, a nearby property, or a general accessibility page written about the office. A person who cannot manage stairs books a viewing on the strength of it and travels across town to a second floor flat with no lift.
This is the clearest single argument for keeping listings out of the material. An empty field renders as silence, and silence in a page is indistinguishable from a fact that was never stated. Point accessibility questions at the listing and at a person, and put the practical detail you do control, the office, the parking, the arrangements for a viewing, in the pages you write yourself.
Before you go live
- The origin the page is served from has to be on the allowlist for that assistant, or nothing renders and the browser console says which origin was refused. An apex domain and its www are two different origins to a browser, so list both, along with any staging or preview host you want it to work on.
- Open the site as a visitor would, on the pages a estate agency visitor actually lands on, and ask it something only your own material could answer. A widget that renders is not the same as a widget that has read anything.
Questions
- Why not index the property pages? They are most of the site.
- Because they are imported, they churn, and the theme renders them as fields rather than prose. Availability changes hourly and empty fields disappear silently, so answers built from them are stale or invented. The fee, referencing and viewing pages are stable and are what people actually ask about at night.
- Can it tell somebody whether a property is still available?
- Not reliably, and it should not try. It has no view of your software and a listing page lags the negotiator. Have it point at the live listing and offer to take a name for a viewing, which is the answer the visitor wanted anyway.
- We run valuation landing pages on a different domain. Do those work?
- Only once that domain is on the allowlist, because a browser treats it as an unrelated origin. Decide first whether you want a chat panel on a page whose only job is one form, and if you do, list the origin when you paste the tag rather than after.
Keep reading
- Installing on WordPressHook the tag into wp_footer with a snippet plugin, keep it out of the theme, and stop optimisation plugins from deferring it away.
- Everything for a estate agencyViewings, fees, referencing and deposit rules are answerable at any hour. Valuing a property or discussing an offer is not.
- A surgery site on WordPress, and the page the widget must not be onWho actually does the install when a supplier owns the site, keeping the launcher off the consultation form, and branch sites that need their own entry.
- The menu is the material, and on most restaurant sites it is a downloadMenus published as files, dishes marked with icons instead of words, and a reservation flow that finishes on a booking platform's own domain.
- Property entries, cached templates and several sites sharing a layoutListings imported from your CRM sit inside cached templates, and one multi site install can put one assistant across every branch.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.