Real Estate Open Houses is a feature that allows frontend users to create special calendar events that are associated with individual Real Estate listings. These events are noted as Open Houses because they are tied to classified Real Estate assets (as children), and are section tagged into the “open_houses” calendar category. Open House listings are then promoted on the individual Real Estate listing to which they are related.
In addition, these Open House events are also displayed in the site’s calendar, within the Open House section. Open Houses have always been a great way for Listing provided by to promote their homes; this can now be accomplished very easily within our BLOX Real Estate product.
In order to take advantage of the Open House listings feature, BLOX Real Estate must be installed.
Working with Open House calendar events
A user can create an Open House calendar event by first creating a Real Estate Classified ad.
Next, after the Real Estate ad has been created, the Open House calendar event can be created by navigating to the Children panel within the Related tab. Choose the+ Add button, and then navigate to Other apps... > Calendar > Event.
When creating an Open House event, it should be correctly section tagged to the open_houses section. The open_houses category can be created as a sub-URL of the calendar section if desired. The calendar name is optional, but open_houses is required. In the example below, the event is tagged to the calendar/homes/open_houses section, but could also be added to homes/open_houses or open_houses sections, as long as the URLs exist.
Open House events can be enhanced in the same way as other event listing with photo galleries, videos, comments, detailed description, etc. Open House events can also be featured so they show up at the top of calendar search results, or flagged so they appear within specialized widgets promoting upcoming Open Houses. It is also recommended both the Venue and Location fields are set to the location of the home that is for sale. The Listing provided by should also be set as the owning business.
Open Houses can be showcased either on the front page of the Real Estate section or on the site's front page, using the Asset Index: Map block. If the Open House events have location information, they will be added to a Google map, with the individual listing displayed in a list beneath it.
In addition, the Real Estate listing will get a special Open House flag on the search results page so users can see instantly which listings have associated Open Houses.
