Houzez Theme Review

Last updated on September 15, 2017

Houzez is a premium real estate WordPress theme developed in June 2016 by Favethemes, an Envato Elite author. This template comes with many dedicated tools, like the advanced search, property page templates, virtual tours, front end estate submissions, and many other useful features. Houzez has ten pre-made demos, and it helps agents and agencies to build beautiful and flexible real estate websites.

Design

Houzez comes with a responsive and retina ready layout to help you and your visitors stay engaged with the website from any device. You can choose to display the content in a boxed or full width way. If you want to give your site a quick start, you can do this by importing one of the 10 demos that come bundled with the theme. It’s easy to design or redesign pages since Houzez has a front end Live Customizer that brings a multitude of customization options. You can choose to change the logo, headers, splash pages, taxonomies layouts, the footer, blog pages, and much more. The ‘Styling’ tab allows you to modify the colors of every page element, starting with the top bar, the search bar, and in the content area.

You can create a new page using the Visual Composer page builder and a lot of custom elements like Houzez Grids, Blog Posts Carousel, or Properties by IDs. The theme also comes with over 30 pre-made page templates, that you can use according to the purpose you want the page to have. You can customize the above the fold area with special sections like Properties Slider, Revolution Slider, images, or video. You have the options to change the header or footer styles and customize them with layouts, widgets, social networks or “Listings” button directly from the front end customizer.

Houzez is a versatile product and will help you design a beautiful real estate or agency website with sliders, left or right sidebars, custom widgets, desired fonts and the list is getting bigger.

As this theme was specially built for the real estate industry, the Properties get most of the attention. You can add as many ‘Property Types,’ ‘Features,’ ‘Status,’ ‘City,’ ‘Neighborhood,’ ‘County/State,’ ‘Labels’ that you want and modify the permalinks for each category. For single properties, you can set up a gallery slideshow, and choose whether to enable autoplay or not.

A popular feature of this theme is the possibility to create invoices using the Houzez Invoices system. These are ideal for record keeping, clarify what clients are paying for, and it helps sellers to get paid on time. Also, you can add attractive listings pack using the Houzez Packages and pick a billing period, frequency, price, and visibility. The theme also offers ready-to-use printable invoices.

The Houzez template has a built-in front end submissions option, which allows the users to register any type of property, including child / sub-properties. The users are also able to submit floor plans of their properties that will catch the customer’s eyes. The floor plans can be emphasized using a lightbox effect built especially for them.

The author built tools to enhance the value of the taxonomies and listing pages. You can choose one of the three layouts available that show properties in a list, simple grid, or grid with 3 columns for full width. The display order of the listing is also customizable, so visitors can see the inventory arranged according to date or price.

The theme provides Google Maps support through the Google API so the audience can visualize the listings with the street view, and choose the map style and map cluster icon. Other options include geolocation, limited to specific countries, and full-screen map.

An important tool of the Houzez is the Property Detail Page, which helps you organize the Property items. You can choose what information will be shown in each listing, the number of views by day, the icon for every element, similar properties and their view design (list/grid), top area type, and content layout for properties.

Functionality

The theme comes with a well structured Live Customizer panel with many subsections that provide settings related to Logos, Headers, Footers, Splash page, Properties, Typography, Taxonomies and a lot more. Houzez is powered by the Visual Composer page builder plugin, which comes with frontend and backend editing functionalities.

As a real estate dedicated theme, it’s only normal that Houzez has many options to facilitate research, and help visitors, agencies and agents find their way around the website easily. It’s easy to add new estates since the ‘Properties’ tab comprises every field that you need to fill in, for a complete portrait of your holdings.

Starting with general information, such as price, area, and year built, to map, address, gallery, home plans, and even private notes. Also, there is an interesting tool to help visitors make an idea about a house they like, the 360 Virtual Tour. All you have to do is paste the embedded code to show the Virtual Tour on the property page.

The searching process is simplified by the various filters that visitors can choose from when looking for estates. Some of them are the area, status, type, property ID, label, minimum & maximum price range, and even additional features like air conditioning, swimming pool, or TV Cable. When the ‘similar properties’ button is enabled, people can see other estates they might be interested in, according to certain criteria like type, feature, status, city, or label. Even more, they can schedule a tour to visit the place they like, by completing a form with their name, phone number, e-mail, and message. Logged-in users can also ask questions by sending direct messages on the property detail page.

Widgets from the sidebars always carry out attention over the entire website. So, the Favethemes author created custom widgets like the Mortgage Calculator, Code Banner, Instagram Slider, Recent View Properties and 13 more. There can also be added ratings and reviews, and visitors can find them at the bottom of the property page they’re currently viewing. For extra functionality, you can use the Yelp tool, which can be placed in the header or footer area, and helps guests find holdings in nearby places.

The theme comes bundled with the premium Visual Composer and Revolution Slider plugins and also the Houzez Login Register and Houzez Theme – Functionality custom plugins. As for the theme’s compatibility with other plugins, Houzez was tested with WPML and IDX and works properly. If you want to use the right to left writing system on your website, you’ll be glad that this template is RTL ready. It comes with membership and payment options through Paypal, Stripe or direct/wire.

Performance

We have tested the Houzez default demo on different page speed tests, and the content loads with a slow speed.

Downsides

There is no built-in translation panel, but the theme is WPML compatible.

The theme doesn’t come with an automatic theme updater, so you have to do it manually.

Houzez has a preview typography for Google Fonts, but you can’t add custom or Typekit ones.