We Have Launched TerraSuite: Free, Uncapped Estate Agency Software

We have published a new product. TerraSuite is estate and letting agency software for WordPress, it went into the WordPress.org directory on 6 October, and the free version is genuinely free: no property cap, no time limit and no card required.

This is a departure for us, so it is worth explaining what it is, why we built it, and what it has to do with a hosting company.

What it actually is

Two pieces, both free and both in the WordPress.org directory. The TerraSuite plugin adds property listings, a filtered search, a self-hosted map, enquiries and client records to any WordPress site. The TerraSuite Agency theme is a block theme built to show them off, with nine layouts and nine palettes you pick from a drawn preview.

Neither one needs the other. The plugin works with whatever theme you already have, and the theme is a perfectly good agency website on its own.

The public search. Filters, sorting, saved searches and a shortlist, all from the free plugin.

Why we built it

We host a number of estate agency sites, and the same conversation kept happening. An agency wants its properties on its own website, properly searchable, with enquiries arriving somewhere sensible. The options are a software-as-a-service platform at a hundred pounds a month and upwards, where the agency’s data lives on somebody else’s system, or a WordPress plugin that caps the free tier at ten or twenty listings and then requires a payment commitment.

Neither is unreasonable as a business model. Both are frustrating for an agency with forty properties and a website it already pays for.

So the cap is the thing we removed. The free version of TerraSuite will hold ten properties or ten thousand, and it will still be free next year.

The map is ours, not Google’s

The map search deserves a mention because it is the part people do not expect. A visitor can draw their own shape on the map and see only the properties inside it, which is how people actually look for somewhere to live: not by postcode radius, but by “this side of the river, above the station”.

Draw an area and only the properties inside it are shown.

It is self-hosted, with no third-party map key to obtain and no per-request bill arriving later. More to the point for anyone who reads our security posts: nothing about a visitor’s browsing leaves the agency’s own server.

The side the agency sees

Behind the website there is a back office. Properties and their photographs, client records, enquiries from the web, email and telephone gathered into one list against the property each one concerns, a viewings diary, offers, and reporting.

The dashboard: what is waiting, what is coming up, and who has been in touch.

The viewings diary is the piece we are most pleased with. An agent sets a working pattern once, the appointment slots are generated from it, and a buyer books themselves into a free one at eleven at night without anybody answering the telephone. The agent confirms it the next morning. No artificial intelligence is involved and nothing is guessed: it offers the slots the agent defined and no others.

Try it without signing up for anything

There are two demonstrations, and neither asks for an email address, a password or a card.

• demofree.terrasuite.uk is the free plugin, exactly as it installs.
• demopaid.terrasuite.uk is the full version with the diary, client accounts and offers switched on.

Both reset every six hours, so you can change whatever you like.

What it costs

The free version covers listings, search, the map, enquiries and client records, with no limit on the number of properties.

Paid licences add the viewings diary, client logins, offers and, higher up, feeds to the property portals. They are £199, £499 and £1,249 a year for Starter, Agency and Network.

We also run it fully hosted, which is the part that makes this a hosting company’s product rather than a side project. The agency gets the website and the back office and has nothing to install, update, back up or secure, because that is our job and we have been doing it since 2006. Hosted plans are £45, £85 and £175 a month, or £450, £850 and £1,750 a year paid up front, and the licence is included.

Why a hosting company writes software

Honestly, because we kept being asked to fix the alternatives. Hosting a site means being the first person called when something breaks, and over the years that has given us an unusually detailed view of which plugins fall over, which ones are abandoned, and which ones quietly cost their owner more than they save.

TerraSuite is the first of our own products to reach the public. There is more behind it, and you will find it in the new Software We Publish column at the foot of every page on this site as each one becomes available.

If you run an agency, or you build websites for people who do, terrasuite.uk has the full detail. If you would like to talk about the hosted option, open a ticket and we will answer it ourselves.