I will add more tips here as I continue to develop and refine the real estate listings setup, which is based on the Great Real Estate plugin to WordPress, in conjunction with with some enhancements of my own.
Use the “New Listing Wizard” I have provided to post the basic details about a property – the address, a short blurb, a longer description, and your best photo (the one you want to be featured up front). The wizard will perform several related tasks: creating a draft page for the listing, recording the basic statistics, looking up the GPS coordinates (for the map that appears on the listing pages), and creating a photo album associated with the listing.
Once you’ve completed that preliminary step, the system will prompt you to further edit and enhance the listing and to add more photos to the gallery.
I recommend resizing photos for the website to be between 800 and 1000 pixels wide prior to uploading. If you upload high-resolution photos straight from a camera, you will wind up with images too large to be displayed in the browser window. The server software will try to resize them on the fly, but this adds a delay. Or in some cases, the browser has to do the work of downloading a high-resolution photo and resizing it, which is also wasteful.
Images will load much faster for the users (potential buyers) if resized in advance. A very simple program for cropping and resizing photos that I recommend is XnView.