ListingKit – Fast Search & Filter for Houzez

Description

The Houzez theme is required. ListingKit reads Houzez’s own property post type, taxonomies and fields — it is not a standalone search plugin.

On a small demo site, Houzez’s built-in search feels fine. On a real portal it does not. Every search submits a form, reloads the entire page, and asks the database to filter your listings through WordPress meta queries — the header, menu, map scripts and footer all rebuild just to show twelve different cards. At two thousand listings it drags; at ten thousand every filter change is a wait, and your visitors feel it.

ListingKit fixes the root cause. It builds a dedicated, indexed set of lookup tables for your properties and filters against those instead of grinding through post meta — so results update in place, instantly, with no page reload. Change the bedroom count and the cards refresh where they stand: no white flash, no lost scroll position, no rebuilding the whole page.

Free finds them. Pro shows where they are. The free engine answers “which listings match?” at any catalogue size. Pro answers “where are they?” — with interactive maps, agent and agency filtering, and lead-capture tools.

Why it is fast (the indexed engine)

Instead of querying wp_postmeta — where every property scatters its price, beds, baths, size and dozens of custom fields across many rows — ListingKit maintains three purpose-built tables:

• an index table with one row per property holding the numeric and status columns visitors actually filter on (price, bedrooms, bathrooms, size, land size, garage, year built, featured);
• a terms table mapping each property to its taxonomies; and
• a custom-field (EAV) table for everything you add in Houzez Fields Builder.

A filter becomes a single, tight, indexed query rather than dozens of meta lookups. That is why it stays fast as your catalogue grows — and why it uses less of your server than Houzez’s native search does today, not more. There are no artificial listing limits on Free or Pro.

What you get, Free

Instant, in-place filtering

• AJAX updates with zero page reloads — no white flash, scroll position preserved
• Dedicated indexed architecture (index + terms + custom-field/EAV tables) engineered to stay fast across thousands of listings, with no listing cap

Full Houzez data compatibility

• Auto-discovers every Houzez taxonomy — type, status, city, area, state, country, label, features, plus any custom taxonomy you add
• Native Houzez keyword search integration (matches the theme’s own keyword behaviour)
• Full Houzez Fields Builder support — any field you mark “searchable” can be placed straight into the search bar
• Dual-scale price slider that automatically swaps its bounds between Sale and Rent as the visitor changes status

A real search-UI builder

• Elementor widgets — a Search Bar and a Results List, added right into the native Houzez Elements widget category
• Shortcodes for any page builder or classic content: [listingkit_fast_search] and [listingkit_fast_search_results]
• Filter Fields manager — drag-and-drop ordering, label renaming, and per-field width control
• Search Tabs — All / For Sale / For Rent, plus custom link tabs, all drag-to-reorder
• Layout control — 1 to 4 columns, grid or list, and native support for all 7 Houzez card styles
• Active filter chips — every applied filter shows as a removable pill, with a live running match count and one-click Clear all
• One-click onboarding — a ready-to-use “Fast Search Results” page is generated automatically on activation

Performance & server operations

• Houzez Insights Optimizer (Page Speed): Houzez’s Insights records each visit by asking a third-party IP-geolocation service which city the visitor is in — a call that blocks the page until it answers. ListingKit performs that lookup in the background and serves it from a short-lived cache, cutting property-page load on our 897-listing test site from about 2.5s to about 1.2s. Fully toggleable.
• Rate limiting and query-result caching out of the box, so it behaves under real traffic
• WP-CLI + resilient background indexing — wp listingkit index … plus a WP-Cron rebuild that keeps running after you leave the page
• Automatic re-indexing on listing save, trash, and taxonomy edit — a manual rebuild is only needed after an external CSV/XML import that bypasses WordPress save hooks

Upgrade to Pro — maps, agents & leads

Pro is a separate add-on that layers on top of Free. It adds what Houzez cannot do out of the box, without removing or throttling anything in Free.

Native, multi-provider map search

• Results on the theme’s own map using whichever provider Houzez is already configured for — OpenStreetMap, Google Maps, or Mapbox
• Dynamic layouts — map beside the listings, above them, or a toggle between the two; left or right orientation; collapsible

Precision geolocation tools

• Radius search — a circle around any point, in kilometres or miles
• “Near Me” search — instantly centred on the visitor’s current GPS location
• Freehand & polygon drawing — outline a neighbourhood point-by-point, or hold and drag to lasso freehand; only properties inside the boundary are returned
• Search as I move the map — panning and zooming updates the results live

Lead capture & dashboard integration

• Saved searches in the Houzez dashboard, with complex polygon and radius boundaries described properly instead of the blank rows the theme shows natively
• Pinned featured properties — featured listings held at the top of every results page without overriding the visitor’s chosen sort (price, date, and so on)

Agent & agency multi-select

• Multi-select Agent and Agency dropdowns supporting both Houzez attribution models — a picked agent or the listing’s author
• Agency roll-up — selecting an agency automatically returns listings across all of its associated agents

Workflow acceleration

• Search-bar presets — configure a search bar once, name it, and reuse it across any other Elementor widget or shortcode; fields, order, labels, tabs and styling all carry across and stay editable

External services

This plugin’s optional Page Speed feature (Fast Search → Page Speed) reduces the delay Houzez’s own visitor-location lookup adds to property pages. Houzez’s Insights records each visit and, to do so, asks a third-party IP geolocation service which city the visitor is in — a request that blocks the page until it answers. When that lookup is about to happen, this plugin performs the same request in the background instead, and serves the answer from a short-lived cache.

Because of that, when this feature is enabled the plugin sends the visitor’s IP address to one of the following services — the same services Houzez itself uses — to retrieve an approximate city and country:

• ipwho.is — the visitor’s IP is sent to https://ipwho.is/ . Terms and privacy policy: https://ipwho.is/
• ipapi.co — used only as a fallback if ipwho.is does not respond; the visitor’s IP is sent to https://ipapi.co/ . Terms: https://ipapi.co/terms/ — Privacy: https://ipapi.co/privacy/

Only the visitor’s IP address is sent, only when Houzez would already have made this lookup, and each result is cached so the same address is not looked up repeatedly. No request is made for a visitor whose location Houzez does not look up. You can disable this feature entirely under Fast Search → Page Speed, in which case the plugin makes no external requests of its own.