A Real Estate Website Using Drupal My friend wants me to create a Real Estate Search Engine for him where Users can submit Real Estate Information so that others can view them ( by searching or any other method ).

I want to use Drupal because I have worked with it earlier. If there is a plugin/add-on for Drupal which can help me make a Real Estate Website, please do include a link in your answer to the plugin or module page(The Plugin or module should be free of cost).

Is there any other CMS which I can use ( Real Estate Plugin should be available )? or should I go with Drupal?
In Drupal, you will not find a specific "Real Estate Module". (Well, there is one, but it's a dev version for Drupal 5 and there's only 1 site using it :-)) Drupal modules tend to be more abstract: you take a module for building list pages, add a module for image handling, use a third module for send-to-a-friend functionality, etc. etc. The great thing about Drupal is that 99.9% of the time, you don't have to worry if those modules are compatible with each other. They just build on core concepts such as nodes, fields, menu's and users.

That said, I think you should be able to build a real estate site by combining the modules you need. This way, you will end up with a much more flexible system than a monolithic real estate plugin can ever offer.

I can't be really specific about which modules you need, because I don't know your exact requirements. For the basic functionality you don't even need additional modules; Drupal 7 core allows you to set up a content type (let's call it 'property'), add fields to the property content type (like an image field, price field, address field) and adjust permissions so logged in users (or anonymous, if you want) can create property nodes. Drupal core also includes basic search functionality.

After that, add contributed modules if needed:


Views to create all kinds of lists (plain, with filters, sortable tables, etc.)
Pathauto to create nice search engine optimized URLs
things like Location, Gmap and/or Locationmap (I haven't tried them yet in D7) for maps and geolocations


I recommend that you start building a basic site first and ask more specific questions when you run into them.