If you are building a property website on WordPress, Houzez comes up quickly. It is one of the most popular real estate themes in the world, and it is the theme we build on every day. Here is what it actually gives you, what it leaves out, and how to decide whether it is right for you.
We should say up front that we are not neutral, but not in the way you might expect. We build a plugin for Houzez, so we spend a great deal of time inside it. We are also not an affiliate and we earn nothing if you buy it. What follows is simply what we have learned from using it.
A real estate platform, not a template
The thing that separates Houzez from a good-looking WordPress theme is that it already understands property.
Most themes give you a design. You then spend weeks bolting on plugins for listings, search filters, agent profiles, lead capture and payments, and hoping they all agree with each other. Houzez starts further along. Listings, agents, agencies, property search and a customer relationship manager are part of the theme itself, built to work together.
That difference shows up in how long it takes to get something real online. You are configuring a platform rather than assembling one.
What you get out of the box
Property listings with everything a buyer expects: photo galleries, video, virtual tours, maps, floor plans and every field you would want to fill in.
Advanced search, which is genuinely one of the strongest parts. Custom filters and a visual search builder let you shape how people find properties, and for a portal that is the difference between a site people use and a site they leave.
Agent and agency profiles, so every listing links back to the right person and the right team. For an agency with several people, this is what makes the site feel like an organisation rather than a list.
A built-in CRM, so leads and enquiries live next to your listings instead of in a separate tool you forget to check.
Frontend submission, which is the feature that turns a website into a business. Your agents and members log in from the front of the site, submit their own listings and manage them, without ever touching the WordPress admin.
And memberships and payments, so you can charge for those submissions. That is where things get interesting, and we will come back to it.
Houzez is built around Elementor, so you shape pages by dragging real estate widgets into place rather than writing code. You can import a ready-made demo and replace the content, which gets most people to a professional-looking site quickly.
Who it suits
A solo agent gets a professional presence with listings and lead capture, without paying for a custom build.
An agency gets a team of agents under one roof, each with their own profile and their own listings, coordinated centrally.
A web developer gets a fast, visual way to build client sites in the property sector without starting from scratch every time.
And a property portal gets the full picture: many sellers, frontend submission, membership packages and paid listings. This is where Houzez earns its keep, because running a portal on generic plugins is genuinely painful.
Who makes it, and how you buy it
Houzez is developed by FaveThemes, the trading name of MyPlayLab LLC, a team that has specialised in real estate WordPress themes for over a decade. They maintain it actively and ship regular updates as WordPress and Elementor move on.
It is sold on ThemeForest, which is part of Envato. Buying from the official listing is what keeps you eligible for updates, support and security fixes, and connects you to the FaveThemes Portal, where you manage your licence, get one-click downloads and automatic updates, and browse the Houzez Studio template library.
Two practical things worth knowing. It is a one-time purchase rather than a yearly subscription, and it includes free lifetime theme updates. And one licence covers one live production website, while staging, development and localhost environments for that same site are free. If you run several live sites, you need a licence for each.
Prices are set by FaveThemes and change from time to time, so check the current figure on the ThemeForest listing rather than trusting any number you read in a blog post.
Where Houzez stops
No theme does everything, and being clear about the edges is more useful than pretending otherwise.
Houzez handles memberships and per-listing payments, and it supports PayPal, Stripe, 2Checkout and Bank Transfer. Its own documentation is explicit that recurring membership plans renew automatically only with the built-in PayPal or Stripe gateways, and that recurring billing is not available for the others.
For a lot of the world, that is fine. For Europe it is a real gap.
Your Dutch agents want to pay with iDEAL, which handles roughly 71 percent of Dutch online payments. Your Belgian agents reach for Bancontact, which handles around 64 percent of Belgian ones. Polish agents use BLIK, Swiss agents use TWINT, Italian agents use Satispay or BANCOMAT Pay. None of those are card methods, and none of them are in the box.
That is not a criticism of Houzez. It is a global theme, and it made a sensible choice about which processors to support directly. But if your market is European, it leaves you offering the methods your agents use least.
The usual fix, and the lighter one
The route most people are pointed towards is WooCommerce. You install WooCommerce, add the Houzez WooCommerce Addon to bridge the two systems, add the Mollie plugin for WooCommerce, and add a paid subscriptions extension if you want memberships to renew.
That works. It is also four plugins from different makers, a webshop platform running underneath a property site, a second checkout for your agents to click through, and a stack you have to keep compatible forever. For a site that also sells physical products it can be worth it. For the single job of taking a payment, it is a lot.
The lighter fix is a plugin built for this exact gap. Mollie for Houzez is one plugin, made for the Houzez theme, that connects your site straight to Mollie and adds payments to the checkout you already have.
It gives you 30 payment methods, including iDEAL, Bancontact, cards, PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, SEPA Direct Debit and the local European options, and you choose which ones appear. It handles recurring memberships itself, so there is no separate subscriptions extension. And it charges for every part of Houzez: membership packages, individual listing submissions, and featured or upgraded listings.
No core theme files are touched, so a Houzez update will not break your setup.
How we would start
If you are building a European property platform from scratch, the order that has worked for us and for our clients is simple.
Buy Houzez from ThemeForest and install it. Set up your listings, your agents and your membership packages, and get the property side of the site the way you want it. Then add the payments layer, so your agents can pay with the methods they actually use.
That sequence matters. Payments are easier to get right once you know what you are charging for and how often.
Our honest recommendation
We have spent a lot of hours inside the Houzez codebase, and we have grown fond of it. If a friend asked us how to start a property website tomorrow, we would point them at Houzez without hesitating. It is the most complete real estate foundation we know of, and it is maintained by people who have been doing this for more than ten years.
We liked it enough to build our entire plugin around it. So the advice is exactly what we would give in person: start with Houzez for the property side, add Mollie for the European payments it does not include, and you have a platform that is genuinely hard to beat.
Explore Mollie for Houzez: https://blog.quantumaddons.com/mollie-for-houzez-european-payments-no-woocommerce/
Frequently asked questions
What is the Houzez theme?
Houzez is a premium real estate WordPress theme by FaveThemes. It provides property listings, advanced search, agent and agency profiles, a built-in CRM and frontend property submission, all designed visually with Elementor.
Do I need to know how to code to use Houzez?
No. Houzez is built around Elementor, so you build pages by dragging and dropping real estate widgets. You can import a ready-made demo and replace the content.
How many websites does one Houzez licence cover?
One live production website. Staging, development and localhost environments for that same site are free. If you run several live sites, you need a licence for each.
Where should I buy Houzez?
From the official ThemeForest listing. Buying from the official source keeps you eligible for updates, support and security fixes, and connects you to the FaveThemes Portal.
Does Houzez include payments?
Yes. It supports membership packages and per-listing payments with PayPal, Stripe, 2Checkout and Bank Transfer, and recurring billing works with PayPal and Stripe. It does not include Mollie or the European local methods, which is the gap our plugin fills.
Can I sell recurring memberships with Houzez?
Yes, through its built-in PayPal and Stripe gateways. If you would rather let members pay and auto-renew with iDEAL, Bancontact or SEPA Direct Debit, Mollie for Houzez adds that without WooCommerce.
Is Quantum Add-ons affiliated with FaveThemes?
No. We are fully independent, not endorsed by FaveThemes, and not an affiliate. We earn nothing if you buy Houzez. We build a plugin that works alongside their theme and we recommend it because we rate it.
Learn more on the feature overview (https://blog.quantumaddons.com/mollie-for-houzez-features/), the pricing page (https://blog.quantumaddons.com/mollie-for-houzez-pricing/), or the documentation (https://blog.quantumaddons.com/docs/mollie-for-houzez-theme/).
Mollie for Houzez is a Quantum Add-ons product. Premium WordPress plugins, built with security and reliability. Made in the Netherlands.