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Featured Properties: How they work

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Featured properties are highlighted listings that can be promoted across your website in property lists, sliders, taxonomy pages, and search results. This option is useful when you want certain listings to appear before regular properties.

A featured property is a property marked with special priority in the theme. Once a property is set as featured, it can appear before non-featured listings in many default property display elements.

How a property becomes featured depends on the paid submission type enabled by the site administrator.

If you want to manually mark a property as featured from wp-admin, go to Properties, edit the property you want, and enable the Featured Property option in the property settings.

This is the method used by the administrator, and it is also the only method available when paid submission is disabled.

Important: After changing the featured status of a property, clear the theme cache so the updated order is visible on the front end.

Depending on your submission setup, there are 3 ways a property can become featured:

1. Free Submission

If Paid Submission is set to NO, users cannot make their own properties featured from the front-end dashboard. In this case, only the admin can mark a property as featured from wp-admin.

2. Paid Listing

If you use paid listing submission, the user pays to publish the property and can also pay an additional fee to make that property featured. In this setup, the property does not expire. It is a one-time payment.

Help article about paid submission

3. Membership Submission

If you enable the membership system, the admin creates packages and defines how many included listings and how many included featured listings each package contains. The user buys a package and can then publish properties and mark them as featured based on the package limits. Membership packages do expire.

Help article about membership submission

If a property is marked as featured, it can be displayed first in the following property lists when those elements use the theme default order:

Note: Several property list elements include their own sort control. Each location is managed individually, so changing the order in one widget, page, or shortcode does not automatically change the order in another location.

When a property list uses the Default sort option, the theme will show featured properties first. After all featured properties are displayed, the remaining properties are shown by ID.

This means the order is:

  • Featured properties first
  • Then non-featured properties
  • Within that order, properties continue by ID
Important: Setting a list to Default sorting does not make a property featured by itself. The property must already be marked as featured.

Featured properties display a special text label or icon over the top left side of the property image, depending on the card unit type selected in Theme Options.

You can create sections that display only featured properties by using the theme shortcodes or Elementor widgets.

WpResidence Property List shortcodes

There are 7 shortcodes available, one for each property card unit type.

When setting up the shortcode, in the Filter section you can choose to show only featured properties.

WpResidence Items Slider shortcode

There are also 7 slider shortcodes, one for each property card unit type.

When setting up the slider shortcode, in the Filter section you can choose to show only featured properties.

If you want featured properties to show first inside the List with Filters widget, set the widget sorting option to Default.

With the Default sort option, featured properties are listed first, and the rest of the properties are shown after that by ID.

  • Many property display elements include their own sorting settings.
  • Each widget, shortcode, page builder element, or list page can be configured separately.
  • If one location is set to Default and another is set to a different sorting rule, the order may not match between those sections.
  • After changing featured status or sorting options, clear the theme cache so the latest changes become visible on the website.

This is especially important if you update a property from admin and do not immediately see the new featured order on the front end.