FW Real Estate – Documentation

The Multi Currency add-on lets you enter a price once and have visitors see it in their own currency, with exchange rates that refresh themselves daily. It also handles tax display — the part that most commonly causes confusion on cross-border listings.

Use Cases

• Cross-border stock. Property priced in euros, browsed by buyers thinking in pounds or dollars.
• Mixed tax markets. Consumer markets expect tax-inclusive prices; commercial markets expect the opposite. This add-on can serve either, or let the visitor choose.
• Portfolios in mixed currencies, rebased onto one backend currency so the numbers stay comparable across listings.

The Currency Dictionary

Enabling this add-on adds a Currency dictionary at FW Real Estate → Dictionaries → Currency. Each entry carries a short name, a rate, and its own tax rate.

Rates refresh automatically. The site pulls the European Central Bank's daily reference rates — no account and no API key required — throttled to once per day and driven by the site's scheduled job. You can still type a rate by hand where you need a fixed one.

Changing the backend currency rebases every rate onto the new one using the rates already on record, so prices stay consistent rather than jumping.

Settings

All settings are found at Configuration → Add-ons → Multi-currency.

• Backend currency — the currency your prices are entered in.
• Second price shown in — shows every price a second time in brackets in a chosen currency (for example, $300,000 (~264,000 €)) on listing cards and property pages. Set to No second price to disable it.
• Currency selector on listings — whether visitors see a currency switcher.
• Tax display — see below.
• Detect currency by visitor country — off by default; see the note below.

Tax Display

The tax display setting has four modes:

• Off — no tax shown at all.
• Prices include tax — the price with tax already in it.
• Prices exclude tax (labelled) — the price without tax, and clearly stated as such.
• Let the visitor switch — both, with a toggle.

Tax is calculated using the per-currency tax rate from the Currency dictionary. A currency with a tax rate of 0 shows no tax at all — which is how a single catalogue can serve a VAT market and a non-VAT one simultaneously.

GeoIP Detection

This setting is off by default, and deliberately so. Enabling it sends the visitor's IP address to a third-party lookup service (ipapi.co). With it on, a first-time visitor is shown their own country's currency and, in Let the visitor switch mode, tax-inclusive prices if their country applies VAT. Crawlers are never looked up.

Whether that trade-off is acceptable is a decision about your privacy policy, not a technical one. The setting is a switch precisely so the choice is yours to make.

Notes

• With this add-on enabled, the core's own currency sign and position settings disappear from Configuration → General. This is intentional — the Currency dictionary becomes the single source, and having two places to set a currency symbol would create conflicts.
• A currency selector is also available in the search module, where it governs the price range filter as well as display.
• Rates are a convenience, not a quotation. They move daily; a contract price should always be stated in the currency it will actually be paid in.

To install this addon, open the Add-ons panel inside FW Real Estate. See Getting Started → Add-ons for details on free addons, paid addons, and site verification.