FW Real Estate – Documentation

The Multi Currency add-on lets you enter a property price once and have visitors see it in their own currency. Exchange rates refresh daily without any account or API key. It also handles tax display, which is the part that most commonly catches administrators out.

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 handles either, or lets the visitor choose.
• Portfolios in mixed currencies, rebased onto one backend currency so figures stay comparable across listings.

Currency Dictionary

Enabling the 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 by pulling the European Central Bank's daily reference rates — free, no account, no API key required. Refreshes are throttled to once per day and driven by the site's scheduled job. You can still type a rate by hand for any currency where you want a fixed value.

If you change the backend currency, every rate is rebased onto the new one using the rates already on record, so existing prices stay consistent rather than jumping to unexpected values.

Settings

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

• Backend currency — the currency your prices are entered in.
• Currency selector on listings — whether visitors see a currency switcher on listing pages.
• Tax display — controls how tax is shown (see below).
• Detect currency by visitor country — off by default; see the note below.

Tax Display

The Tax display setting has four options:

• Off — no tax information is shown.
• Prices include tax — the displayed price has tax folded in.
• Prices exclude tax (labelled) — the price is shown without tax and clearly labelled as such.
• Let the visitor switch — both views are available, 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 exactly how you serve a VAT market and a non-VAT one from the same catalogue without maintaining separate listings.

Detecting Currency by Visitor Country

This setting is off by default, deliberately. When enabled, it sends the visitor's IP address to a third-party lookup service (ipapi.co) to determine their country. A first-time visitor then sees their country's currency automatically, and in Let the visitor switch mode, VAT-country visitors see tax-inclusive prices. Crawlers are never looked up.

Whether that trade-off is acceptable depends on your privacy policy, not on any technical requirement. The setting is a switch precisely so the decision is yours to make.

Notes

• When this add-on is enabled, the core currency sign and position settings disappear from Configuration → General. This is intentional — the Currency dictionary becomes the single source for all currency display, and having two places to set a currency symbol would create conflicts.
• Rates are a convenience, not a financial quotation. They move daily; any contract price should 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.