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Irish Property Sites Keeping an Eye on Each Other?
You may or may not know of a service called Alexa. Alexa is Amazon.com’s search engine and Internet statistics service.
Alexa collects statistics on general Internet usage from the browsing habits of millions of Alexa toolbar users. This data is then presented on the Alexa website.
Can you trust Alexa?
There’s are one or two problems though – Alexa is too easy to game, and the toolbar users are very often extremely biased both geographically and technically (heavily US tech users).
But, without prejudice to these issues, Alexa does have some nice features. For instance you can compare traffic data from a number of sites over long periods of time.
Strange what you run into
Recently while searching for some info on a particular Irish Property site I noticed a SERP entry for www.alexaholic.com:
This page had been set up by a visitor to alexaholic.com who entered the following five Irish property websites:
- www.myhome.ie (blue line)
- www.daft.ie (red line)
- www.funda.ie (green line)
- www.sellityourself.ie (brown line)
- www.privateseller.ie (cyan line)
So what? I hear you ask
Of course just about anybody could have gone over to alexaholic.com and set up this comparison (the site is public and free). But what really caught my eye was the trends of some of the sites.
Now before I go on let me explain that I studied economics at TCD for 4 years, and had a healthy (or perhaps unhealthy) interest in the stock markets. In particular I had an interest in charting and technical analysis.
Trends
Not withstanding the Alexa bias, the following trends are quite interesting:
- November an December are bad months for the property websites;
- Until Q4 2005 both myhome.ie and daft.ie were joint leaders for website reach;
- December 2005 saw myhome.ie visits plunge, while Daft.ie failed to set a new low for the year;
- Since 2005 the paths have diverged significantly for the two large property sites;
- Daft.ie Internet reach appears to have become more volatile but a clear up trend is in place (higher highs, higher lows);
- Myhome.ie conversely has entered a very clearly defined down trend – their reach is falling.
The €50m website
Myhome.ie was bought by the Irish Times last July for a reported €50m. Although no accuracy can be attributed to the Alexa data, over large sample sizes the trends reported may be representative of the actual actual figures.
If so the Irish Times may have quite a job on their hands catching up with Daft.ie.
Funda
Toward the recent area of the chart you might notice a blip in the green line. This is the data for Funda.ie which launched with the Dublin Coastal Development back in September.
The chart shows the uphill struggle Funda will have to compete with the big boys of Irish on-line property.
A pinch of salt
Of course you can’t trust Alexa data. But the charts still give some food for thought and give some indication of the competitive environment facing websites in the Irish property niche.
Now that is interesting. That’s a bit gap opened up over a period of only 1 year! I know alexa doesn’t include everyone out there but it might be a good indication of the current affairs. Here’s some figures to back up alexa results though:
http://www.daft.ie/news/2006/daft_audit_september_2006.daft
Daft with 38 million page impressions and myhome only with 18 million. I like daft, it’s a great site but at the same time I don’t like to see a big monopoly out there. Competition will keep them on their toes!
Great find and report (as usual Richard)
Dave
Comment by David Behan — December 4, 2006 @ 1:37 pm
I’ll take a look at that link David.
Thanks for the props
Comment by Richard Hearne — December 4, 2006 @ 2:50 pm
Here’s some more stats from Daft:
http://www.daft.ie/agents.daft
On this page they say 28m while on other page they say 38m. Someonly has accidently (possibly on purpose) gave them an extra 10m!
Comment by David Behan — December 4, 2006 @ 2:57 pm
Look at the jump daft is after taking since the new year! The gap between them is only getting bigger. I’m confused though… myhome was sold for 50m and I’ve heard on the grape vine that daft is worth around 20 odd million. Are they not monetising their site enough? Why pay so much to myhome when they are clearly not getting the visitors to justify!
Comment by David Behan — January 16, 2007 @ 11:41 am
Hi Guy,
some good points on the site, expect myhome.ie to grow as it embarks on a heavy advertising period… the gap will close.. anybody know any estate agents personally ??
Comment by Phil — March 19, 2007 @ 1:58 pm
sorry for the shameless plug, but i run http://propertyireland.net.
just did a comparison of the above sites with propertyireland and while i see that the alexa rankings are not exactly accurate, its good to see that it compares well to funda.ie, sellityourself.ie and privateseller.ie without any advertising budget.
Comment by dave — June 11, 2007 @ 8:51 am
Hi Dave
Shameless plugs are always welcome if they bring some additional knowledge into play. I hadn’t heard of your site before now.
Thanks for commenting,
Rgds
Richard
Comment by Richard Hearne — June 11, 2007 @ 11:44 am
Thanks Richard,
Only found your site today on a google search, so didn’t know how relevant the topic still was.
The original reason propertyireland.net was set up is because I was trying to sell a house in Mayo after moving to England and I found the local Estate Agents to all know each other and any perspective buyers a bit too well which didn’t help me too much as a seller (my opinion only) so I decided to set up a site for the house.
After a week or two I realised a site with one house would only get a few hits if any but a site with lots of properties would get a lot more hits, so I went for the free FSBO (For sale by owner) model.
That was 4 years ago, the site has been running and growing in features and users since then and has paid for itself in the google ads displayed on the site.
Just interesting to see on the stats above that if you have an advertising budget behind you how well you can do.
If you are interested in any of the stats on my site, let me know and I will be happy to post – nothing too interesting as it has been a word of mouth site, but maybe be of interest to others who want to try the same type of idea.
Thanks, Dave.
Comment by dave — June 11, 2007 @ 10:03 pm
Great Article, but as you said Alexa traffic is by far accurate.
The toolbar is mostly used by web developers, who doesn’t really browse those websites.
BTW http://www.alexaholic.com seems to be gone.
Comment by Louie — July 6, 2007 @ 8:35 am
Hey Loiue
Yeah Alexaholic was more or less shut down by Amazon (who own Alexa). That’s actually an interesting story in it itself. Have a Google for it – some good lessons on how not to manage thrid parties using your data.
Rgds
Richard
Comment by Richard Hearne — July 6, 2007 @ 8:39 am
Hi Guys,
i think we need to findout alternative for above websites because they charge lot of money for advertising, if you want to advertise property in daft.ie they charge 195 euro, see this website http://www.yourchoice.ie (quite new) landlords and estate agents can advertise their properties for free
Comment by John — July 6, 2007 @ 1:25 pm
Richard,
Here is another shameless plug!!! We just launched http://www.estatemate.com on the 20th of July 2007 and at the time of writing this we have £400,000,000 (UK sterling) worth of properties.
We are concentrating our efforts north of the border for the moment. It is free for all estate agents to use and it features a property management/marketing system.
I would love to hear some feedback of how we can improve our offering.
Comment by Errol Maxwell — July 12, 2007 @ 1:15 pm
It seems that the Irish property market is growing so much that people seem to think that on-line property listings will grow likewise. I understand Daft and My Home will propably dominate, but as somebody who recently let an apartment, I found that the smaller sites are crying out for business and are undercutting the big boys.
One new site http://www.buyrentorstay.com site is offering listings for 95c and somebody else told me that funda had folded … is this true ?
Anyway I see that there is a slowdown in the Irish property market – I wonder if this will see a slowdown on the web also ?
Comment by Ross — July 27, 2007 @ 11:30 pm
You can post Rental, Residential and Commercial Properties for FREE of cost at http://www.yourchoice.ie, you don’t need to pay even 95 cents.
Comment by Declan — July 28, 2007 @ 8:55 am
It seems that the trend is now going away from paid listings and more towards free listings, http://www.buyrentorstay.com/ and http://www.yourchoice.ie,/ are only 2 of many sites offering Free Property listings … how can these sites make money ?
Comment by Sheamus — July 28, 2007 @ 12:21 pm
http://propertyireland.net has also always been free and will continue to be so…
Comment by dave — July 29, 2007 @ 11:07 am
Wow !!
Just had a look at http://www.estatemate.com. Super site. I think if you move down here you’ll wipe the floor with the southern sites
Best of luck with it.
Comment by Jockser — July 30, 2007 @ 8:29 pm
Just realised I made a booboo with copying & pasting the site address
It should of course be http://www.estatemate.com
Comment by Jockser — July 31, 2007 @ 1:27 pm
I just stumbled upon another site for selling and buying property in Ireland. It’s You buy from me and looks like it’s all for free. No clue how these sites make money but it seems to pay off for both sides I guess
Comment by house buyer in dublin — August 29, 2007 @ 7:55 am
Hi,
It is remarkable how Internet designers have caught onto the property bubble with both arms. Surely the end is near for most of these sites now as the property bubble does seem to have bursed and the market, well does it exist.
One new property website that does have a difference is http://www.apti.ie which gives estate agents and auctioneers a chance to offer sn enhanced service which includes free sms and email property bids and the buyers and sellers login online to view the bidding process. http://www.apti.ie bidding transparancy is certainly welcomed by property buyers and sellers in Ireland and appears to be free to all.
The obsession of Irish people with the Property market and the now infamous Irish Property Bubble has lead me to beleive that this country is not as “rich” as we are told. 10% of people have 90% of the wealth and the society that we are in is not equal.
Michael.
Comment by Michael Doyle — October 12, 2007 @ 9:47 am
well, here is another one…
http://irish-property.ie
I have decided to use http://propertyireland.net as a backend for a few new sites.
Registered a .ie domain to see if it makes any difference with Irish search engine traffic (although it is hosted in the states), will move it onto an Irish server in a few months after I see some initial stats.
Any feedback is appreciated.
Comment by dave — October 30, 2007 @ 2:26 pm
On the subject of site traffic can anyone, please, explain to me how it is calculated. Daft.ie stats below are from ABCE who independetly monitor site traffic – see http://www.abce.org.uk/cgi-bin/gen5?runprog=abce/abce&type=irishaudits&search=page
Site Name Daft.ie
Unique Users 813,288
Page Impressions 59,525,107
Audit Period Sep-07
What I’m confused about is that ABCE claim 813k unique users – does this mean 813k individuals? If so I find it hard to believe that 20% of the Irish population visited Daft in Sept. I also find it difficult to uderstand nearly 60m page impressions as this means an average of 75 pages viewed by each unique user. There must be an awfull lot of people out there serious about renting!
I’d appreciate comments.
Michael
Comment by Michael — December 21, 2007 @ 5:50 pm
God only knows how they collect their stats. I can only see Google Analytics on daft.ie.
I would say one thing – I do know that the average pageviews is very high, but I also doubt very much that those figures are all ‘human’.
They could publish some screenshots from their GA to back this claim up… if they wanted to of course.
Final words – pinch-of-salt.
Rgds
Richard
Comment by Richard Hearne — December 22, 2007 @ 2:57 am
For anyone that is interested. alexaholic.com is now statsaholic.com.
Comment by Paul — May 25, 2009 @ 10:50 am
Just came across this blog entry while investigating property management on Ireland. Interesting. Wonder what the situation is now in 2012?
Comment by Property Management — July 23, 2012 @ 12:30 am