Myhome.ie interesting move

There is a website out there that tracks the movement of house prices through checking the price drops (and rises) on myhome.ie. It doesnt matter what the name of it is, but I use it all the time as I am currently looking to buy a house. My home recently changed the format of the way they publish prices on their site, so its now impossible for that website to track prices.

I hopefully wont get banned for this and have absolutely no connection with any of these websites, but I think its a very interesting move by My home. Obviously they don't want people to track price drops, I presume its their right as its their site, but do they (the agents) think that this will make them sell more houses, less houses? Obviously if prices are less they earn less commission......

Anyways I'm disappointed as I now cannot track prices, anyone else find this move strange?

It seems like a flawed business decision. Daft.ie have been exceptionally open to the idea of analysing and publishing trends that have emerged from the content of their site. They see themselves as being in the media business so all publicity that they generate is beneficial to their business. MyHome obviously have a different business model. No idea what it is though.

Maybe they just don't want people taking data off their site.
After all, the data is one of their main assets.

In addition, this may also create a slight additional load on their server, which they are paying for.

leghorn said:

Maybe they just don't want people taking data off their site.
After all, the data is one of their main assets.

In addition, this may also create a slight additional load on their server, which they are paying for.

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I was using this site to look for a new property as well and was really disappointed when it put out of business. I think it is only going to be a temporary closure judging my the posts on the site.

I doubt the load on a server than handles a 1,000,000 page views each week was that significant.

The cynic in me would speculate that the fact that Sherry Fitz, DNG and Gunne were part of the the group that owned Myhome.ie would lead me to believe that they may still yield some influence. Also the model of only allowing estate agents to advertise leaves myhome.ie at the mercy of keeping estate agents happy.

Myhome is now owned by the Irish Times who may also have a vested interest in keeping estate agents sweet or the property supplement full !

I keep track myself of house prices as I'm interested in this area. I take a typical estate in a city (which I would know about and would be reflective of a certain typical type of house ) and follow the prices by writing it down let's say 4 times a year. Gives me an idea of where prices are going. Would never trust a website run by auctioneers as they have a vested interest in only talking up prices. At the end of the day these websites are just ads. Plus he who controls the website controls the information.

Just to clarify.

This post and thread is not in breach of our posting guidelines.

It is a useful piece of additional information. The data is not available on Myhome, but is on Daft. That is useful to know.

Obviously there is a risk that this thread will deteriorate at which stage it will be closed. Most threads cover the main issues inside the first 5 posts.

Brendan

Brendan said:

It is a useful piece of additional information. The data is not available on Myhome, but is on Daft. That is useful to know.

Brendan

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(I agree which is why i was bemused when a thread detailing the exact information was locked before. http://www.askaboutmoney.com/showthread.php?t=64216
Anyhow thats now for me to judge.)

Its an interesting move by myhome because had the site which gleaned the data from it reported property price increases then the action would not have been taken. It even makes it the more interesting that the site is owner by the Irish Times, a publication which would be against any forms of censorship.

Is myhome down all my old links to properties I have been looking at are no longer working?

Thomas22 said:

Is myhome down all my old links to properties I have been looking at are no longer working?

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It appears that they have changed the IDs that they use to reference the property advertised on their site. Very strange thing to do as now all links, including those from the search engines will be broken. We can't know for definate the reasons for them to do this, but it appears to be an attempt to obfuscate their data. If I were you I would email them to complain and/or see if they have valid reasons for doing this. I'm sure the press would be interested to see what they have to say, although I can't imagine the Irish Times going after them too hard.

IFT said:

the Irish Times, a publication which would be against any forms of censorship.

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Putting important information (like prices and addresses) into images creates problems for visually impaired people trying to surf the site. These days websites are trying to be more accessible to people with disabilities, but this change does the opposite unfortunatly. Visually impaired people buy houses too and could use myhome up until this change occured. And its not just blind people who are effected with text in images, people with poor eyesight (who increase the size of text) have difficulities, colour blind people who change the default colours to increase contrast etc... are all effected. This amounts to a significant enough percentage of the population (5% of men are colour blind, and quite a lot of people have bad eyesight!).

Its poor form. Theres many other technical ways of limiting automatic crawling of a website, which dont effect real users. Its a badly thought out kneejerk reaction.

Perhaps the people selling houses on MyHome were not happy that this feature showed their property dropping every once in a while as they try to get a sale. It would show how badly they need to sell and how much they have dropped already therefor the potential buyer would get the full history and put in a low bid accordingly. If I were selling a property now and had dropped my asking price I would not want any buyers to have this information. MyHome would not want to lose business from sellers as they need them before they get buyers.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that the only people that can put ads on myhome.ie are estate agents. If that still stands, can we conclude that maybe the EAs do not want this information to be public, rather than the actual sellers themselves? Daft.ie don't seem to be losing much advertising from sellers on their more open system (the last I heard they had a record number of about 80,000 properties for sale on their site). On the face of it, it looks like an attempt to stonewall those that are trying to monitor the status of the Irish property market. Hardly confidence-inspiring to see this happen now, is it?

They also seem to have changed Don Wycherley's line in their radio ad from "thousands of houses, one address" to "thousands of househunters, one address".

I am currently a 2nd time buyer and have been house-hunting for a year now in the Midlands for a family home not an investment. If I actively see sellers dropping prices, it makes me MORE interested in seriously entering the market rather than less as it makes me think I could get a good deal. Why do vendors and estate agents not realise this and use this as a selling point? Presently I don't even bother viewing houses at the top end of my budget because it looks like sellers are not budging on prices - as I've no concrete evidence to suggest this either from property websites or estate agents. When you've seen a house on MyHome at the same price for a year in a falling market why would I go back and enquire about it again? If the words 'open to offers' rather than 'In Excess of' beside the price I might be tempted to at least ring the estate agent.

There are 2 ways of looking at it - from my point of view If I see that a house has dropped its price, I'm thinking "So If I buy it now it could drop its value AGAIN straight away and leave me with something worth less than I paid for".

andynui said:

Putting important information (like prices and addresses) into images creates problems for visually impaired people trying to surf the site. These days websites are trying to be more accessible to people with disabilities, but this change does the opposite unfortunatly. Visually impaired people buy houses too and could use myhome up until this change occured.

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I'm wondering what the NCBI's response would be to this seemingly retrograde step by Myhome.ie.

I think these sites that "name and shame" property drops really can, on a personal level, cause much anguish. For someone to have their house put up on a site like this [like property pin] for other people just to make comments on it and about their area is disgraceful. There is a person behind this "address" on a website. Indeed, it probably does put people off seeing a drop in price. I think househunters can do the maths themselves if they are monitoring a house or an area. They don't need to be told the price drops. If they just had '2 bed apt, lucan drop 2%' I think this would be much fairer. You are still able to see whats going on in the market rather than putting someones house on a website like this to be ridiculed. And no, this has not happened to me but I would be upset if it did.

This has been discussed enough at this stage. If you have criticisms of myhome or of propertypin, continue the discussion there.

Brendan