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Buying online: Who Delivers?
The Sunday Business Post
29/02/04
By Susan Mitchell
Life has become a lot easier for house hunters since the dawn of the Internet. Traipsing the streets peering into estate agents' windows is no longer unavoidable - a click of the mouse and you can take a virtual tour of thousands of properties without setting foot outside your front door.
Estate agents have been quick to jump on the cyberspace bandwagon. Most have launched their own websites, and these are growing in popularity.
There are scores of property websites. The majority are run by estate agents. Others such as www.Myhome.ie, www.CountryHomesIreland.com and www.Nicemove.ie are property portals promoted by various different interests.
The advantages of using the Internet are obvious. Many people work full-time and don't have the time to trawl around properties and estate agents day in, day out. Besides, this being the information age, it's natural to browse property websites and sign up for e-mail alerts, which automatically e-mail details of properties that match your requirements.
Jim Miley, chief executive of the dominant property portal, Myhome.ie, said that an increasing number of buyers look to the Internet when purchasing a property. Miley said two-thirds of users are women, and the site has a strong youth profile. "This is largely because they are the most active age group in the property market, but also because they are the most prominent Internet users," he said.
Almost half of all users of the site are first-time buyers, and new developments generate the most interest. Price, location and type of property are the most important considerations when buying, said Miley. "It is vital for property websites to provide an efficient way of searching for these components. It's all about making the choices that are available more manageable."
Sherry FitzGerald recently relaunched its website. Marketing manager Amanda Dunne said the company's website generated between 400,000 and 500,000 hits a month. It has an average of 14,000 to 15,000 unique users each month.
Dunne said that the estate agency did not profile the ages of users, but she believed that the majority were in the 25 to 40-age bracket.
"The number of people using the web to source a property has increased greatly since sherryfitz.ie first launched. I think the public also has more confidence in the accuracy of property sites," she said.
Detail, accuracy and ease of use are intrinsic to the long-term success of any website. But a random survey by The Sunday Business Post found that in many cases the sites of estate agencies and umbrella organisations alike were often so far out of date that the property had long since sold.
Some agents had no means of telling web users that properties were under offer. Another recurrent problem was an ineffective search engine. When we added our specifications, various sites provided listings that did not tally with what we had specified. A number of agents did not appear to have a handle on e-mail and the response time to e-mails varied widely from agent to agent.
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