I have just finished developing daftdrop.com, a new Irish property price tracker. Although in its infancy, it is mature/complete enough to be useful, and hopefully more useful/usable than any alternatives…
The most useful part of the website is at daftdrop.com/#searchView … I’ve focused on making it as fast and easy as possible to use; all searching can be done without browing to a new page, and the results table is fully sortable on any column. Each house is clickable to retrieve the full price history, without leaving the page.
Please let me know what you think. Note that it is a non-profit, non-commerical project/experiment (more of a hobby) which I developed in my spare time, so go easy with your criticisms!
However, I did a search for price drops in Galway between June 27 and June 29 and, instead of giving me the price drops between those dates, it gave me the price drops (“drop detected”) between June 23 and June 25. The calendar is out of sinc or something.
I then did a search for price drops in a certain area of County Galway between 1 January 2010 and 1 July 2011 and was only given the price drops in that area for 2011 (up to 25 June), despite the fact that I know price drops occurred in 2010 in that area.
Great stuff. Would definitely use it. Possibly silly question considering the name, but are you scraping (or however it works) myhome.ie as well. Made a huge difference when Irish Property Watch.com started covering that as well as SherryFitz won’t use Daft.
Nice work. One small gripe, the “Example: Howth” on the search form, could that disappear earlier (e.g. when you first click any of the fields on the form), as it is it looks as if you have to manually clear it every time (even though you don’t)
Also, you can search for drops from, say, 2005, but when are the drops ACTUALLY recorded from? Only 2011? Perhaps this could be made clearer (e.g. prevent user selecting a “From” date before the date drops are actually recorded from).
And could the date fields allow manual entry (i.e. typing in a date)? (The jQuery Datepicker control allows this)
Looks good - one small tip - it annoys me on DAFT - in the drop down list : Remove “Co.” from “Co. Antrim, Co Dublin” so you can just hit D for Dublin?
thanks for the feedback! There’s a couple of reasons. Firstly, it’s only been tracking data since May, so only price detections that occurred from there on are known. Also, I used the phrase “Search for houses having price changes that occurred between” because that’s what it does – these houses in your results have had prince changes between your dates – but if a house has also had a price change after your chosen dates, then that’ll also be considered in the results and organised by date accordingly. It’s a bit confusing but I felt it more useful to be like this.
No, I decided as a one man operation I probably wouldn’t have the time to maintain both scrapers, and I didn’t really see the benefits. BUT, SherryFitz do list on daft.ie, I’m sure of it: daft.ie/sherryfitzogormanoreilly … am I missing something?
I would make similar comment re colors in that red normally means drop and green increase. people wanting price drops would quickly reconcile the red with the price drop being good for them.
Hope you keep this up as it would be great to have something like this, with data going back a few years.
Nice job, works well. A few more minor suggestions:
In the search results, the headings don’t line up correcly over the data (e.g. “Beds”). Perhaps left justify the headings if the data is left justified, and right justify if the data is right-justified?
Put “€” in front of any euro amounts
Format percentages with a fixed number of decimal places (1 may be enough?)
Instead of “in the Co. ZZZZZ area”, simplify to “in Co. ZZZZZ”.
Default search county to Dublin, rather than Antrim.
…