Beerhunter from the UK forum globalhousepricecrash.com has kindly adapted his Firefox 2 add-on Property-Bee for use with www.daft.ie.
The property-bee toolbar, is a new and exciting Firefox add-on which makes browsing property sites like Rightmove and Daft so much more enlightening.
It allows you to view a history of how the price and description change over time for properties you have viewed on property sites such as rightmove.co.uk and daft.ie
Basically instead of your having to remember or write down this information Property-Bee stores it for you and embeds it into whatever property site you are looking at.
No information is shared with others and all information is stored locally on your PC.
I would like to thank Beerhunter for all his fantastic work and congratulate him on the development of the best tool for house hunters that I have seen developed so far.
I just downloaded and installed Firefox 2 and the Property Bee toolbar. It is fantastic to be able to see a price change history ‘live’ as I am browsing Daft. I think it is an essential tool for anyone looking to buy a house.
Thanks a million for the development work Beerhunter.
This is absolutely fantastic - a superb resource and a genuine public service! One minor query - will the daft changes be automatically updated, or is there simply a snapshot of changes up to a certain cut off date via the zip file?
Two minor technical points - the xpi link doesn’t seem to work for me on firefox, installing from the propertybee site itself does. Also, the “Application Data” folder is hidden in XP by default, so you’ll need to show hidden files & folders to access it.
One interesting presentational point - Daft at some point seem to have changed their standard listing format from Price €X,000 to Price Region €X,000. So if you see this change on a listing it indicates that Daft feel the market is wobbly, not the vendor.
I’m using Firefox Portable, I don’t like to keep my browsing history on “The Man’s” computer if there’s anyone else in the same boat unzip the files into “…FirefoxPortable\Data\profile\property-bee”
Is there anyone out there still using IE? It’s very poor in comparison with Firefox.
The zip file contians all the complete price history for all properties listed on Daft up to the 5th of February.
The tool will record any price changes for properties that you view after this. It is like your own personal IPW
This is just due to the way the two systems, IPW and Property-Bee, record prices. IPW records just the price “€X” while Property-Bee records the compele text “Region €X”.
Useful tip re: using property-bee with Firefox Portable but just thought it worth pointing out that if ISD at your office is doing their job properly all your internet activity is being logged and stored already by the Proxy Server / Firewall. So it’s irrelevant whether your browsing history is kept on the actual machine you are using.
That’s of course assuming that ISD where you work is reasonably competent!
