David Behan's Web Design Ireland Blog

Funda.ie to cease operations!

July 4, 2007 @ 5:59 pm · Filed under Business, Internet, Ireland, News

I’ve had reports from clients that funda.ie have sent out emails telling their clients that they are closing up shop. Funda.ie is the IAVI website for advertising properties for sale in Ireland and is part of the Funda Group, that own a number of web portals including funda.nl. Funda.ie entered the market last year when they acquired realestate.ie and re-launched the website as funda.ie in September 2006.

They did a number of advertising campaigns including a very good viral campaign about a man made shamrock island off the coast of Dublin. You can view it on YouTube here. Funda entered the market with good intentions but never seemed to be able to battle it out with the big boys - daft.ie and myhome.ie. After only 10 months in play, they have decided to close up shop. An idea of how funda.ie faired out traffic wise in comparison to the big boys, have a look at the report below generated at Alexa that Richard Hearne discussed a few months back.

In the “Important Announcement” email, Funda Ireland CEO, Ronan Higgins explains that it was not possible to achieve the market leading position within the target timeframe in order to make the business financially viable. He also thanks staff, the IAVI and it’s members for their support and efforts. In addition, he suggests alternative property portals for clients to advertise on.

It’s a real pity that funda.ie could not survive in this property portal market and it shows how cut throat a business it is. It’s not enough to have a good marketing campaign or even all the properties, you have to offer something more. In the past myhome.ie was the market leaders and who ever thought someone could surpass them, but daft.ie came along and did it. Who’s to say that someone won’t be able to come up with that “extra” factor and leave daft.ie floating behind.

In conclusion and open for discussion… what does this mean for the property website market? If spending a lot of money on marketing can’t get you above daft.ie and myhome.ie, what will? It’s going to take something really special from a property website to be able to knock these off the top, especially daft.ie as it always seems to be ahead of the group. Has this opened up a gap in the market for someone to fill? I wonder will any of the smaller property portals try and capitalise on this gap opening up?

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9 Comments (post a comment)

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funda.ie is closing up shop... - Irish SEO, Marketing & Webmaster Discussion  spacer

[...] is closing up shop… blog » Funda.ie to cease operations! | davidbehan | web design - web development - web marketing | i… So is daft.ie always going to "own" the market or will anyone ever be able to better [...]

July 4, 2007 @ 6:13 pm
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MT Fields  spacer

Hmm- I just saw your blog-interesting about the closure of Funda.ie alright. Its never good to hear web companies failing. However I really don’t think funda left any gap in the market.They’d no market share to speak of at all.I understand they had just 30 or 40 customers which is tiny in comparison with the 2 majors.
At 5m people Ireland is just not big enough to sustain more than 2 portals in an online classifieds/listing sector.Imho, daft.ie is by far the most useful property site at the moment and it seems to be used a lot more these days than myhome.ie or that new indo one. In fact the indo one (propertynews.com) is seriously rubbish-i can’t understand why do they call it propertynews. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone ever using it to find a place yet they claim to be the biggest website in ireland which is plainly false.
I’ve heard the indo are also behind that other (new houses only)property website thats advertising on the radio - sherlockholmes.com - but thats really awful too.

Anyway-I think in the future myhome.ie will continue to compete with Daft.ie whilst trying not to lose all those big newspaper property ads in the Times property supplement.

Hence I won’t notice Funda’s absence personally - but at least they tried to be different with their adverts whilst they were in business.

July 4, 2007 @ 10:47 pm
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David  spacer

Hi,

Good points you have made there. I have to say that I think there is room for only 1 big player in the market and that’s daft.ie at the moment, but I don’t think they will be there for ever. I think there are concepts and ideas that have not been brought to the table yet and with the right timing, someone could take that top spot. Someone needs to challenge the proven track record and try something different. Funda did a nice job of viral marketing but they didn’t follow up with a decent site in my opinion. Some nice features not on the others but just not up to scratch to pull the masses away from myhome and daft.
One day, someone will have a unique concept when it comes to property portal websites that is too unique for the traditional sites to try and by doing so, they’ll lose out.
Ya never know, I might set up my own portal one of these days! :D
Thanks for your comment. Rgds, Dave! :D

July 4, 2007 @ 11:31 pm
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Paul  spacer

Hi, I think there is room for more than one player in the market in Ireland. Look at the amount of newspapers that are out there. I think they will all find their own niches. It is a pity to see any business going out of business but I don’t think Funda connected with the Irish people and I thought their tv ads were terrible. I disagree with you about SherlockHomes I think that is a great brand name and I really like the website, I think you are right, I think it might be backed by the Indo group, they may merge the two sites into one one day.

July 18, 2007 @ 10:19 am
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Errol Maxwell  spacer

We just launched estatemate.com on the 20th of June 2007. At the moment we are concentrating on Northern Ireland until we improve the extra features that we have in the pipeline.

It will be a tough job but we want to make a go at doing a property portal for Ireland that is actually good. We are a long way off Daft and Property News at the moment but we feel we are heading in the right direction.

I would really value any comments you have to make about our site.

July 22, 2007 @ 2:20 pm
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David  spacer

Hi Errol,

I had a play with your new site recently and I was impressed. I plan to do a full review of it in the next week or so, once things quite down a little here. I’ll couple my review of your site with a few more sites I found that I quite liked. If you can mimic the features and get the properties on board, you might be on to a winner. Anyway, keep an eye out for traffic from here once I get an hour or so to do the review, and pop back over and post a comment!

Rgds, Dave ;)

July 23, 2007 @ 3:20 pm
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Errol Maxwell  spacer

Thanks Dave,

I only noticed your reply and look forward to the review. We plan to make it a lot better in the near future so all comments and requests would be really appreciated.

Regards,

Errol.

August 19, 2007 @ 1:17 am
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Job  spacer

Funda had a wrong business plan. There is no site in the Irish market that have ever succeeded in establishing itself with the crawling technology. We have a long list of sites that have failed in almost every industry. Cars, jobs, and Funda is the best example of the property site failure.

Are we too small market for the crawlers? Are we more ‘Personal’ oriented?

September 12, 2007 @ 1:43 pm
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David  spacer

Sorry for delay in response…

@Errol: Would you be available for a chat later in the week or next week? Drop me a quick mail with a contact number if you get a chance and time that suits!

@Job: It’s going to take something special for a property website rise to rise above the small competitors out there. There are too many of these small sites out there, all trying for a piece of the market. A new concept and new approach is needed to really give daft a run for their money!

September 25, 2007 @ 6:48 am

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