Myhome.ie an excellent example of a defensible business that doesn’t need patents. Its got the estate agents on the hook and the punters are following. Very difficult to compete against and even more difficult to dislodge. However if I was to start a myhome.ie clone tomorrow here is what I’d add in order to compete.
- Add free text search based on Street name, area, county. Use smart search capabilities to guess the appropriate search
- Allow users to personalise search by geography so that searches are limited to on or more geographic locations (e.g. clontarf, Dublin) and a specific price zone (€800K to €1.2m) or house type (terraced) or other feature (south facing, back garden, off street parking)
- Place search screen next to AJAX map of search area and blip properties on and off the map as search criteria are entered
- Mousing over a house location on the map pops a DHTML window with a thumbnail of the property and the price. You can click from here to the brochure
- Attach a PDF copy of the brochure to the web description
- Provide an RSS feed for houses meeting my search criteria and support the use of multiple searches for this feed
- Post selling prices of houses on the web when available
- Allow searching of history of house sales (e.g. when was this house sold before and for what price)
- Shrink the top banner and in general make the adverts more inobtrusive
- Produce price graph and stats for areas and house types
Copacetic 
Estate agent portals have been around for years and are nothing new (rightmove, fish for homes, realtor.com etc) A company like myhome is essentially cruising with 2 formidable strengths (neither of which are exclusive to MH)
1. IT Infrastructure and processes
2. Sales
Look at daft.ie (ex Cape Clear employee). Initially they had neither of the above but a good understanding of their target market and a pssion for what they are about rapidly increased the value of their service and although ‘they are primarily about rentals’ have quickly established themselves as formidable young upstarts and can value their company at a couple of million.
Also – what you’ve outlined above are ‘features’ whereas companies that succeed expuse benfits.
LikeLike
er sorry about typos!
LikeLike
hi Joe,
There’s one obvious service for sellers (who are of course customers from the myhome perspective) that the site doesn’t provide: the ability to list a house without going through an estate agent.
A well-funded and heavily promoted myhome alternative that put private sellers directly in front of buyers would give myhome (and estate agents) something to think about, and someone will do it sooner rather than later.
LikeLike