daft.ie Launches rent.ie as Test Bed

News from Ireland today is that Daft Media, owner of Ireland’s largest property website daft.ie, is launching a new rental website focused on students and young professionals, rent.ie.

rent.ie is not a completely new website – it was first launched over ten years ago, just before the rentals boom. Daft Media acquired the domain name in June of this year for an undisclosed sum and will continue to run rent.ie in parallel to daft.ie.

The company says rent.ie has been developed as a test bed for new technologies, and to continue to grow Daft Media’s overall market share of online property searches. The new website looks to have taken on board its younger market with a cool new illustrative design, and focus on search categories like students, flatmates, holidays, and corporate.

daft.ie receives traffic of 85 million page impressions and 1,025,838 unique users per month (ABC Electronic September 2008) and Daft Media has been growing its audience by acquiring new websites. This year it has purchased competing property website property.ie and took a minority stake in Ireland’s largest community website, boards.ie. Combining all Daft Media’s websites, the group’s traffic will be over 2 million unique visitors per month.

Ciaran Maher, Director of Technology at daft.ie, said the move was about more than just traffic:

“With over one million unique users per month, Daft.ie drives over 70% of all property searches in Ireland. With such high search volumes visiting the site each month, we wanted a platform to test new technologies, and allow us enhance daft.ie without negatively affecting such a large user base” said.

He said the company will be measuring the success of rent.ie and will integrate any successful features back into daft.ie.

According to Odhran Ginnity, COO at daft.ie, the new rentals website is “great news for our existing advertisers as it will give them access to a larger audience at no additional cost”.

daft.ie say their audience has gradually grown older over the last ten years with the largest demographic now aged between 30 to 45 year olds. These are people who are looking to buy a property, so the launch of rent.ie allows for a complete focus on rentals.

In a separate release issued yesterday, daft.ie published the latest Daft Rental Report, for Quarter 3 2008. The report found that rents have hit their lowest level since August 2006 due to a glut of properties on the market, and that in the past 3 months, rents dropped by 3% on average across the country. With so many properties for rent, this surely bodes well for the launch of rent.ie.

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